Tag Archives: Eucharistic presence

Jesus’ Legacy

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It is normal and laudable to think ahead to the legacy one might leave for posterity, hopefully a legacy to the good for others. In the case of Jesus, his sights for an enduring legacy must have been very high, high enough to cause much anxiety on account of the heavy resistance he had encountered, not least from his closest disciples. It seems highly likely that he had become conscious of being a messianic figure by the close of his life, made all the more problematic in that the Davidic model didn’t seem to fit the life he had felt led to lead. Given that he had reason to believe that there was no escaping the death close on the horizon, much as he would have wanted to, the model of the Suffering Messiah of Isaiah 52-53 seemed more like what was in store for him. But how could dying at the hands of the religious and political authorities lead to anything after his death? The need to firm up his legacy as best he could reached its climax at what has gone down in history as The Last Supper. On Maundy Thursday, we commemorate the two last things recorded of Jesus before his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The first event is Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. The resistance he encountered from his closest disciple, Peter, could not have been encouraging. Jesus reacted to this resistance with a firm reproof that seems to have done its job, as Peter seems finally to have gotten on board with the notion of being a leader by being a servant. Jesus’ act is easy for anyone to understand provided one’s heart is not so clouded as to find such a humble act of service incomprehensible. The problem is, it is easy to let our hearts cloud over in such matters and it is very difficult to clear up our hearts when they have been so clouded. However, Jesus’ act of washing the disciples’ feet is about a clear a beacon as he could have given to his followers and to us.

Jesus’ second and last act is to host the supper, possibly a Passover meal, but not necessarily. In serving the bread, he says cryptically that it is his body for them, and when serving the wine, he says. just as cryptically, that it is his blood of the new covenant. (1 Cor. 11: 24-25). He then instructed his disciples to eat the bread and drink the wine in his memory. We have been doing this ever since with the conviction that in some mysterious way, Christ continues to give of his substance through the bread and wine. What was Jesus thinking at the time of making these gestures? He didn’t have a theological manual on sacramental theology to help him out and presumably didn’t need such a prop. A deep dependency on his heavenly Abba would have been enough. When I think of the stiff resistance Jesus was experiencing at the time, even from his disciples, I begin to suspect that the bread and wine was something of an escape hatch, an end run around the resistance. In many mysterious ways, eating the bread and drinking the wine not only teaches us more and more over the years what Jesus is all about, but these acts keep Jesus alive within us. It is of profound significance that the two disciples who walked the road to Emmaus recognized the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread.

When Jesus died on the cross, Joseph of Arimathea buried him and put a stone at the opening of tomb. This stone was just to protect the body. For Caiaphas, that was not enough as he did not want to take any chances that the dead man would get away. So he had the stone sealed just to make sure. Three days later, we’ll see how that worked out.

Ascending to Come Near to Us

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In the famous dispute between Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli over the Eucharistic presence (or lack thereof), Zwingli argued that Jesus’ body could not be present in the Eucharist because he had ascended and was located at the right hand of the Father. Luther, though taking Jesus’ words of institution of the sacrament literally, did not take the Ascension so literally and so did not see that as a problem.

This is not a sermon on the Eucharistic presence of Christ but, in preaching on the Ascension, it is interesting that the Ascension was triangled into the Eucharistic debate. What this debate shows, vis-a-vis the Ascension, is that the event is overflowing with paradoxes about time and place.

Actually, such paradoxes go back to the dawn of creation. God, for all God’s Infinity, chooses to become involved in matter by creating it and tending it; giving the world freedom to grow even at a microscopic level, as contemporary nuclear physics teaches us, and culminating at the level of the human will. God also intensified God’s involvement in the world at certain historical moments, most importantly at the Red Sea and the Jews’ return from their Babylonian exile. God deepened God’s involvement with the material world by entering it as Jesus of Nazareth, a man vulnerable to rejection, taunts, and the nails on the cross. It is these considerations that supported Martin Luther’s contention, in continuity with his patristic and medieval inheritance, that the Ascension had nothing to do with Jesus leaving, let alone forsaking the created material world, but rather that the Ascension was a deepening and intensifying of Jesus’ involvement in our world.

After all, relating to God and to God Incarnate is not something that involves time and place in the way we experience time and place in all other relationships. If a friend or lover is away, that person is not there, although a certain level of closeness can still be experienced via letter or a phone call or Zoom conversation. But God can be both closer and farther at the same time in profound ways. Jesus tries to prepare his disciples for this combination of closeness and distance when He tells them that when he goes away, the Paraclete will come to make him more profoundly present than He was when He was physically with them. Getting back to the question of Eucharistic presence, it is worth noting that the Holy Spirit is invoked to bring the risen and ascended Christ into the bread and wine.

Unusually, there is a choice between two collects for this Feast with significantly different takes on it. The collect to the effect that Jesus ascended into Heaven that He might fill all things is much closer to my approach, especially with the petition that we “perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the ages.” The idea of ascending to where Christ continually dwells, as the other collect would have it, seems to be at cross purposes with this approach unless we understand our ascending to where Christ is to be allowing Christ to draw us (and all creation) to himself as promised in John 6. Or, perhaps we can take ascending to where Christ is to be a broadening of our view of life to the perspective of the ascended Christ, which is another way to let Christ fill all things.

So, Ascensiontide is not an end; it is a new beginning. It is not about saying good-bye to Jesus; it’s about greeting Jesus anew every day in ever-deepening ways.