The outline of this sermon comes from the Instructions to the Newly Baptized of St. Cyril of Jerusalem.
Tonight we celebrate Maundy Thursday. As I mention every year, the word “Maundy” comes from the Latin phrase “Mandatum novum” – or New Commandment – the phrase from St. John’s Gospel, where the Lord says “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” And the Epistle of 1 John, John writes “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God.”
The Lord’s MANDATUM NOVUM, his new commandment, is that are to love one another as he has loved us, because love is from God. If we love, then we show that we are born of God, and that we know God.
Tonight we celebrate the institution of the holy Eucharist. It is a fitting celebration to go under the name “Maundy Thursday” – as it is in fact the institution of the Lord’s own loving self-gift. It is mystically axiomatic that the Eucharist is the fountain of love, because it is the sacramental prism through which our Lord’s own self-gift is refracted, by which he continually gives himself to us – in which the sacrifice of the Cross is re-presented to us – presented to us again and anew.
For God is love (1 John 4.16), and Jesus is God. When Jesus gives himself, it is the self0-gift of God, who is love. In the Eucharist therefore we have the divine gift of pure love to and for us. In this respect St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians:
“For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
It is the Lord himself who took bread and said “this is my body”, who took wine and said “this is my blood.” The teaching about the Lord’s real presence in the Eucharist is not some bizarre doctrine invented by men. It is simply a reiteration of what the Lord himself claimed. We may therefore approach the sacrament in the confidence that we are communing with God in love. For it is God’s own mandate, part and parcel of God’s own self-disclosure.
And indeed the Lord did not equivocate. He did not say that this is like his body, or merely a symbol of his body. In fact, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you, he says. And John says that “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.”
These are difficult truths, because they are spiritual truths. These are truths apprehended by faith. All the most central truths of Christianity are like this, including the most fundamental truth: that Jesus Christ, the only and eternal Son of God, was born of a Virgin, and died for our sins on the Cross. When people tell me they have trouble believing in our Lord’s real presence in the Eucharist, my reaction is that THAT is not the difficult teaching – the difficult teaching is that God himself gave himself to us and for us on the cross, that God, who made the heavens and the earth, was nailed to a tree and died. If you can believe that – and you HAVE TO believe that to be a Christian – then surely you can believe that the gift of the Cross is refracted – is re-represented – in the Eucharist.
The Lord gave himself to us once for all on the Cross – but his gift of himself on the Cross is renewed at every mass, on every altar, every day, in every part of the world. For he promised that he would be with us ALWAYS – because that is what true love is: the real and abiding and mutual presence of the lover and the beloved. It was the Lord’s will not to give himself for us once, and then to cease to give, but to give himself for us not only once, but always and forever. And so he gave us the Eucharist: the glass in which the eyes of faith apprehend the all-overcoming love of God in Jesus Christ.
Inspired by the Holy Spirit, David sang in the OT of “bread which strengthens our heart, and oil which gives us a shining countenance”. He thus prophesied of the Eucharist – the nuptial feast which gives us strength, because it is God’s gift of himself to us, and which makes the countenance of the faithful glad.
When we, with faith, receive Christ’s gift to us, we allow him to build himself up within us – we allow his grace (which is his own self-gift) to strengthen our faith, to knit us ever more closely to himself. This is how Christ is honored in our bodies (Phil. 1.20), and how we “become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1.4), how we, as St. Paul says, “attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4.13).
And this is why these two mysteries are yoked together: the MANDATUM NOVUM, the Lord’s command that we love one another as he has loved us, and the institution of the Eucharist. Because the Eucharist is the fountain of God’s love: where the once and forever gift of his Son on Calvary is perpetually given to us and renewed within us.
Therefore “let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12.1-2).
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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