The extreme opposite of social distancing
In many places people can’t go to church because of the pandemic. This feels lonely, but there’s a greater privation. The Eucharist – the celebration and reception of Holy Communion – is what makes the Church.
When the recipient of Communion hears the priest say to him or her, “The body of Christ”, St Augustine observed in the fourth century, the reference is not only to what is being received but also to those receiving it.
Going without Communion is no more comfortable than going without ordinary food. Yet it is a strange kind of food. The founder of Christianity said that his followers should eat his body. What is the point of that?
It’s no minor aspect of the teaching. You see people genuflecting, going down on one knee, before the Eucharist reserved under the appearance of bread in Catholic churches. The worshippers will probably say that they do so because of the real presence of Jesus Christ, who is God as well as a man. So they make this sign of adoration.
But God is everywhere, so we might fall to our knees everywhere ( just as we kneel anywhere in a voluntary act of worship when addressing God in prayer). The difference about the real presence of Jesus in the Sacrament is that his body is there too, alive and united with his soul – and divinity, it is true.
So it is not the same to be united “spiritually” with Jesus Christ in the street as it would be in ordinary circumstances in Holy Communion where his body is present.
A book that rather shocked me when I first read it 10 or 12 years ago was A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist by Anscar Vonier, published in 1925. On rereading it I was impressed by his deployment of the notion of a sacrament. But the initial impact came from his insistence on the Eucharist being the body and blood of Christ. From that all follows.
I’m now reading for Lent a book with a title even more alarming: The Flesh, Instrument of Salvation. It is by Cipriano Vagaggini (1909-99), another Benedictine monk, and it conveys, as far as I can tell, entirely orthodox Biblebased Christian teaching.
Part of his argument is that in the Incarnation, when God became man (as St John’s Gospel put it, “the Word was made flesh”), the body of Jesus was co-essential to his person. It wasn’t his human soul alone that was united to his divinity. His body, once he became a man, was permanently at work in the mediation between God and humanity that we call the atonement or redemption.
This body of Christ was separated from his soul when he died on the cross. That separation is what we mean by death. After the Resurrection, the same body, reunited with his soul and taken up to heaven, continued permanently to act in the communication by Jesus of his life, the life of
God, to humanity.
Once God had decided that Jesus was to be the saviour of men and women separated from him (and incapable of bridging the gap), then the bodily resurrection of Jesus was necessary for that salvation.
The Word became flesh so that flesh-and-bone human beings might partake of God’s nature. This is what the Eastern Church more often calls divinisation, or theosis (to use a Greek form of word).
The living body of Christ in heaven is co-essential to this process. It is the body touched and consumed in Communion (a reverse process of the ordinary one, as it transforms the consumer into the food). Hence the words of the psalm: “My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh also longeth after thee.”