Lords supper.docx - Lord’s supper However the church...

Lord’s supper
However, the church participates in the same communion of the Trinity and Christ because something
analogous to the incarnation is happening in her. Christ, the head of the church, is united with the
human members who make up the church, which Scripture calls “the body of Christ.”7 God and
humanity are united by means of the actions of the Holy Spirit, which we call the sacraments.
The Eucharist has been called “the source and summit of the Christian life” by Pope Paul VI.
The Christian life s a life ordered by the character of God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and by the
action of God in human history — creation, revelation, redemption, and consummation. This doxological
life is revealed to us in the history of the people of Israel and in the person and event of Jesus Christ.
From the doxology, which is the Eucharist, we receive life. Toward the doxology, which is the Eucharist,
we journey, for unity with Christ is the goal of this life. In the doxology, which is the Eucharist, we find
the foretaste and promise of the eternal life which is to come in the kingdom.
Holy Communion is the moment when all of this comes together. When I receive the body and blood of
Christ in the sacrament, what I receive becomes part of me. And I become part of him. The unity of the
sacred elements of Communion in my body unites me to his body. And unity with the body of Christ
makes me an adopted child of God.
Sacrament as the Central and Unifying Insight of the Catholic Tradition
“sacramental economy.” Economy, as used here, refers to God’s work. Specifically, the sacramental
economy is the work of the Holy Trinity in human history during the age of the church.
In the descriptions of the kingdom of God in the book of Revelation, we find the image of a liturgy, a
worship service.12 Worship by saints and angels is offered to the Father through the high priesthood of
Jesus his Son in the communion of the Holy Spirit. Reading backward, temporally speaking, we find that
the prefigure of the kingdom of God is the church, gathered for the sacred liturgy. That sacred liturgy,
which the church celebrates between the time of the ascension of Christ and the second coming, recalls
and makes present the saving events of his earthly ministry, especially his passion, death, and
resurrection. That anamn sis (“remembrance”) gives glory (Gk. doxa) to Christ. The life of the kingdom is
doxology. The Christian life in the age of the church must also be doxological.
pre-Christian history is also marked by this doxological dimension. The whole of the first covenant was a
call to the right worship of God.13 If we read the history of the Jewish people through this lens, we see a
very clear pattern of God working in and through their history as a people, we see a sacramental
economy where God blessed them. When this anamn sis is empowered by God, it is not merely a
remembering but an actualization of sacred events so that they are really present.15
Saint John of Damascus wrote about this: “You ask how the bread becomes the Body of Christ, and the
wine . . . the Blood of Christ. I shall tell you: the Holy Spirit comes upon them and accomplishes what
surpasses every word and thought. . . . Let it be enough for you to understand that it is by the Holy Spirit,
just as it was for the Holy Virgin and by the Holy Spirit that the Lord, through and in himself, took