“And Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down”
Jesus identifies himself as the bread of life in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. It is one of the seven so-called “I am” sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel which point to his essential divinity at the same time as providing a host of metaphors that concern our humanity in terms of our dwelling and abiding in him. Such is the whole matter of thinking sacramentally. “I am the door”, “I am the way, the truth and the life”, “I am the resurrection and the life”, “I am the good shepherd”, “I am the light of the world”, “I am the vine” and “I am the bread of life”. They are all really sacramental in scope and application. They speak to the forms of our incorporation in Christ. But the most ostensibly and obviously sacramental is when Jesus says he is “the bread of life”.
The Gospel for the Fourth Sunday in Lent is John’s account of Jesus’ feeding the multitude in the wilderness. It comes from the sixth chapter where Jesus says he is the “bread of life” and belongs to its sacramental intensity. It belongs, in other words, to what Christ is teaching us about himself and his relation to us. First, he is saying something profound about himself in relation to God who reveals himself as “I am who I am” in and through the burning bush, itself a sacramental image about the invisible made known through the visible, and without the destruction of the natural. The bush burns but is not destroyed. Secondly, he is saying something profound about us in our relation to him. In other words, his relation to the Father in the Communion of the Trinity is the ground of his relation to us through these metaphors of incorporation; in short, metaphors about our life in Christ.
Articles XXV through XXXI of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion deal with the matter of the sacraments in a reformed understanding and in the context of the intense debates about the sacraments at the time of the reformation. Article XXVIII deals explicitly with the Lord’s Supper. It is crucial to keep in mind Article XXV which treats of the sacraments in general and makes the important point that they are “effectual signs of grace”; in other words, they effect what they signify. What is critical for the Anglican reformers is preserving the essential nature of the sacraments as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace”. What that means is the necessity of preserving the sign in relation to the thing signified and that requires maintaining the integrity of the natural in relation to the supernatural. This is the key point which shapes the Anglican Reformed understanding of the sacraments. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
Article XXVIII explicitly rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation meaning “the change of the substance of the Bread and Wine” as something which “cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and have given occasion to many superstitions.” Cranmer is writing around the time of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) which will ultimately require that Christians must accept transubstantiation as an essential doctrine of the Christian faith, as something necessary to be believed. Cranmer was reacting, however, to a debased and superstitious view of transubstantiation that was part of late Medieval catholicism. Those after him will recognise that there were a myriad of different interpretations of transubstantiation, some good, some not so good, but all of them far, far later than the Fathers of the early Church and none of them warranting scriptural affirmation that could justify such a doctrine as being de fide. A hundred years after Cranmer, Bramhall shows that there was a great profusion and confusion of opinions about the meaning of transubstantiation; a host of conflicting and contradictory views. At best, he says, it can only be a matter of opinion and therefore not something required to be believed.
At the risk of an oversimplification, the Reformers bear witness to a profound shift and one which would become part of the Roman Catholic Church as well. The shift was from Mass as spectator event to Mass as communion. We take this for granted but for the late medieval church, communion was rare; perhaps once or twice a year. Mass was frequently celebrated but the highlight for the laity was the elevation of the host. Some English churches actually had a ‘squint’ in the walls of the Church which allowed the laity to peer in during the Mass and see the host elevated by the priest. There is something wonderful about such piety at the same time as something altogether inadequate. On the other hand, a too casual almost rights-oriented approach to the sacrament is also inadequate. Each age has its struggles and shortcomings in its understanding of our life in Christ.
But the reformers, and here Cranmer et alia largely follow Calvin, sought for more frequent communion which they saw as the purpose of the sacrament. Cranmer was particularly aware of some of the superstitions that had attached themselves to the infrequent medieval Mass, such as people secretly taking the host home with them and making a shrine for it; a kind of idolatry. That is why Cranmer argued for people receiving not in their hands but on their tongues, precisely in order to prevent this kind of misuse and abuse.
Yet, transubstantiation, in the hands of careful and thoughtful theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, whose hymns on the sacrament are a common feature of Anglican worship, provided a way to think about the mystery of the sacrament and in ways that uphold and do not destroy the fundamental feature of the sacrament; in other words, preserving the distinction of natures in the sacramental act. It is through the natural that we participate in the supernatural life of God, the supernatural does not destroy the natural but perfects it. This is the underlying instinct of Cranmer and subsequent Anglican divinity.
It has everything to do with thinking sacramentally and insisting that the outward and visible not be destroyed but preserved in its integrity as the vehicle and vessel of supernatural grace. The bread of the communion is bread and yet is far more; it is the body of Christ. The wine of the communion is wine and yet is far more; it is the blood of Christ. Not by any kind of corporal or physical change of properties but spiritually and sacramentally.
There is a lovely quatrain attributed to Queen Elizabeth about the sacrament.
’Twas God the word that spake it,
He took the bread and brake it,
And what the word did make it,
That I believe and take it.
It has served usefully and not so usefully as an Anglican response to the insistence on transubstantiation as an essential of faith. Later Anglican divines were very clear about the distinction, as was Cranmer, between transubstantiation and the real presence. At issue is what one means by real. Emphatically and theologically that cannot be the material and physical, the corporeal and the carnal. The real is spiritual. Hooker boldly argues for a“transubstantiation in us” capturing wonderfully the real point. It is about us in Christ. It is about creation and redemption, about the grand pageants of justifying and sanctifying grace by which we are incorporated into Christ. His life lives in us. That is the point of the sacraments; it is about our life in Christ.
It transcends all of the limitations of our cultures and communities. How fitting that our Lenten Programme on ‘Thinking Sacramentally’ concludes on the night when the Church, especially the Canadian Church, commemorates Henry Budd, the first North American Indian, to be ordained to the ministry. He was a Cree Metis. It was in 1852 that he was made a deacon and in 1853 that he was priested, a rather long time after the initial encounter between the European cultures and the indigenous cultures of North America. We live very much within the orbit of such things in all of their confusions and conflicts and uncertainties. One thing that remains in spite of abuse is that so many of the native peoples of Canada remain committed Christians. They bear witness to the power of the Gospel in spite of betrayal and suffering. I cannot help but think that the sacramental understanding is precisely that which comforts and strengthens, renews and redeems, and gathers all to Christ.
“Holy Communion,” Lancelot Andrewes says, “is the blessed union, the highest perfection we can in this life aspire unto.”We are “gathered to Christ, and by Christ to God.”
Find the gathering, you shall find fulness; find Christ, and you shall find the gathering, for the gathering is full and whole in Christ.
The passage echoes powerfully this Gospel reading and the sacramental actions that belong to our life in Christ.
“And Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set down”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Programme: Thinking Sacramentally IV
April 2nd, 2019