Texts: Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 19:5-9; Luke 14:15-24. If not otherwise noted, Scriptural quotations from the NRSV.
“Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” With these words, from our second biblical text from the Revelation of John, we can express a central truth about the Christian faith and particularly about the divine service. It all points towards this, the great heavenly marriage supper. Or, as it is written in the Gospel: “Blessed is anyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” The Eucharist, which we will be celebrating today, points to this. All our specific celebrations take part in this heavenly celebration. When we gather here, we mysteriously take part in the celebration that takes place in heaven, where Christ is the celebrant. And that’s why we see that in many church communities, the words from John’s Revelation are used in the invitation to the Eucharist: “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”1
Because when we are invited to participate in the Eucharistic celebration, it is precisely an invitation to take part in this heavenly meal. This is also the reason why, in the Church of Norway, at least, the altar rail makes a half circle. We are to imagine that the other half are those who have already gotten their heavenly reward, those with whom we mix our voices when we thank God the Father and sing ‘holy, holy, holy.’
For the Eucharist shows us that we belong together. It is the Church’s central sign of communion, and it is something we can take part in because we have become part of the family of God in Baptism. To receive communion, you do not need to achieve or obtain anything. You only need to be baptised, and it is open to all who are baptised, regardless of age, position or status. Because before God, we are equal. British theologian D. Stephen Long puts it this way: “In baptism we receive faith, through which we recognize our place in God’s economy. This recognition is sealed, strengthened, and renewed in the celebration of the Eucharist. The blessed meal is our participation in the life of God, and all of our life is to have its intelligibility from the centrality of that meal. Such a meal makes us holy and cultivates in us the practice of koinonia, which is both our communion around the table and our communion with God.”2
All of this has been given to us, completely free. If there is one thing that truly characterises the faith we have in Christ, it is that this is not a faith we have arrived at on our own. Our faith, our trust in God, is a gift from God, given to us through the means of grace, through the word and the sacraments. And, as Long says, we can, through faith, “recognize our place in God’s economy.” And this is strengthened, again and again, when we read the word of God, when this word is preached to us, or by us, and particularly when we celebrate the Eucharist.
And notice the wording: the whole Eucharistic celebration is important, not just the reception of communion, when we receive the consecrated bread and wine, but all the prayers we pray to God and all the thanks and praise we direct towards Him. Many prefer to call this a meal, the Lord’s Supper, but if we go back to the first Christians, we find another word, Eucharist, which is derived from the Greek word eucharistía, which means thanksgiving. Yes, this is a supper, but more importantly, it is a thanksgiving. For if there is one thing that should largely characterise the Christian faith, it is thanks, gratitude, especially for God’s creation, which we have received from Him, and the salvation we have through Jesus. We express this thanksgiving in Baptism, we express it in our prayers and praise, and we will get to express it when we celebrate the Eucharist together.
Because the Eucharist is an expression of the whole of human life, seen in the light of the community we have with God – and through Him, with each other. Because in the Eucharist, we receive the gifts of life. In the bread and wine we share in the gifts of creation, the fruits of the earth and of the vine. But we don’t offer bunches of grapes and grains of wheat. No, we offer bread and wine. These are gifts from God’s creation. They are the fruits of the earth and of the vine, but they are also the work of human hands. They have been refined both through natural processes and through human work. As the now deceased Norwegian Roman Catholic priest Arnfinn Haram put it: “This way, all human work, all refining work, is blessed and offered.”3 We receive them as gifts, and we lift them up and give them back to Him who has given them to us, to God Himself. We give them back in thanks and praise, for we give gifts we would not have if God had not given them to us. When we offer, we just give God back what he already owns, as it says in the offertory prayer: “Of your own, we give back to you.”4 And God lifts our sacrifices, ourselves, up in Christ, not because we can then boast of ourselves, but solely because of grace. Through this we get a deeper communion with God, and this is grace through and through.
I got to participate in something like this a while back. Participating in a conference in Drammen, outside of Oslo, I got to join in on bread baking as it is done by Coptic Christians. It took a while, and we said a lot of prayers, but it was very good. We often forget this, most likely, when we just order wafers from a bakery. This can show us that the Eucharist is the Church’s continuous celebration of thanks. We offer bread and wine, yes, we offer ourselves, out lives, and we give them back to God. And what we receive back is so much more. We receive Jesus. And from this gift, we are given a call to go out into the world in the peace of God, to serve the Lord in joy.
The Eucharistic meal, the “blessed meal,” as D. Stephen Long puts it, “is our participation in the life of God, and all of our life is to have its intelligibility from the centrality of that meal.”5 This meal and this thanksgiving, which is essentially God’s own work, performed through us and through creation, expresses, makes present and recreates our communion with Gud. It makes us holy, not because we are holy in ourselves, but because we have received Christ, or because He has taken us to Him. We are holy in Christ. As we pray in the Gloria: “For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father.”6 Christ, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is the only one who is holy, but we are made partakers in this holiness when we, in the words of St. Paul, are ‘in Christ.’ But this communion is not just a communion with God. Long points out that the Eucharistic meal “makes us holy and cultivates in us the practice of koinonia, which is both our communion around the table and our communion with God.”7 Through our communion with God, we are made one with each other. We cannot be Christians in isolation. No, true communion with God, and a true communion with Christ, is also a true communion with His Church.
And this is why we use the word ‘communion’ to refer to the reception of the Eucharist. The Church is not one because we decided that one day, but because God made us one through Baptism, where we received faith. And through this faith, says Long, “we recognize our place in God’s economy.” The Eucharist is one of the most concrete places where we meet God, worship God and give thanks to God. There, Jesus comes to us quite concretely, in something we can touch and feel, in something we can taste. When we receive the Eucharist, we receive Jesus in a concrete way. He is not only in the abstract, but in the concrete and tangible. The liturgy is absolutely central, not because we have created it, but precisely because we haven’t. Yes, it contains elements that we have made, from the culture in which we live, and from our history, but the core is given by Christ; the word of God, baptism, and the Eucharist.
Knut Alfsvåg, who is a professor att VID Specialized University i Stavanger puts it this way: “The significance of the liturgy is that it takes us into the room where an incarnational spirituality unfolds.”8 What he means by an ‘incarnational spirituality’ is a spirituality which does not remain in the abstract, but in the concrete, the tangible. It is based on what we call the incarnation, that God became a man of flesh and blood in Jesus. The point, then, is not that we should meditate away to some kind of spiritual sphere, but that God makes Himself known in specific and concrete things – in water, bread, and wine – and in the many gifts of life we have received. Alfsvåg continues: “In worship, we encounter God in the shape of word and sacrament. This does not remove us from the world but renews our understanding of the world as the place where God is.” Here is something of the core. Creation is good, and God comes to us. He does not take us out of the world, but he gives us the world back as the place he is. This is better reflected in the Norwegian original of Alfsvåg’s book: “This does not remove us from the world but gives us back the world as the place where God is.”9 We can perhaps say that God reveals Himself to us as creator and He reveals that creation is good, and that we can live for Him here and now. And because we receive this, we can pass it on.
Alfsvåg continues: “From worship as fellowship centered on divine presence there is a path to fellowship with everybody and everything God has created.” Yes, we cannot have fellowship with God if we do not care about others. As I said, we have a calling to receive the gift, God’s peace, and then go out into the world to serve the Lord with joy. Christianity is about participation, in God and in each other.
And that is, and must be, the goal we strive for, not alone or by our own power, but by God’s power and His grace. So come forward today to receive the gift. The Eucharist is not a prize for piety. No, it is a gift given to us by Jesus. It is salvation given to us in bread and wine, in something we can sense. We don’t need to worry, we don’t need to stress, we don’t need to wonder. For the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, has promised us that there, in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, we receice His salvation, on his promise. Then I give Paul the last word, from 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 and 5:7-8:
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.
Clean out the old yeast so that you may be a new batch, as you really are unleavened. For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, who was, is, and will remain, one true God, world without end. Amen.
Notes:
The Roman Missal, third typical edition (Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), 132. The reference is to the paragraph, not the page.
D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the market, ebook version (London: Routledge, 2003), 234. Long notes that koinonia “can be translated as participation, fellowship or communion.”
Arnfinn Haram, “Sursum Corda – Lyft dykkar hjarto: Om musikkens liturgiske karakter,” in Tre florentinarar: Essay og artiklar om religion, kultur og samfunn 2003-2009 (Bergen: Efrem 2009), 89-112, here: 100 (translated by yours truly).
This is a direct translation of the Norwegian (“Av ditt eige gjev vi deg attende”). In the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the priest says, following the words of institution (and preceding the Epiclesis): “Your own of Your own we offer to You, in all and for all.”
Long, Divine Economy, 234.
Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England (London: Church House, 2000), 171.
Long, Divine Economy, 234.
Knut Alfsvåg, Divine Presence: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Kindle version (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2021), 177, cf. 175-180. For the Norwegian original, see Knut Alfsvåg, Det guddommelige nærvær – en innføring i kristen teologi, 2. ed. (Stavanger: VID/MHS, 2021).
Alfsvåg, Det guddommelige nærvær, 116. Original: “Det tar oss ikke ut av verden, men gir oss verden tilbake som det stedet der Gud er.”
There is a lot of false, unbreathable air in bread made with old yeast; the exhalations of the Enemy, his lies and our own pride. It makes a fine looking loaf that only starves us.