St James the great - part 2.
Ordinary Sunday 18: 1st August, 1999
Revd Dr Colin Holden,
Assistant Priest, St Peter's Eastern Hill
Part 1
of this sermon was delivered on Sunday July 25th, 1999
Next [during the consecration prayer], [we intercede] also [for] our holy fathers and bishops that have fallen asleep before us, in a word for all who have fallen asleep among us, believing that this is the greatest aid to their souls, for whom the entreaty is made in the presence of then holy and dread [phrikodestatos, lit. making the hair stand on end] sacrifice . . . [1]
Had you been a newly-admitted catechumen in Jerusalem in the middle of the fourth century, you would have heard these words as part of the explanation of the meaning of the eucharist delivered by the bishop Cyril in a series of addresses specially aimed at you and your peers. The imagery used by Cyril reflected a piety that stressed the experience of God in worship as transcendant, other. There was no room allowed here for warm fuzzies. The Anglican liturgical scholar Dom Gregory Dix suggested that this terminology reflected a long tradition of eastern attitudes to the holy as something awe-inspiring ultimately because it was dangerous, potentially a consuming fire, destructive to anyone who approached it without proper preparation. Such an attitude could certainly be the basis for a more or less supersititious approach to or an avoidance of what was understood to be holy. But the history of concepts in religious belief and practice is in part a history of refinement, evolution and increased sophistication (with possibilities of regression as well). When it comes to the Old Testament tradition of sacrifice, its remote ancestry may well be in human sacrifice, but eventually it reaches the sophisticated level of understanding in several of the prophets and some psalm texts which saw ethical behaviour instead of sacrificial animals as sacrifice ultimately pleasing to God - see for example, Psalm 51. I mention this development,m because there are parallels for the eucharist: that it can be the object of a sacrificial theology or devotion that is crude or misplaced does not mean that such an insight is necessarily erroneous at the core.
It is a commonplace, a platitude to state that the eucharist enshrines many core Christian insights. A cynic might say that it is a symbol that has simply borne the weight of successive interpretations foisted on it due to needs of different times. However, the mere fact that it is a combination of basic words and acts impose limits on its interpretation. The church certainly claims that the eucharist has certain definite meanings. While the interpretation of those meanings certainly reflects the needs and insights of particular periods, the variety of interpretations, and disputes over the eucharist, reflect the richness of its core, not just changing fads. In the first three gospels, our primary documents for the basic words and actions, Jesus links the eucharist with His death, and what He understood His death to mean - among other things, an offering in accordance with God's will. St Paul, who understands Jesus death in sacrificial terms, also links the eucharist with Jesus death: it proclaims the death of the Lord until He comes.
The emphasis on death might first appear, but is not primarily, negative. Christianity has stressed, and sometimes had to stress strongly, the reality of Jesus pain and suffering; but these are properly understood as having positive value, notas ends in themselves. It is significant that in the Jewish understanding of the sacrifice of animals: the purpose of the sacrifice was not primarily destruction or death, but release of life to God. Blood and its shedding was interpreted as a sign of life ('for blood makes expiation, by reason of the life that is in it', the passage misunderstood by Jehovah's Witnesses in connection with blood transfusion). [2]
So when the question, what is eucharist, is raised, one of many answers, but one proclaimed particularly, but not exclusively, among Anglicans by Anglo-Catholics, has been that it is a sacrifice. Their proclamation reiterated the use of sacrificial language concerning the eucharist by church, from at least the 2nd century (Justin Martyr's identification of the eucharist as the univesally offered pure sacrifice prophesied by Malachi) and even possibly as early as the very 1st century (if parts of the Didache date from as early as that period0. Such language was at first very general, but became increasingly elaborate and specific from the 4th century onwards. It was expressed in liturgical texts as well as abstract theological reflection. And the term was used not only in reference to the offering of praise and thanksgiving in worship, nor the intentions of self-offering brought in prayer by the community and its members, but also in the sense of a dynamic link with Jesus' offering at Calvary - the eucharist envisaged as sharing,,participation, extension.
Among Anglicans, and among the members of various reformation churches,the absence of any reflection on the eucharist's sacrificial dimension, or the limiting of these to prescriptions that primarily told people how not to think of the eucharist as a sacrifice, were an inheritance of the reformation. There was certainly a need by the early 16th century for a corrective to crude expressions, such as the understanding that in the liturgy Jesus' passion was physically repeated, or a new sacrifice offered, likewise that the liturgy was something performed exclusively by celebrant, not community. In response, there were both sophisticated Roman Catholic doctrinal formulations, and various reformed answers. Among the reformation churches, there was a general trend to abandon sacrificial language in liturgical texts altogether; or to limit the expression of offering to self-offering of worshippers, and to exclude any such approach from the offering of the gifts, let alone suggest that they enabled a participation in the offering of Jesus. These attitudes registered most widely in the kind of evangelical piety that saw the eucharist in purely static terms, not as something dynamic, presence, power: ie as a psychological reminder, a dramatic memory aid of past events. Nevertheless, pure and simple dismissal did not occur. Not all evangelical piety saw the eucharist in this way. The Wesleys expressed a theology very strongly through their hymns, a kind of theology that Methodists by and large never took up:
Ye royal priests of Jesus, rise
And join the Daily Sacrifice,
Join all believers in His Name
To offer up the Spotless Lamb.
Thus their hymnody complemented the liturgical texts, expressing what the reformation tradition in general had excluded from them.
Among Anglicans, Thomas Cranmer, the primcipal fashioner of the first two Prayer Books, came to limit all expressions of offering to the post-communion prayer; in other worlds, the only offering in the eucharist was the self-offering of the worshippers. But the fading cheshire cat smile of sacrifice refused to disappear altogether, and a small but important group of 17th century Anglicans asserted that the eucharist was a sacrifice in more ways than Cranmer allowed. By beginning of the 17th century, some Anglican celebrants placed this prayer straight after words of institution, undertanding it as expressing offering in broader sense than Cranmer ever intended. Jeremy Taylor and other significant devotional and theological writers of the 17th century made a link with the eucharist as a sacrificial act, but sought a way around the reformation debates by turning away from Calvary as the link point, instead using the image of Jesus interceding at a heavenly altar as High Priest ,presented in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Our earthly eucharist was envisaged as caught up into His sacrificial prayer and presence in heaven. In Britain, 19th century Anglo-Catholics faced the frustration that any revision of Prayer Book texts to incorporate what they saw as important but neglected truths had t have parliamentary approval as a basis for legality - a long and difficult business. Some decided that the only way was to return to the full or partial use of the Roman rite since it was an existing liturgical text that gave explicit expression to the understanding that the eucharist was a sacrifice. For others, the illegality of this alternative just stressed the need for textual revision within the existing system. Meanwhile, others took something like the Wesleyan approach, and produced some of our finest eucharistic hymns. Bright's 'And now O Father mindful of the love' is a prime example.
Its first verse begins with refernce to both Calvary and Jesus' high priestly intercession in heaven, thus taking us the older high church tradition:
And now O Father, mindful of the love
That bought us once for all on Calvary's tree,
And having with us Him who pleads above . . .
It then continues by referring to the eucharist at which the hymn is being sung:
We here set forth, we here present to Thee,
That only offering perfect in thine eyes,
The one true pure immortal sacrifice.
For Bright, the eucharist is no repetition, nor addition, to the sacrifice of
Jesus on the Cross; rather, it is one with it, its extension through time.
At the end of the last century, the Anglican dean of Perth, Frederick Goldsmith, had Bright's hymn sung at every sung eucharist in the cathedral, and to make doubly sure that a sacrificial theology was made explicit, St Thomas Aquinas' hymn O Saving Victim opening wide (O Salutaris Hostia) was sung by a treble as a solo immediately after the words of institution in the Consecration prayer. While Goldsmith was able to use hymns to express a theology that the Prayer Book text itself did not, the shadow of the reformation debates continued to influence the texts used by Australian Anglicans much later in the century. An Australian Pryer Book trod gingerly around any language concerning sacrifice and offering, mindful of the reality for Sydney Anglicans of the reformation debates, but the more recent Prayer Book for Australia makes much more explicit statements in 3rd eucharistic prayer, that have the theology of Jeremy Talor and others in their ancestry.
But today, the limits imposed by the reformation debate - (is the eucharist a sacrifice, and in what sense - are too narrow Not only do we need to find a solid basis for a sacrificial understanding of the eucharist: we need to cast the net much wider, envisaging the potentially sacrificial undertone of all Christian prayer and living.
For late 20th century Christians, more sophisticated thinking by physicists and philosophers concerning the nature of time, and by those in various disciplines concerning memory as something dynamic, rather than static, can be helpful in offering new ways of approaching the relationship between the sacrificial dimension of the eucharist that we offer in the present, and Jesus' death on Calvary. We might also want to broaden the canvas so as to find points other than Calvary to which to attach the eucharist's sacrificial dimensions. One such point is our affirmation that here we enter into the presence of the divine, God in Jesus. If God is Himself the gift, and He is by virtue of own nature giving, then as gift and model, His presence in itself constitutes an invitation to offer.
A focus on the presence of God Himself as gift can also act as a powerful and necessary discouragement to new tendencies to think of the eucharist in terms of what we offer: a kind of thinking encouraged at times by the legitimate reallocation of a strong participatory role to the laity in eucharistic texts, and in the rediscovery or renewed emphasis on offertory processions that were fashionable in so many churches in the wake of the Parish and People movement. Equally such a focus can discourage the harnessing of the eucharist as the basis for a merely shallow activism. Archbishop Ramsey warned of the need to stress that there is ultimately only one offering - that of Jesus, who as an act of grace incorporates what we have and are are into His own. To say this is neither to denigreate nor deny the importance of the communitarian sense recovered in 20th century worship and theology; the stress on communitarian values and criticism of individualism not only in piety, but in social and economic values remains important, because in terms of the wider culture in which the churches are set in the west, to present such an emphasis is to swim against much of the prevailing cultural tide.
A far from obvious inheritance of the reformation debate concerning sacrifice is the position of our intercessions in the whole liturgical framework. Anglicans still place their intercessions outside the framework of the consecration prayer, as though they are a part of a kind of introduction. Actually they are nothing of the kind, and we do well to recall that our intercessions are primarily the worshipping community's offering of its concerns to God and of its people to God in love and service. The intercessions become truly sacrificial in nature and at the same time true prayer, when their words are matched by actions that we perform in the rest of our lives. With this in mind, it would be logical for us to include a clause in our intercessions that reminded us that we offer our prayers in response to, and as part of our involvement in this greater sacrificial act.
Last week I raised the subject of self-offering and sacrifice. In particular, I related it to the positive understanding of martyrdom which Christianity has proclaimed virtually from its inception, an understanding that has been quick to distinguish martyrdom from a psychologically unbalanced indulgence that cultivates the death-wish. I suggested that this was one aspect of a more general positive motive that underlay a wide and significant range of ideals-driven actions: a desire to offer or give.
Theology cannot be driven by psychology, or by social needs or by the commentary on these by sociologists, or those in various other disciplines. But it must pay heed to them. It needs to reconsider and emphasise the dimension of sacrifice in terms of the desire to offer or give as basic human drive. A clearly stated theology of offering provides a corrective to visions of humanity as primarily grasping, acquisitive; when nit comes to the eucharist as the offering of community, it provides an alternative to individualism, and the ignoring of community; and its stress on life as something directed toward offering also provides an alternative to destructive death-wishes of individuals currently troubling our own and other societies. I doi not present this as a universal panacea, but as a significant challenge and alternative that is consistent with our faith.
To conclude, much of what I have been discussing in this second address is succincly summed up in the following prayer, which I learnt as part of my training before ordination:
Stretch forth your hand O God, for this the sacrifice You have commanded; that standing uncondemned before You, we may offer that sacred and unbloody rite which our Lord Jesus Christ Himself both is and offers, now and to the end of all time.
Further reading: While there is an extensive literature on the reformation debate over the eucharist and sacrifice that is far too large to list here, readers interested in a detailed survey of the treatment of sacrifice in liturgy should consult Kenneth Stevenson, Eucharist and Offering, New York, 1986. Those interested in the Anglican attitudes, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries should consult the relevant chapters in that work; also the remarkable anthology of liturgical texts and the commentary on them in Jardine Grisbrooke, Anglican Liturgies of the 17th and 18th Centuries, London, 1958, and Kenneth Stevenson, Covenant of Grace Renewed, A Vision of the Eucharist in the 17th Century, London, 1994.
Notes
- Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. Myst., xxiii, 9, as quoted in Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 2nd edn., London, 1945, p. 195.
- For a lengthy discussion of the connection between blood in sacrifice and life in Hebrew thinking, see R. de Vaux, Ancient Israel, its Life and Institutions, London, 1961, pp. 419-49.
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