Maundy Thursday

1 April 2010

I don’t know whether you have ever spent much time trying to explain the Holy Eucharist as it is experienced in the Catholic Church to someone who knows very little about it.  I suppose that we have all tried to explain to ourselves what we are doing when we gather to celebrate Mass and to receive our Communion.  It doesn’t take very long for someone who has attended our church to realize that in the Holy Communion we are doing something much more than merely remembering Jesus’ Passion and Death by the use of the old symbols of Bread and Wine.  We do remember, of course, but something more than remembering is going on.  Jesus himself is doing something; exactly what, it is hard to explain.  But the more we think of it, we are driven to the conclusion that he is doing the same thing for us here and now that he did for his disciples at the Last Supper he celebrated with them. 

It is important to remember that what we do at Mass is the responsibility of Jesus himself—not only in the sense that anything that is really done in the way of worship is first of Christ’s and then only ours insofar as he draws us into it—but also in the sense that we wouldn’t be doing what we do at all if he hadn’t started it and insisted that we keep doing it.  The church did not make up some kind of magical, mystical, sacramental ceremony to symbolize its experience of or devotion to Jesus.  Jesus himself took the Bread and Wine and gave them his own interpretation at the Passover Meal he celebrated with his disciples.  Sometimes it seems to me that it would be far more sensible to do away with sacraments—not very often, for I rather like ceremony and music and all, being kind of a romantic.  But in some cold sober moments of reflection, it is hard to give a rational account of it eating and drinking as a spiritual form of worship.  But then, there is Jesus, sitting at the table, saying, “This is my Body; This is my Blood; Do this in remembrance of me.”

Well, why did Jesus get this started?  Didn't he know that it would give rise to hundreds of years' worth of arguments about what Holy Communion means?  I suppose he did—although he was probably not thinking about that on this evening before his crucifixion.  Perhaps he wasn’t even thinking that our faith would be put to the test if we were offered a chance at obedience without perfectly understanding why we were obeying.  At any rate, it is his fault—if I can speak in that way—that the Mass is the chief act of worship of the Church.  Still, the question remains: why?

There is one overwhelmingly simple and obvious answer: Jesus meant the Eucharist to draw us into what he did at Calvary.  He brought his disciples into it before his Passion on Holy Thursday; he brings us into it after it has already taken place and Easter has come.  In other words, Jesus meant the Eucharist to be a link between his death and resurrection and us.  By partaking of his Sacramental Body and Blood, we are offered a share in his death and resurrection.  We are not to think of Christ's Passion and Rising from the dead only as a great objective event external to us, accomplished without us—though it certainly is that.  Rather, we are to think of ourselves as drawn into Christ's dying and rising.  That, surely, is part of the meaning of eating the Bread and drinking the Wine, the Body and Blood of our Lord: that the reality of his Passion and Resurrection may enter into our very depths and not remain merely an external act, performed once, long ago, outside the city walls of Jerusalem—in which we are required merely to believe. 

Now what could it possibly mean for us to enter in to Jesus' death and resurrection—except in some purely metaphorical or poetic sense?  To get closer to an answer, let's look at a kind of thinking about the Cross which is almost at the opposite extreme from this.  You have probably all heard this kind of thinking before.  This is the kind of talk which speaks of Christ's death as paying the price due to God because of our sins.  Because Jesus was God as well as Man, his death was infinitely valuable—it was worth more than all of our lives, all of our deaths.  Of course, because of our sins we are all guilty and deserve death.  So God can now let us all off, he can save us, grant us clemency, a stay of execution, an official pardon, because Christ paid the penalty for us—we have been ransomed—but only if we take advantage of his work.  Now I am not saying that there is not an element of truth in this point of view—but it is not the whole truth, and surely not the most important part.  God wants more for us than just to “let us off.”  He wants us to be free, but free for something—free to serve him, to cooperate with him. 

In order to be free for God's service, something has to change within us, because on our own we are not ready for it.  We need more than someone to pay the price of the guilt we have already incurred or are likely to incur again.  We need someone to change us inside so that our desires are re-oriented toward wanting to please God and to do his will.  The language that the Christian tradition has used for this interior change is pretty strong.  It is called a dying, a mortification,  of our corrupt affections.  The only way for this to happen is for a power greater than we are to get hold of us—the kind of power at work in the Passion and Death of Christ.  St Paul called this being crucified with Christ.  The old collect for Easter Even called it being buried with Christ.  The reality being described is this:  just as sin lost its hold and found its power broken when Jesus died on the Cross, so sin must die in us if we are to be released to live lives which will glorify God.  Because of Jesus' death and resurrection, a power is released which can turn us from our old way of life.  It is a re-creating power, a vivifying power, able to transform us from within so that we can love the people we have always tried to avoid, so that we can give of ourselves when we have always tried to protect our weaknesses; so that we can really live for God in this world.

It is this power of transformation, otherwise called grace, which comes to us under the form of Bread and Wine.  It is the power to be conformed to the death of Christ so that we can know also the power of his resurrection life.  Jesus knew that for us humans the old self, the old self-determined way of living, dies hard, so he commanded us to keep a “perpetual memory of that his precious death and sacrifice until his coming again.”  We celebrate the Eucharist often because we die to our old selves little by little with many failings and fallings.  Christ draws us into his death and resurrection again and again as we eat the Bread and drink the Cup.  Always, in the very act of eating, he is explaining to us that the mystery of his sacrificial death and his victory over the power of sin is one which must invade our deepest selves. 

If this is what the Eucharist means, then it is clear why it is that receiving Communion is not a privilege reserved for the holy, or the perfect, but a necessity for all of us sinners.  There are only two groups of people who are really ineligible to receive Communion—those who are hard of heart, justifying themselves to God, impenitent, annoyed that there is any standard they are bound to other than their own; and there are those who are complacent, who fancy themselves alright, pious, having kept all the commandments, who wear their religion like a suit of comfortable old clothes, living largely unexamined lives.  These two kinds of folk actually harm themselves by coming to Communion. But those who are broken at heart, who see how weak they are, who have seen the holiness of God and have compared it to their own pathetic attempts to do good, who know how often they have failed, how cold their hearts, how feeble their resolution, how faltering their attempts to put the life of Christ into daily expression—Holy Communion is meant for sinners like these.  It is their souls' health and strength, the remedy for their sin, their hope of immortality, and the source of their daily resolve to live for Jesus. 

And the Sacrament does its work for those who approach it in this spirit.  They are transformed.  Expecting to enter yet again into the death of Christ, they find his resurrection life coming to expression in their daily lives. 

The meaning of Holy Communion, then, is really the meaning of the whole Christian life, applied to us sacramentally, focused on the death and resurrection of our Lord.  What a good opportunity this evening to renew our personal acceptance of the Christian calling: entering into the death of Christ so that we may know the power of his resurrection life.  There is nothing that Christ as done for us that he does not also, or even above all, want to do within us. All he awaits is our permission to get to work.  Let's give him that permission—even by the very act by which we rise from our pews to approach his altar.