I should receive the sacraments by faith in Christ, with repentance and thanksgiving. Faith in Christ is necessary to receive the grace of the sacraments, and obedience to Christ is necessary for the benefits of the sacraments to bear fruit in my life.
To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism
We look again at Anglican theologian Richard Hooker for the Anglican perspective concerning the means to experience the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist. “The bread and wine are His body and blood because once we receive them they become causes of the participation of His body and blood in them. […] The real presence of Christ’s most blessed body and blood is not, therefore, to be sought in the Sacrament but in the worthy receiver of the Sacrament.”1
I won’t belabor the age-old debate of how or when the “real presence” of Christ enters the Sacrament or the person because I will stop here with Hooker’s stance that it is harmful and unnecessary to argue over that which is a mystery received as reality in faith. What I will focus on is that when we in fact “take and eat” we are agreeing to receive the reality of what Christ is offering— that “the soul of man is the receptacle of Christ’s presence.”2
The greater question at hand is how are we becoming Christ’s “real presence”? If the Eucharist is meant to be forming us into the likeness of Christ, how then are we being transformed to look less like ourselves and more like Christ?
To understand this more fully, we must first recognize our identity; who we are and whose we are. “Jesus is the sacrament of God, his very incarnate person is a sign making visible the presence of God. His death is a real symbol of God’s concrete presence.”3
When we enter the sacramental narrative in the Eucharistic liturgy and ingest the visible sign and receive the invisible grace we are enacting a real sign of being sealed, devoted, and indwelled by Christ himself through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is the outward acknowledgment that it is no longer we who live, but Christ in us. (Galatians 2:20) We can faithfully proclaim, “I am in Christ and Christ is in me.”
This translates to mean that the Church, you and I, are the living “real presence” of Christ, the sign of Christ to the world by the power of the Holy Spirit. We, the Church, are the sacrament of God in Christ.
James E. Griffiss, in The Anglican Vision, puts it this way, “Just as the outward and visible signs of bread, wine are ordinary, fragile, and ambiguous signs of God’s presence with us, so too the church, comprised as it is of ordinary, fragile, and ambiguous human beings, is the outward and visible sign of God’s presence with us.”4
We are transformed to be the “real” and active presence of Christ. We do not eat in order to withhold and grow fat. The spiritual food we receive is to be given, as Christ gave of himself.
Megan McKenna, in her book Rites of Justice, beautifully expresses how we corporately continue the work of Christ, “It is the church, the body of believers, that reveals the presence of God most clearly. Through the Trinity, God is expressed theologically as community, and it is the church, the community of the breaking and sharing, gathered, thanks-giving people, that witnesses to the good news of God’s presence in the world.”
The Eucharistic table and the meal it offers is unitive unlike any symbol in the created world. Our participation with Christ and all baptized believers in this ancient ritual reverberates an eternal and eschatological message to humanity toward a greater calling—one of humility, unity, forgiveness, reconciliation, justice, mission, love, mercy, self-sacrifice, suffering, and service.
We are called to be a hospitable table that shares good news, welcomes the outcast, and sustains creation until the return of Christ. We do this best when we are united, in communion with Christ himself. Jesus makes this clear when he shares his prayer for us in John 17, “I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
Becoming the “real presence” means “becoming what we eat so others can feed on us just as we feed on God. […] It is giving because of others’ need and our own gratitude for what has been shared so fully with us.”
Megan McKenna
The “real presence” dwells in each of us, unifying us to work as one with the Father for the reality of his Kingdom to be experienced here on earth now. As embodied persons, through faith we also become indwelled persons who need spiritual nourishment in the faith to give us strength and fortitude to continue the mission of being Christ in the world. It is at the communion table we practice the work of the kingdom through taking, thanking, breaking and giving the visible and invisible grace offered through Christ Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit. Now you know how to go and be broken and poured out wine for those around you.
“Brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
Romans 12:1 (NIV)
Thank you for sticking it out with me as we explored the Eucharist. If you have questions or comments, please reach out below. If you are not yet part of the wandering way, feel free to subscribe at the bottom of the website.
Footnote:
- Secor, Philip. Richard Hooker on Anglican Faith and Worship: Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Book V—A Modern Edition. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. London, England. 2003. p. 283
- Ibid. pp. 281, 283
- Vorgrimler, Herbert. “Sacramental Theology. Jesus Christ as the Primordial Sacrament.” The Order of St. Benedict. Collegesville, MN. 1992 (paraphrase)
- Griffiss, James E. The Anglican Vision: Church’s Teaching Series, Volume 1. Cowley Publications. Plymouth, United Kingdom. 1997.
