From time to time I am asked about various aspects of our Sunday morning Eucharist, why they are there and what they mean. So this month on June 12th we are going to experiment with a ‘preached’ Eucharist, in which, instead of the sermon in its usual place, I will provide a reflective commentary at significant stages in the service, explaining what is about to happen.
The last Thursday in May happened to be the feast of Corpus Christi, which always occurs on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. It is a feast commemorating the institution and gift of the Eucharist. We normally associate that with Maundy Thursday, but in the context of Passion Week it takes on a different significance, so this separate feast has been observed since the fourteenth century. Some Anglican Churches keep this feast, but not many, which is a pity because it is the focus of some of the best hymns written by Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth century theologian, which teach us a lot about the meaning of the Eucharist. You will find them as numbers 268,269, 308 and 521 in the New English Hymnal, though the translations afford only the occasionally memorable line.
So what did Aquinas believe about the Eucharist which may still be helpful to us? First we don’t perhaps appreciate quite how odd a phenomenon our coming to Church on a Sunday is in today’s world. Not so long ago the Church of England was seen as the Tory party at prayer. Going to church on a Sunday had a lot to do with what it meant to be respectable. Nowadays there is almost something ‘counter cultural’ in Sunday church going, so that people can be embarrassed to admit it to their work colleagues. Such critics might see it as identifying oneself with all that was illiberal, old fashioned, stuffy and naïve. But that is not what I mean by ‘counter cultural’. It goes against our culture to sit still and listen in silence to so many words. It is unusual to be at some level quite intimate with a large group of people whom one doesn’t know very well. It is rare that people acknowledge in public that they have sinned ‘in thought, word and deed.’ There are few places that offer drama outside a theatre, live music outside a concert hall, education outside a college or school, where people of all ages are involved in an act which combines all these things with a climactic moment of eating and drinking.
And finally there is nothing in our society which replicates an event that was initiated nearly two thousand years ago, which is being replicated still all over the world and which if it was miraculously visited through time by people from every past century, would still in its essentials be recognisable and familiar. Such unity of purpose, and such a community of experience goes beyond anything we experience anywhere else in our culture. And we do not I think sufficiently acknowledge the wonder of this. We do not recognise what a powerful instrument the Eucharist is for maintaining a system of behaviour and belief which is fundamental to who and what we are. It is not surprising that there has been so much conflict about what goes on in the Eucharist and how it should be celebrated.
And it is not therefore surprising that Thomas Aquinas saw this as ‘the sacrament of the Church’s unity.’ People often ask why they should go to church. The answer is that they can’t be Christian without it. By which I mean that ‘being a Christian’ is not primarily about being good or believing in God, it is about believing that you cannot know God in a Christian way outside the context of a community of people with whom you learn about God and about being good through means that are available nowhere else. And it is the Eucharist that makes possible this community of those who are learning and being changed. For it is in the Eucharist, as Aquinas taught, that we come closest to Jesus Christ. When he said over the bread and wine ‘This is me,’ and ‘Do this in remembrance of me’ he established the context in which ever afterwards people would be enabled to be a part of him, his life, his teaching, his actions, his death, and his new and life-giving and victorious spirit. The Eucharist, said Aquinas, is ‘a union in which Christians share in the life of God as it is lived by the Son of God, who is the Father’s giving of himself.’ And it was almost the last thing he wrote he could say no more of any greater importance than that.
There is, however, much more to Aquinas’ discussion of the Eucharist than that, and much more that is immensely difficult, so perhaps the best way to end is with the most ‘poetic’ of translation of his hymns by the seventeenth century Catholic Richard Crashaw, set to music in Finzi’s wonderful anthem, ‘Lo the full final sacrifice.’ (gust in the fifth line means taste though it could also then mean as it does to us, a blast of wind, which resonance makes the word doubly vital!)
O dear memorial of that death
Which lives still, and allows us breath!
Rich, royal food! Bountiful bread!
Whose use denies us to the dead;
Whose vital gust alone can give
The same leave both to eat and live;
Live ever, bread of loves, and be
My life, my soul, my surer self to me.
With my love and prayers,
Father Stephen
A DEACON AND THE LITURGY
Starting this month on Sunday June 26th – we shall have a newly ordained deacon in our midst. I shall write more about the role of deacon next month but for now it’s appropriate to point out the differences Sarah’s presence will make to our celebration of the Eucharist. There are certain parts of the Eucharist which have always been the deacon’s responsibility, and which in some ways symbolise their wider ministry.
The deacon is in some ways the go-between; he or she always stands to the right of the celebrant; she invites the people to confess their sins; she may play a part in the intercessions and where lay people lead these prayers they are exercising a diaconal function; she invites the people to share the peace; she prepares the altar for communion and receives the offerings; she administers the chalice and at the end of the Eucharist dismisses the people. You will also notice that she carries in the gospel book, places it on the altar, and then after receiving a blessing from the celebrant takes the book and processes to the pulpit for the proclamation of the gospel. This has always been one the deacon’s principal roles. It is a pity that we have no permanent deacons to link us into this ancient ministry, but we shall make the most of this liturgical role in Sarah’s first year with us.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker