An Invitational God: What Happens When We Receive the Eucharist

Assigned reflections on assigned texts for my Sacraments masters course at the University of Notre Dame.

In a previous essay for this series on sacramental theology, I alluded to the problem of reducing the meaning of the Eucharist to the act of taking medicine. This analogy certainly holds great truth: the Eucharist, like medicine, does indeed heal the human person and restore her to wholeness. We have to be sure that, however, in our employment of this analogy, that the Eucharist never ends up being mistaken as a means to an end apart from itself (as it is with the use of medicine). For, when we consume the Eucharist, we are not taking a kind of spiritual antidote, that frees us from things that trouble us; rather, we are receiving and uniting our whole selves to Him who gave his life for us and, by our union with him, we — including all of our troubles — become a part of his very life, death, and resurrection.

In our union with Christ in the Eucharist, you and I are transformed into who it is we receive. Our lives — our sufferings — are given Christocentric shape and imbued with eucharistic meaning.

To explore the “mechanics” and implications of this sacramental reality, we’ll turn to select excerpts from Louis Bouyer’s Cosmos and Jean Daniélou’s The Bible and the Liturgy, which provide complementary articulations of the meaning of the Eucharist. In The Bible and the Liturgy, Daniélou presents a twofold sense of the Eucharist as a sacrifice that is “an efficacious memorial of [Christ’s] Passion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension”  and as a “that of participation in the sacrifice and the banquet of heaven” (141). Drawing from that same framework, Bouyer, in Cosmos, provides corresponding historical and theological context on those eucharistic realities.

Sacrifice as an Encounter with the Divine Other

We will begin with Bouyer, who sketches out the meaning of sacrifice in human history and thus, sets the stage for the Eucharist, which is the sacrifice of Christ’s life. This larger historical context may help to balance out an understanding of the Eucharistic that is purely medicinal, as its clarifies the meaning of sacrifice. Dismissing the trend in theology of pitting the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist against its celebratory nature, Bouyer draws the two together, as he highlights their unity in the act of ritual sacrifice: 

a sacrifice is a ritual banquet, that is to say, not an artificial festivity, but a celebration recognized as the quintessential feat in which men meet the gods to enter into a profound vital association with them. (Cosmos, 26)

Through the practice of religious sacrifice, as it appears throughout human history, we see in humanity a persistent drive to seek connection with the divine — with someone above and beyond itself. We will follow Bouyer’s line of thought here (which shares great similarities with Ratzinger’s articulation of the meaning of a meal) to see how he arrives at this conclusion.

When the person partakes in any kind of meal (ritual or otherwise), she, in a sense, re-realizes the cosmos as “a community of apparent inexhaustible life” that sustains her own life, yet by no necessity of the cosmos (27). Thus, through the meal, human life is revealed to be “something inherently of this world” and yet, simultaneously, something “necessarily originating outside and above it” — from the divine life that gratuitously sustains the cosmos itself (27). The meal implicitly expresses the giftedness of human life and that it is sustained by life greater than itself. Bouyer thus writes that through the significance of the meal, it can be sensed “that divine life…is entirely directed toward communication and the giving of that which is most precious, i.e., of oneself” (27). 

The act of giving something “most precious” to the divine out of gratitude for the gift of life itself is essentially what constitutes a religious sacrifice. In this way, a sacrifice or ritual banquet makes this hidden symbolic reality of a meal present. Bouyer’s articulation of this dynamic of sacrifice — as a kind of thanksgiving banquet between humankind and the divine — is integral to a proper understanding of the Eucharist.

The End of All Sacrifice

Daniélou expands on the historicity of this dynamic theologically: he connects the practice of sacrifice to the meaning of the Eucharist, particularly as it arises in the context of the nation of Israel, the People of God. Speaking about the prefigurement of the Eucharist in Old Testament typology, Daniélou writes about the universality of Christ’s sacrifice:

Christ is the fulfillment not only of the figures of the worship of the Old Testament but of all the sacrifices which in all religions and all times men have offered to God, which He takes up and transubstantiates in His own sacrifice. (The Bible and the Liturgy, 147) 

In the Eucharist, all sacrifices made throughout human history find their fulfillment. That is to say: what a sacrifice is ultimately for (a meeting of humanity and the divine) finds its fullest realization in the person of Jesus Christ. And in the Eucharist, according to Daniélou,

[w]hat is rendered present […] is not only the Body and Blood of Christ, it is His sacrifice itself, that is to say, the mystery of His Passion, His Resurrection, and His Ascension which the Eucharist is the anamnesis, the efficacious commemoration.

The Promise of an Eternal Banquet

Christ’s life, death, and resurrection — his gift of himself for humanity — is made wholly present for us in the Eucharist to partake in. The difference between the Eucharist and human sacrifice here is striking: the Eucharist is not humanity making a sacrifice to contact the Divine; rather, in the Eucharist, we find that the Divine himself has, quite unexpectedly, condescended to humanity and invited her into his life, by giving himself for her on the Cross, so that she may “feast” with him one day at the heavenly table of his Divine Life, in worshipful thanksgiving. This is how God becomes “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). Bouyer writes on the cosmological implications here:

In this sense…the world is capable of becoming for us, once again, the kingdom of God. …Such is the knowledge imparted to us by the Son: he allows us to recognize God as Father, and all things as the result and token of the Father’s love, that love that is the Son’s alone, and can be known only through a filial experience of love. This is the ultimate significance of the eucharist — the ultimate end of the entire teaching of the Word in the Old Testament. [...] (Cosmos, 87)

We thus find, in the Eucharist, not a kind of divine antibiotic that frees us from pain, but the Divine Son, who takes us each of us by his pierced hands and draws us into his whole life — as it was then, is now, and ever shall be, in that world without end. In this union with Him — who kisses us, his beloved, at each mass — lies our healing and our restoration.