_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:--
Sec. 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.
Sec. 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.
Sec. 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._