All Saints: the Body of Messiah

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The Readings for the Solemnity of the
Body and Blood of Christ
The Readings for the Sunday of All Saints

So Jesus said to them, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. Assuredly I say to you, that in the regeneration, when the Son of Man sits on the throne of His glory, you who have followed Me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.”

John 6:54; Matthew 19:28

BY A LITURGICAL COINCIDENCE today is the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ in the. western rites of the Catholic Church and the Feast of All Saints in the Byzantine calendar. In the liturgical East, All Saints comes after Pentecost rather than in October. And it strikes me these are the same feast in a way. In an exact way, actually: for the glorified saints are no less the Body of Christ than the Eucharist. The Church, herself, is the Body of Christ in the same way but at a different level for she is filled with sinful man on the way to salvation, but there is something else:

At which point does salvation win? Before that point what is happening?

The most ancient Eucharistic prayer we have does not mention “body and blood” but rather the Church herself made holy as the Kingdom:

Over the cup: We thank you, our Father, for the holy vine of David Your servant, which You made known to us through Jesus Your Servant; to You be the glory forever.
And concerning the broken bread: We thank You, our Father, for the life and knowledge which You made known to us through Jesus Your Servant; to You be the glory forever.
Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let Your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into Your kingdom; for Yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ forever.

Didache (1st Century AD)

In my former Episcopal parish, we gave communion to each person by name. I asked the pastor, “When I say, ‘Lizzie, the Body of Christ’ am I saying something about the bread or about Lizzie?” His answer was, “Yes.” Gazing upon the bread Catholics are invited to “Behold what you are, become what you receive”. The Bread is holy because of the words pronounced over it by the priest, who is repeating, in his person, the words pronounced over it by Christ. Is this the body of the priest made Christ or the Body of the Messiah made bread? Yes. Jesus says he, himself, is the Bread of Life, come down from heaven and given for the life of the whole world. When we eat this bread it consumes us – making us into who we have received. This is not just the appetizer for coffee hour, we become bread for the life of the world.

Today I have to give a talk on Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ concept of the Efficient Cause. There can be only one, actually. The efficient cause of all that exists is God – although Aquinas does not force us to get there. He walks us slowly over a very smooth road, but it requires faith at every step: it’s not an airtight, locked universe. God requires we have faith, we act on things unseen – including himself. But at the point where we accept that God is the Efficient Cause of all that is, that means that he is the cause of the Communion of the Saints both in their spiritual union and in their corporeal feasting of unity: God is what makes them one in that they are spiritually one and also in that what makes them one is that they share one bread, one body for feasting.

The Church, the Body of Christ, is present in the world. The Church, the Body of Christ, is present in Eternity. The Church, the Body of Christ, sits at the right hand of the Father of Glory. The Church, the Body of Christ is the Sacrament of Salvation for the wold world. As Messiah sits at the right hand of God, we gaze upon the Bread elevated in the Monstrance, the Church is elevated for the world to see. And there, if we are honest the mystery is at its weakest density, for the Church in the world is filled with sinners and has a really bad history of relationship to the world. How has the Body of Christ acted in the persons of his faithful towards others?

In Father Arseny, the priest – imprisoned in a Russian Gulag by Stalin in the 50s – is quoted as saying the Russian Revolution happened in no small part because of the way faithless clergy and laity acted in spite of their claim to be Christian.

How can we “Sit on 12 thrones judging the tribes of Israel” and act in any way less mercifully than did our master Himself? We do not discern the Body of the Lord. For this we are being, ourselves, judged.

Here’s Father Arseny explaining how the Russian Church created the environment that gave us the Soviet revolution. It’s timely. It sounds like us in the layter half of the last century, a time of rejection of the Church’s teaching by large numbers of priests, nuns, and theologians.

“…Let us remember the bad examples set by the intelligentsia, the nobility, the merchants,.and the civil servants. We in the priesthood were the worst of them all.

“Children of priests became atheists, and revolutionaries, simply because they had seen in their families lies and a lack of true faith. Long before the revolution priests had already lost the real right to be the shepherds of their people, of their conscience. Priesthood became a profession. Many priests were atheists and alcoholics.

“From among all the monasteries of our land, only five or six were real beacons of Christianity. Valaam Monastery, Optina Pustin with its great startsy, Diveyevsky Convent, and also the Monastery of Sarov. Others became communities with almost no faith in them.

“What could the people learn from such monasteries? What kind of an example was set?

“We did not raise our people right, we did not give them the basis of a strong faith. Remember all this. Remember. This is why the people were so quick to forget all of us, their own priests; they mainly forgot their faith and participated in the destruction of churches, sometimes even leading the way In their destruction.

“Understanding all of this, I cannot point a finger at our authorities, because the seeds of faithlessness fell on the soil which we ourselves had prepared. And from there comes the rest.”

This liturgical coincidence today helps me to see that we cannot objectify (reify?) the Eucharist into its own space without the Church, without Christ himself, and without the Communion of the Saints. It is all the Body of the Messiah in the World and in eternity. But how to we take it? What do we do with it? As a novice recently preached at St Dominic’s, “Sometimes it’s easier to know if someone has had their morning coffee than the Eucharist.”

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Huw Raphael

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