When I participate in the eucharist it is like getting on a celestial lift. Though its a brief journey timewise, a few minutes when it comes to specifically pleading Christ’s Sacrifice, I am aware that people and needs already on my heart get lifted to God with powerful consequences. With our patron Saint John I see the lifting of Christ in bread and wine drawing the cosmos to him ‘the bread of God which (also) comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (John 6:33). With Saint Paul I am lifted with Christ through separate consecration and display of bread and wine imagining a showing, a piercing through the Church walls, of divine love to irradiate our suffering world. Our striking west windows expand on Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11 verse 26, one with a picture of the Crucifixion and the other of the priest at the altar enfolded by the second half of that verse ‘Ye do show the Lord’s death until He comes’. Those who built St John’s were intent it should be less a preaching house and more a temple of God so that what we do this morning is the movement to heaven of Christ’s self offering into which we are drawn, ‘our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice’.
The Old Testament reading today from Genesis 22 is profound and difficult. It is the one used on Good Friday to illuminate the offering of the Son of God upon the Cross. Abraham’s offering of his son, Isaac mirrors God the Father’s sacrifice. It is a difficult passage to read mindful as we are of contemporary abuse and even killing of children by parents and quasi-mentors. The story of how in obedience to God Abraham takes his beloved son and prepares to sacrifice him is graphic. An angel calls back his hand with the knife as it prepares to descend on little Isaac. A ram caught by its horns in a thicket is revealed to replace Isaac as a sacrifice to God. On Good Friday this scripture of a father prepared to offer his son but spared doing so is a pointer to One who actually does so. The profound action of that Day is put into a sentence by Paul two chapters on from today’s second reading: ‘God did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us’ (Romans 8:32).
For that reason we show the Lord’s death day by day at the altar, as our church windows illustrate. Unlike Abraham God did not withhold his Son for us. Rather, through God's Offering of Christ there is made as the Articles of Religion describe ‘once for all, perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world’ (Article 31). God who created the world and human beings in his image, seeing the havoc caused by humans through misuse of free will, provided the remedy once for all. Though that havoc continues it is countered day by day as people come to the Cross for forgiveness, healing and to offer themselves in love to God’s praise and service. This is picked up in our second reading from Romans Chapter 6 where Saint Paul reminds his readers that since they have welcomed the living Christ who has freed them from the power of sin they should live accordingly. Like us, those Roman Christians needed reminding that through Christ’s sacrifice the power of sin had been potentially countered in our lives but our own grateful sacrifice is needed to release the potential of that saving gift. ‘Just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification… now you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 6:19, 22-23).
At every Eucharist in St John’s we plead Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary made present among us in Bread and Wine and join to it the sacrifice of ourselves. ‘Pray, my brothers and sisters’ the priest invites ‘that this, my sacrifice and yours, may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father’. ‘May the Lord accept this sacrifice at your hands’ we respond ‘for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his holy Church’. We go on later in the service to offer ‘our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice’.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and always, across the timespan of creation, the glorious redemption effected upon the Cross displayed in the resurrection, moving on through our own engagement and that of billions, towards the end of history ‘when he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’ and make God everything to everyone who accepts his love. To effect today’s Gospel, which presents believers as Christ’s instruments, we need an eye to the once for all Sacrifice of Christ, its renewal in the Eucharist and our own response in self offering. ‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me… and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple - truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward’ (Matthew 10:40, 42)
Though you’ve been listening to me, I hope, and maybe feel encouraged, St John’s, as our windows warn, is built not as a preaching house but, with its heavenward-pointing spire, as a temple for the worship of God in Burgess Hill. Going to the Eucharist can sometimes be reduced to the spiritual equivalent of going to Waitrose. Whilst I hope you’ll be encouraged by your attendance this morning, it's not what you feel that matters but how real the worship of God has been to you over this hour. In our church window - do look at it afterwards - the priest faces east to lead the people Godwards. A Waitrose type consumerist approach to the sacred mysteries is suggested by recent liturgical changes - Mass in the round - as well as the obligation to listen and reflect upon the homily or keep quiet after Communion. These helpful elements are geared more to serve our own needs than to what is historically central to the eucharist - the worship of God through pleading the Sacrifice of Christ for the suffering and triumph of the cosmos into which our own renewed self-offering Sunday by Sunday has a key part.
Seeing such profundity beyond the brief action of this hour with scripture and bread and wine has been for me a gift from teaching received and engagement with holy priests and people. Over the course of my life they have lifted for me the veil covering the sacred mysteries, not least my own mother Elsie, who, as my son John is now, was a regular attender at our Wednesday Eucharist. In recognising the power of Christ’s Sacrificial Prayer to which my intentions are joined day by day I have gained confidence in a transformative dynamic summarised in Our Lord’s promise that ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’ (John 12:32). All people, but also all things as St Paul writes of all things being ultimately put ‘in subjection under Christ, so that God may be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28). Such ultimately is the power of the eucharist which draws us up to God and out into service of what the Gospel calls ‘the little ones’ of Burgess Hill.
‘May the Lord accept the sacrifice which is yours and mine for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his holy Church’.
No comments:
Post a Comment