Chapter X
The Great Act of Worship
The Eucharist is the Church's great central act of corporate worship. It would be strange, considering the origin of this wonderful mystery, were it otherwise. Even those who regard it as a bare memorial of the historic occurrence of Christ's Passion and nothing more, however highly they may honour the ordinary round of prayer and praise, approach the Eucharist with unwonted awe.
Of course no one conception of its character is complete, as its various and stately names testify. So bound up with the Person of our Lord is it, that, as new treasures of knowledge are laid open concerning Him who is the eternal Son of God, this feast of rich things is proportionately enriched to the participant. Says Jeremy Taylor in his quaint and reverent way: "The Holy Communion or Supper of the Lord is the most sacred, mysterious and useful conjugation of secret and holy things and duties in the religion."[22] And withal it is, in essence, of all simple things the most simple—a meal, a meal transformed and exalted, it is true, but still a meal. However difficult the liturgy may be for unlearned folk, the sacrament itself, "the breaking of the bread," is easily understood by every one, even the least wise. Nor is it hard to reconcile the idea of a feast with this meagre meal of a morsel of bread and a sip of wine; for everyday experience has prepared us for the conveyance of great wealth through what has no intrinsic excellence. If a scrap of paper can have the value of heaps of gold, and, by the law of association, an age-worn trinket can become of priceless worth, it suggests no unreality to claim that under certain conditions a simple meal becomes a royal banquet, filling heart and soul and mind, and admitting into the very presence of the Most Holy and Most High. There is diversity in the explication of this act of worship, but whatever difference of opinion there may be regarding its exact nature, those most widely separated in thought will agree in this, that it is a profound rite, and that in it is spiritual wealth. And in these days, when at last men are beginning to perceive that truth is always greater than its best definition, no one will contend that what he sees in the Eucharist is all that it contains.[23]
The best commentary on the Eucharist is the closing chapter of our Lord's mortal career. The Son of Man, as He approached the Cross, drew nigh to that which throughout His ministry He had viewed as a goal; the crucifixion was what He had been preparing Himself for in all that He said and did throughout His human experience; His whole life was indeed a "long going forth to death." He aspired to reach the moment when He would be lifted up from the earth. He saw and predicted with composure all the horror and shame of the Passion, the betrayal and desertion, the scourging and spitting. But He saw even more clearly the dignity and wonder and majesty of the opportunity contained in it all, and spoke of it with suppressed joy: "I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!" The Cross would test to the full His obedience to God and reveal to what lengths Divine love would go to redeem sinful man. When men near the goal of their innocent ambition their cup of joy is full; nor was Christ's less than full. In the first Eucharist the pain of self-sacrifice for the time being was lost in the joy of self-fulfilment. When He took the bread and the wine and said, "This is My Body which is broken for you," "This is My Blood which is shed for you," He made the sacrifice of Himself. It is this act which separates His death from all other deaths, transforming the crucifixion from a judicial murder into a triumph of self-oblation. It is not the Cross which explains the Eucharist, but rather the Eucharist which explains the Cross.[24] Eliminate the Eucharist from the story of the Passion and our Lord's death sinks from the atoning act by which the world is reconciled to God into a mere act of resignation to a painful fate, to be classed with the death of Socrates and like heroes. It is the Eucharist that enables us to say that the crucifixion was a sacrifice; that however true it is that Christ was put to death by sinful men, it is a truth of greater magnitude that, according to His repeated prediction, He laid down His life for His friends; that the Cross of Calvary, and through it every cross that bows the shoulders of men, has become the instrument of victory and a school of obedience and sympathy.
No act of Christ was a mere personal experience. The Son of Man, as in loving sympathy He declared Himself to be, was the Universal Character whose life must needs concern and touch all other lives. It was His expressed desire that His fellows should share all that He was and did. He, the Son of God, became the Son of Man that we might become Sons of God.[25] Therefore it is not surprising that, at this the supreme moment of His life, He should bid the representative group who companied with Him, and through them all men, come in and participate in its power and joy; He did not merely lay down His life, but asked others to enter into His experience, saying, "Take, eat; this is My Body," "Drink ye all of this; this is My Blood." For what is the import of this invitation but this? "Associate yourselves with Me,—aye, be one with Me, incorporated into Me, in this great moment of self-offering; for I would present you a willing surrender in and with Myself." The idea of at-one-ment was never more intelligible than in these latter days. We are becoming more and more conscious of how close-wrought are the fibres of the human race; we recognize how the life of any one man affects the life of his fellows, and how the individual can gather into his own soul the sorrows and joys, the perplexities and aspirations of many people. If this is part of the experience of a son of man, it follows that the Son of Man, by the extension and completion of that quality which, when found in us, is known as sympathy, if by nothing else beyond,—and the character of His personality tells us there is much beyond that is inexplicable—not only may but must take into Himself and hold there for time and eternity the whole race—except so far, alas, as men struggle from the freedom of His embrace into the slavery of a false independence. Thus the Eucharist is the divinely chosen means whereby we men are invited to enter into, and consciously to appropriate the highest points of the victory of the Cross as well as what lies beyond,—the resurrection life. Through it He shares with us His life-giving death and His deathless life, His Divine nature and His perfect humanity, and we are "accepted in the Beloved."
The various titles of the sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood suggest its various aspects,[26] one of which, and that the one that happily is most common in our Church, we shall consider—the Holy Communion. This title indicates the view of the sacrament which most readily appeals to the human heart. The Holy Communion means, of course, "the Holy Fellowship"—not "a" but "the," that fellowship which above all others is holy, the end of which is to make all who participate in it holy. It is fellowship with the Father in Christ—not merely with Christ; that is not the whole of it, for Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man as He is, is the "Way" to the Father. Nor is it an ordinary fellowship, of which the fellowship of mere men is a complete image. Ordinary fellowship allows two lives to intertwine; but here so close is the relationship that "Christ with us," "we with Christ" is inadequate to describe the intimacy, and "we in Christ," "Christ in us," phrases which no one dare to apply to any other friendship, can alone tell the tale. And "we in Christ" not "Christ in us" is the grander and more frequent phrase. "In Christ" tells of the unmeasured wealth of fellowship, divine and human, which is the Christian heritage; it is the whole parable of the vine and the branches in two syllables.[27] This is the Godward aspect of the sacrament. And in this connection three things are to be noted:—
§ 1. Every fresh communion is a new point of contact with God in Christ through the working of the Eternal Spirit; each last communion means more than any of those which have gone before, as even in our association with a human friend new qualities and untried depths of familiar characteristics are revealed in each successive act of intercourse. Friendship is taken up day by day on a higher level than formerly, because of these new glimpses of the inner recesses of life which are caught from time to time as friends meet. And frequent repetition of the sacrament ought no more to impair its value, than frequent meetings the reality of friendship.
§ 2. Communion is only begun and not ended at the altar. It is something more than a touch for a moment. Grace is not the infusion of some mysterious spiritual property, which God having imparted leaves the recipient to make use of by himself; grace is the gift of God's personal working in the life through the indwelling Spirit. God never holds His faithful children one moment to let them go the next. He enfolds us in Himself with a tightening embrace, as by loyalty to His laws and repeated acts of faith, we expose new portions of our nature for Him to lay hold on. The sense of God's presence may be peculiarly full as we kneel to receive the heavenly food, just as at the moment of meeting again one whom we love the emotions are deeply stirred; but by virtue of yesterday's communion, God is as near at hand to-day as He was when we received the sacrament. The Holy Communion would fail in its purpose if it made the presence of our Lord a reality only for the time being, and did not more fully introduce men into the Divine presence as an abiding state. The fact of God's immanence in us requires this conclusion.
§ 3. The result of a faithful reception of the Holy Communion should be holiness in the common, everyday life, from which an incident, the family meal, is borrowed and transformed as the symbol and means by which all other incidents may be transformed. So great a mystery demands all the majesty of a liturgy and the accompaniment of stately worship; and a dignified ritual attached to this representative, this common act of our human life, is most valuable as indicating the majesty of all that is commonplace when it is touched by God. Just as we consecrate certain times and seasons in order that all times and seasons may become holy, so in the sacraments God has taught us to consecrate the simplest acts of ordinary life—the bath and the meal—as typical of the potential sacredness of all acts, and as a means of sanctifying and ennobling them. So the Holy Communion touches alike private life and life in society, the life of recreation and the life of business, and unless it transfigures each of these departments of human experience it falls short of its purpose. Let the business man remember that he strains to see and touch the Most Holy at the altar that he may see and touch the Most Holy in the market; let the professional man and the man of letters, the day labourer and the scientist each in his sphere be carried from the vision of God in the Eucharist to the abiding fellowship with God in his special vocation. He who comes from God goes to God, whithersoever his steps may bear him. The presence of our Lord at the altar is special but not exclusive. It is not a lamp lighted for a moment and then put out, but a light which will illuminate all life, and enable us to see at every turn the vision of omnipresent Love. It is one function of the sacraments to enhance, not to dim, the reality of God's immanence in all His works; to train us to perceive and apprehend that
Earth's crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God,—
a declaration which otherwise would be held to be but a poet's fickle fancy or a vague philosophical idea. Days are coming, if they are not already upon us, when in the midst of scientific progress and explanation in which men are prone to rest as final, the believer's ceaseless theme must be the Divine indwelling. And the strongest and most telling means of keeping alive this truth for ourselves and others is the sacramental system of the Church.
Thus far we have been thinking of the Godward aspect of the Holy Communion—fellowship with God in Christ. On its manward side it is fellowship with man in Christ. As it sustains us in Divine fellowship and lifts us continually into purer heights, so it assures us of our incorporation in the mystical Body of Christ, "which is the blessed company of all faithful people," and inspires us to deeper love. Here again it is necessary to recall the original simple form of the sacrament, a form so simple that, as Bishop Westcott says somewhere, it is difficult in the earliest references to it to distinguish it from the ordinary family meal. The brethren gather around the common table and partake of the common loaf.[28] And the use of the one loving-cup from which all drink goes beyond the customs of ordinary family life. The Holy Communion, which is a social act, speaks of the transformation of social life.[29] Just as the constant sharing of food at one table is the pledge of loyal service to one another on the part of all who partake, as well as a means of gaining strength to fulfil the pledge, so the Holy Communion is a pledge to mutual service and equipment for its accomplishment. "In Christ" a new relationship is established between man and man, or rather an old relationship is deepened and consummated. Brethren after the flesh are made brethren in the Lord.[30] Family and national ties are very sacred and very close, but they reach the full purpose which God designed for them only when they become the basis for spiritual kinship. It is considered a dreadful thing, and rightly so, when men of common blood are at variance with one another; nothing is more shameful than a family feud. And on the other hand, blood relationship is in itself a demand for the most loyal service that men are capable of rendering. Now through the sacramental life a kinship is established and sustained as real and as binding as that consequent upon the accident of birth; so that for Christian to be at variance with Christian is as unnatural as it is for two of one family to strive with one another; for Christian to over-reach Christian is as treacherous as it was for Jacob to steal Esau's blessing. The loyalty which those who are "in Christ" owe one another is the loyalty due among those who sit at the same board and eat of the same loaf, among those in whose veins runs the blood of a common mother. When men learn the reality and force of spiritual kinship, social problems will be solved and social evils will cease.
But a hasty glance has been bestowed in the foregoing pages on a mystery of unsearchable depth, and many of its aspects have not even been noted. The more obvious aspects are the ones upon which stress has been laid as including in them all others. As with all other forms of approach to God, so here, what a man knows about the Holy Communion is that which God has taught him in his reception of the Sacrament. Those who would fain plumb its depths must come frequently and preparedly to the feast. Nor is preparation a formal act. It is unfortunate that some teachers make it so by laying insistence on a set form. The best, and indeed the only, true preparation is an outcome of a full knowledge of the thing for which we wish to prepare ourselves, just as the best thanksgiving for a blessing is the spontaneous utterance consequent upon a contemplation of the gift received. The man who knows the spiritual significance of the Holy Communion, ipso facto knows how to prepare to receive it.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] Works: Vol. viii. p. 8.
[23] It is not easy to be understood, it is not lightly to be received; it is not much opened in the writings of the New Testament, but still left in its mysterious nature; it is too much untwisted and nicely handled by the writings of the doctors; and by them made more mysterious, and like a doctrine of philosophy made intricate by explications, and difficult by the apperture and dissolution of distinctions.—Jeremy Taylor, Works, vol. viii, p. 8.
[24] Milne.
[25] 2 Cor. viii: 9.
[26] See a valuable little book, Some Titles and Aspects of the Eucharist, by E. S. Talbot, D. D. (Bishop of Rochester). Rivington, Percival & Co., London.
[27] Bp. Alexander.
[28] Cf. 1 Cor. x: 17.—"We, who are many, are one loaf." The one serious objection to the otherwise convenient custom of using unleavened bread in the shape of wafers is that the symbolism of the common loaf is lost, and the point of contact with common life is somewhat obscured.
[29] Our Church, by the title adopted, by the form of service used, by the spirit of her rubrics where they touch upon the subject, plainly declares it to be her intention that the Holy Communion should always be celebrated so as to be a social act. The priest is not a mere representative of the congregation, doing things for them, but a leader acting with them. For the priest to act without the congregation is only less anomalous than for the congregation to act without the priest. Not that the whole congregation present should necessarily receive at any given celebration of the Holy Communion, though in the judgment of the present writer the ideal would be reached only thus.
[30] Cf. Philemon 16.