Jesus tells us “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” This statement has been interpreted in many ways. Most often people talk about how Jesus is calling us to a life of self denial in order to follow God. To me, what this clearly alludes to is that Jesus will carry a cross down a road in Jerusalem to a place of execution and in the words of St. John, through his death he will be the “sacrifice that takes our sins away.” (1 John 2:2 TJB) By telling us to pickup our own cross, Jesus is telling us that we must also live a life of sacrifice. In our life as Christians, we are called to a life of both self denial and a life of sacrifice. Yet there is another piece to this invitation to a life of sacrifice, and that is lived out here every Sunday, when we participate in the Eucharist, and we encounter, behold and benefit from the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
The notion that the Eucharist is a sacrifice has been a sticky issue since the time of the Reformation. During that period, some Christians held a view that grossly perverted the nature of the Sacrament. They thought that the priests were actually re-sacrificing Christ at each Eucharist, as if they could repeat that act over and over again for the benefit of those in attendance. The reformers rightly protested this view, but unfortunately, they often went too far. In order to counter this erroneous view of the Eucharist, they began to avoid all talk of a sacrifice and began to think of it simply a memorial of the Last Supper, under the assumption that the notion of a Eucharistic sacrifice was a medieval corruption.
Yet what they failed to realize was that Christians have understood the Eucharist to be a sacrifice from the beginning, and the early Fathers of the Church attest to it. So what then, is this sacrifice? In the early and mid 20th century some of the brightest minds in Western Christianity began to rethink this subject. Liturgist Dr. Frank Gavin told us what it is not. It is not the bloody sacrifice of the Pagans. Dr. Gavin suggests that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus changed the whole meaning of Sacrifice. He tells us “Sacrifice has therefore a new meaning and an intensely practical aim. God stands in no need of what we can give, but man has grievous need of what God gives…so the oblations of the faithful were no mere alms, benevolences or charity: they where the very stuff of religious worship.”(Liturgy and Worship, 110) By oblations, Dr. Gavin means our offerings, both of the physical nature and of a spiritual nature.
There is no getting around it, some of things we do bear a resemblance to what the Pagan Romans did. They offered food to the gods because it fed them, and they offered money to the gods because they desired it. We too, offer food and money at out service.
We offer food in the form of bread and wine each Sunday and that is why it carried forward from the congregation to the altar. However, unlike the Pagans, we know that God does not need our bread and wine to somehow be satisfied. We offer bread and wine because by giving it to God through His priests we in turn feed ourselves and our brothers and sisters. It doesn’t seem like much of a sacrifice to us to give these little wafers and bottled wine, but we must remember how this was done for so long. In times past, someone in the congregation actually baked bread before the service in order to offer it up for the Eucharist. Likewise, someone in the congregation picked grapes, crushed them and fermented them, all to give it to God in the Eucharist. This is sacrifice. Surrendering time, effort, grain and grapes in order that, through the Eucharist, the congregation might be fed. The fact that our bread and wine are pre-made makes them no less a sacrifice, these wafers and wine on the credence table back there were not free, they cost you all. When that bread and wine comes up to this altar soon, each one of you in here will have sacrificed.
After these gifts have been presented, you will offer yet more sacrifice. As our Eucharistic prayer in the Rite I service says, “here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and living sacrifice unto thee.” (BCP, 336) Each time you participate in the Eucharist, you do something dangerous to your own human will, you lay it aside.
The Prayer Book recognizes the gravity of this. In the beginning of the section of the Prayer Book that contains the liturgies of the Holy Eucharist, there is a section called the Exhortation. This is an old part of the service that used to be read before communion in the old Prayer Books. In reference to receiving Communion, it states “For, as the benefit is great, if with penitent hearts and living faith we receive the holy Sacrament, so is the danger great, if we receive it improperly, not recognizing the Lord’s Body. Judge yourselves, therefore, lest you be judged by the Lord.”
This exhortation recognizes what St. Paul addressed in his first letter to the Corinthians – receiving the Body and Blood of Christ while refusing to give up and repent of our favorite sins that we hold on to, anger, greed, lust, this is dangerous to us.
When you truly sacrifice your will in order to receive communion, you lay yourself open and invite the Holy Spirit to fill you, to feed you, to change you. You sacrifice your own fallen human desires and intentions and let yourself become made new in Christ.
Finally, we get to what may the most important aspect of the Eucharist, the Sacrifice of Christ himself. While today we often think of the Eucharist as memorial of the Last Supper, that interpretation is not what the majority of our Christian forebears thought. In analyzing the primitive Western Liturgy that serves as the basis for our Eucharistic Prayers, the Liturgist Dom Gregory Dix made a succinct statement. He said the whole liturgy “”recalls” or “re-presents” before God not the Last Supper, but the Sacrifice of Christ in His death and resurrection, and makes this “present” and operative by its effects in the communicants.” (Shape of the Liturgy, 162).
Now some may point to the objections that some of the reformers raised 500 years ago. They said, “wait a minute – how can Christ’s Sacrifice be present here and now? We know Jesus died in 33 A.D. and as we sat in the Creed, he now sits at the right hand of the Father!” None of what they said was incorrect. Jesus did indeed offer himself once as a perfect, full and sufficient Sacrifice for all, the rose on the third day and ascended to the right hand of the Father.
The problem that the reformers had is that they couldn’t escape linear time. What happened in the past stayed in the past! The thing is, God is not bound by time and space. He is the one who created time. He is the one who created space. He had always existed and therefore God is not bound by these constructs, because it seems from the account in Genesis, that God was doing just fine before he created time in the fashion of day and night and made space by creating matter.
St. Paul tells us that Christ’s sacrifice reordered the entire universe, for it had all been disturbed by our fall. An action by God, that affected everything in existence, surely then cannot then be bound by time and space. That is why it is possible at the Eucharist for Christ’s Sacrifice at Calvary to really and truly be before us.
That act of redemption and love by God is so big, that it breaks through the world we know and comes before us again at the altar. That is why the Sacrifice at Calvary must be present at the Eucharist. God, the One who is Love, brings us to the moment when all humanity is reconciled to Him through the laying down of Christ’s life voluntarily, out of Love, and yearning for us each time we follow his command to take and eat. That Love demands each and every one of us be present at that act of Love and redemption. So when you pray and participate in the Eucharist you stand next to St John and the Blessed Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross weeping. You stand next to St. Mary Magdalene and the other women gazing at the empty tomb. You marvel with the Apostles as they first encounter the Risen Christ.
That is what we do each time at the Eucharist, and that remains the invitation. Come to Church and offer to God the Sacrifice of your labor, your possessions and your money. Confess your sins with a true and penitent heart and receive God’s forgiveness through the Church. Lay yourself open before God and sacrifice your own will, and accept His. Draw near and witness Christ’s death and marvel at his Resurrection. Come forward and be fed, healed, renewed, forgiven and reconciled. Then go back into the world on fire with the Love of God.
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