Eucharist: The Self-Giving of the Son to the Father
EUCHARIST: THE SELF-GIVING OF THE SON TO THE FATHER
I.
All of us know that the Eucharist is an infinitely rich banquet of grace; we’re hungry for that grace, or we wouldn’t be here today. It’s the sacred meal that gives life. It’s the memorial of the Lord’s Passion. It’s the blood of the Lamb that washes the world clean and nourishes each soul who thirsts for God; it is the pledge of future glory.
The Eucharist is the living, loving, beating heart of our life as Catholics. Without the Eucharist, the priesthood has no meaning, and there is no Catholic Church. Without the Eucharist, the Lord’s promise to be with us always, even to the end of the age, would be empty. Without this sacrament, we cannot eat the flesh of Jesus nor drink His blood. This is what He commanded us to do in the Gospel of John. This is what scandalized so many of His followers during His ministry on earth. It does the same thing today. Neither the past nor the future has meaning outside the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is the bread which is the flesh of Jesus given for the life of the world; it is not simply a symbol or a memory, but is His real flesh and blood. That’s what the Latin root of the word “transubstantiation” means. It means literally that the whole substance of bread and of the wine is changed into the substance of the body and of the blood of Christ; “therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained” (Council of Trent). Remember that Jesus said, “Take and eat; this is my body.” He did not say, “This represents my body; use your imaginations.”
The Eucharist is also the window through which God pours His light from heaven into human affairs. And the glass of the window works both ways: It’s also the means by which the human heart looks out on the transcendent and encounters the “Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13. 8).
Any speaker can approach the Eucharist in one of two ways. The front door is theology. Unfortunately for me here at the podium, but fortunately for all of us in the Church, that door has already been opened by masters like Augustine, Aquinas and Von Balthasar. I could add very little to what they’ve already said.
But there’s a back door to the Eucharist that leads through the here and now, the time and place where we find ourselves today. And this is the path I would like to follow today. Why? Because I believe the “signs of the times” have some unique lessons to teach us about the relevance of the Eucharist; the real presence of Christ among us; and the urgency of returning to this sacrament as a way of recovering the soul of the modern world.
II.
G. K. Chesterton once said that people who don’t believe in God don’t believe in nothing; instead, they believe in anything. When one abandons God one doesn’t become more sophisticated. One becomes more gullible. This leads to some interesting ironies and contradictions.
Let me give you an example from my own backyard. Boulder, Colorado, is one of the most educated communities in America. It’s home to the main campus of the University of Colorado, so the population is secular and politically astute.
However, Boulder is also the New Age capital of the West. If you earnestly believe that certain rocks have a mysterious healing power, well, you won’t be lonely in Boulder. But of course Boulder is just one example. I could name dozens of others. America in the 1990s is a greenhouse for every kind of eccentric cult. We have Moonies and scientology. We have people who claim they can “channel” the voices of dead cavemen. We have covens of white witches. We have UFO groupies. This is the new face of American pluralism.
My point is simple. Our brains may reason God out of existence. But our hearts don’t listen. More than 200 years ago, the Enlightenment in Europe locked our brains inside a jail cell. It’s a comfortable cell. Today it’s filled with CD players and 500 cable channels and all sorts of technological goodies. But the bars on the cell are a very cold steel. They’re made of rational logic and mechanical laws.
Our hearts want more than this. They’re hungry for meaning, and if modern secular culture expels the true God—the God of Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ, the God of glory—from our public arenas, then people will seek meaning elsewhere, in spiritual counterfeits like Est or the Hare Krishnas.
Some 1,500 years ago, St. Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And the great Catholic scientist/mathematician/theologian Blaise Pascal, wrote 300 years ago that “the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know.” Both of these insights are still true today.
Our hearts instinctively know that there’s much more to life than things we can see and touch. The material world, the world we can observe, is only one part of reality. We need to remember that logic and science are important tools for understanding the world around us. But they are limited tools, and they are not the only tools.
Which leads me to my second example. I need to confess that, unlike Cardinal O’Connor and Cardinal Mahony, I am not on the Internet. I have a computer, but I’m very much of a novice. In fact, I am strictly a pen-and-paper man. I would much rather read a journal than “surf the net.” But I’ve discovered some advantages to this. You notice certain things. Like books. And some of the new books being published by scientists are extremely revealing. Let me give you a tour of a few recent titles.
First there’s The Physics of Immortality. The author is a nationally respected mathematician. What he describes as “the resurrection of the dead” will one day be literally possible through some kind of computer regeneration, he argues. Of course, the Christian belief in the resurrection from the dead is without analogy and only possible through the direct power of the Holy Spirit.
Then there’s Hyperspace, and another book called Black Holes and Time Warps. The two authors are award-winning physicists who tell us that reality probably has 10 dimensions instead of three or four. They also tell us a lot more than we want to know about superstring theory and worm holes. They also suggest that time travel and parallel universes are, in fact, possible. Then there’s Virtual Reality, a book about computer-generated artificial reality and the radical changes it will bring to business and society.
And finally there’s Out of Control. This is my favorite. Its subtitle is “The Rise of NeoBiological Civilization.” The author says that our technology is becoming so complex that it now resembles biology. In other words, the difference between what is made and what is born is disappearing. We are creating very smart, organic-like, semi-autonomous, machine system—not merely “manufacturing” dumb tools.
By now some of you are wondering what, in heaven’s name, any of this has to do with the Eucharist. Not so fast. There are two important signs here we should ponder. Remember, John Paul II urges all of us, again and again, to reflect on the “signs of the times.” The first sign is this. All of these books were written by respected scientists, men who are leaders in their professional fields. All of these books got serious reviews in the mainline press. All of these books argue that reality is much more subtle and complicated than we ever imagined. And every one of these books would have been dismissed as fantastic nonsense just 25 years ago.
You see, science is beginning to figure out that there is much more wonder to the universe than we can ever observe, dominate and dissect. That’s important. That’s good. The second sign is this. If a person can feel wonder when faced with the grandeur of the created universe, then he’s just one step away from feeling reverence in the presence of the sacred. This is the beginning of conversion. The physicist Robert Jastrow wrote years ago that scientists have spent centuries climbing the mountain of truth, only to find theologians waiting for them at the summit. At no time in the last 100 years have scientists been closer to recovering a respect for the holiness of creation, the Godliness of creation, than they are today.
After all, why is God more implausible than black holes? Why are miracles less believable than a universe with 10 dimensions? There is something deeply ironic, even almost funny, about scientists who theorize about time travel and parallel universes, but then shrug off transubstantiation as religious mumbo-jumbo.
Yet our popular culture is still, for all practical purposes, a culture of unbelief. That’s partly because our brains are still suffering from a 200-year-old intellectual hangover that began with the Enlightenment. But there’s another reason, as well. Consumer technology works in an immediate, practical way. Prayer and miracles don’t. Americans believe in things that work. We’re pragmatists. It’s our national personality. Technology answers our animal needs and appetites. It extends our lifespans, right here, right now. It heals our sickness. It eases our pain. So while many scientists are discovering the limitations of their science, many ordinary folks have turned technology into their God.
This “functional atheism” is what makes the sacraments so difficult to preach to modern people. We all have a hunger for meaning, but we’ve lost the proper vocabulary to discuss and understand it. We moderns want to see the sacraments do something useful in the same way we see a toaster make toast. But the Eucharist doesn’t operate that way. The Eucharist is about a relationship with God. It creates no product. It solves no material problem. The change in the bread and wine at the Consecration is unseen, and unfortunately that word “unseen” translates, in our modern vocabulary, to “unreal.”
If you want to see what many Catholics genuinely believe about the Eucharist, just look around you at Mass. How many of us approach the altar as if we were really approaching our Creator? How many of us stroll back to our pews bored and distracted? For far too many Catholics, the Eucharist has become the wrong kind of habit—an external, community ritual; a Sunday routine. It is so much more than that, if we open our hearts to it.
Like the Consecration itself, the change within the person who receives the Eucharist is also unseen and hard to measure. It’s also long term. The process of being drawn into the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is much more like the ripening of fruit or the deepening of a marriage than the manufacture of a tool. The transformation is real. It’s radical. It takes place here and now. But it’s organic, not mechanical. The work of the Eucharist is from the inside out, not the outside in. Just as Christ allowed himself to be disposed of (“Thy will be done”) so too the Christian in the Eucharist is called to surrender to God’s definitive disposition.
The proof of the power of the Eucharist is the fact that it has survived as the center of Catholic life despite 2,000 years of persecution, heresy, schism, revolution, Reformation, ignorance and indifference. Despite all this, the sanctuary light still silently burns in every Catholic church where Jesus’s love in the Eucharist takes on the kenotic form of obedience out of love for the Father.
The task before us today is, how do we rebuild a strong understanding of the Eucharist—along with a healthy piety in personal devotion and community worship—among a generation that is, in some ways, religiously illiterate?
III.
I once asked a parishioner what single action she would take, if she could do just one thing to revitalize the entire Church. I expected her to complain about this or that doctrine, or ask for more Catholic schools. But her answer was much shrewder than that—and much more fundamental. She said that she’d like to see people freely return to the practice of heartfelt, frequent, personal confession.
I’ve never forgotten her answer. Make no mistake: The loss of our reverence for the Eucharist and the loss of our sense of sin are intimately connected. Jesus said, “This is my body, which will be given up for you.” But why? Why did Jesus give Himself up to torture, ridicule and humiliating death for us?
Why was His execution necessary if “I’m OK and you’re OK,” and sin is just an outdated word for neurosis or social maladjustment? At the heart of the Eucharist is the reality of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. Jesus had to die so that we would be free from sin and death. Jesus, the innocent One without sin, is condemned justly so that the unjust ones, the sinners, may be rightly justified.
Everything in our culture denies the reality of sin, both original and personal, just as it ignores the reality of God—but we are each of us sinners, every day. Personal sin isn’t some collective, group defect that simply hangs in the background of human affairs like an annoying Muzak. Personal sin is chosen. It is willful. It is ours.
Economic structures or family environment or genetic profile may mitigate our freedom, but they don’t remove it. And because we are free, we are also responsible. Adam couldn’t hide his responsibility for sinning from God. Neither could Cain nor the Samaritan woman. And neither can we. Sinful structures are built by sinful individuals—each one laying an ugly new stone with each new choice to sin.
Unless we understand our guilt, we cannot understand our deliverance. If we honestly don’t see ourselves as sinners, the Cross to which was affixed the One who was made sin for our sake, becomes incomprehensible and even offensive. This is why the examination of conscience which precedes personal confession is so important. It takes humility to fix a steady gaze on our own very specific, very tangible sins. It also takes courage. But when we reflect on our actions and indict ourselves for the pain we have caused others, we open ourselves to the healing power of Christ. We ready ourselves to be set free by the absolution of the priest. The Sacrament of Penance prepares our hearts to be drawn, by believing hope, into the new creation as we await in patience the complete redemption of our bodies.
In the Eucharist, we encounter that risen body in flesh and blood. The flesh and blood of the Risen Lord mingle with, and redeem, our own. We take our place in a glorified and renewed creation, which is why Communion is so often referred to as a foretaste of heaven. This is why theological descriptions of the Eucharist as a “community meal” can sometimes seem so mundane and inadequate. It certainly is a meal, just as it is also a sacrifice. But it is a sacred meal, a meal like no other, because the food consumed is, quite literally, God Himself.
This is the reason why returning to the Sacrament of Penance is a crucial first step to renewing our understanding of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the Catholic “pearl of great price”—a pearl we have consistently undervalued for years, because we have forgotten the price Jesus paid for it, and why He paid it.
I don’t think it’s an accident that as the lines for confession got shorter, the lines for Communion got longer, but our understanding of both sacraments got weaker. The Sacrament of Penance is a fundamental “reality check”—and I mean here the real reality, God’s reality—for every Catholic seeking to make sense of his or her own life. Penance, as “the second baptism,” configures us to the Cross, and only because we share the Cross can we share the Resurrection and adequately love the Eucharist.
Brothers and sisters, it would be easy to write off our century as an evil time, an age of consumer addictions and spiritual counterfeits, an age of unprecedented mass murders. Condemning is easy. Forgiving is hard. And redeeming is so hard that only God could do it. Yes it’s true, the noise of our modern, frenzied, anxious, fear-ridden culture is often so great that we cannot hear the harmony of all created life—that reassuring song of heaven which God weaves into the music of every heart, uniting all things to each other, and all things to Him.
But this is the world Christ died for. We are the people Christ died for. He did it because He loved us, each one of us, no matter how sinful, or broken, or failed, or confused we are. He died for each one of us, and He calls each one of us to Him in the Eucharist.
“This is my body, which will be given up for you.” For 37 years as a priest I have said those words of Jesus Christ at the Consecration of each Mass acting in His person, and I have never tired of their beauty or their power, the greatest power in all creation, the power of perfect, sacrificial, self-giving love. As in the mysteries of the Trinity, Incarnation and Mary’s “fiat”—here in the Eucharist we find supremely that "the weakness of God is stronger than man” (1 Cor. 1:25).
This is the gift and the glory we receive at Communion. This is the “body of Christ.” This is why we simply say amen, so be it, in our Communion response. Only such a word can begin to capture the fathomless mystery of that breakthrough formula of St. Paul: “Jesus Christ...though he was rich, yet for our sake...became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). Jesus, the Crucified and Risen One, is God’s substantial Eucharist, and is forever thanking the Father in his eternal self-giving.
+ J. Francis Stafford
Archbishop of Denver