Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our Office Gospel this morning, Our Lord names himself the Bread of Life. It’s the closest John’s Gospel will come to talking about the Eucharist—all the other Gospels have accounts of the Last Supper: what was said, how it proceeded. John has the Bread of Life discourse in chapter 6 which ultimately sees Jesus saying, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” (v.54).

This visceral image is designed to be startling, in part because the invitation is so boldly, surprisingly (even off-puttingly) intimate: Jesus is inviting us to receive him fully (his body, blood, soul and divinity) as our own; he’s inviting us to understand the fullness of his life as the source, ground, and nourishment of our own lives; he’s inviting us to see relationship with him as the sole condition of our true flourishing. There’s nothing else in this world that can provide us with this kind of life-giving sustenance, that can so sustain us and root us fully in our humanity while drawing us into the fullness of God’s own divinity. There’s a lot more than this going on in John 6, but there’s definitely this.

And it’s no wonder that the word we use for the sacramental participation in the Body and Blood of Jesus; the sacramental enactment of our identity with and in Christ and Christ’s identification with us; the sacramental re-membering of Christ’s Body by which and in which the Church is built and revealed in a living community which stretches beyond the limits of time and space and even death, and into the magnificent and scintillatingly brilliant depths of eternity…it’s no wonder that the word we use for all of this is “Eucharist”: Thanksgiving. Not only because that’s our response to the revelation of the reality of our identity in Christ, but because the sacramental revelation of that reality is itself an enacting of the reality, a making-present of the reality given to us and to which we’re given. The Eucharist is not only our Thanksgiving for the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ, but is itself a manifestation of the grace for which it gives thanks. In making Eucharist, our identity as a Eucharistic people is revealed, realized, and affirmed. In partaking of the Eucharist that we both offer and that is offered to us, we become Eucharist. We become the Thanksgiving we offer. To paraphrase Augustine: in the Eucharist, we behold what we are, and we become what we behold.

All of which is to say...Eucharist is not just a rite: it's the deepest reality of our lives, wherever we are, all the time.

It may seem this year that there is precious little for which to be thankful. But our Eucharistic identity is not a matter of listing our blessings (however good and fruitful that exercise may be). No, our Eucharistic identity is a matter of understanding the whole of our lives as a sacrifice of praise and Thanksgiving in which we lose ourselves only to have ourselves returned to us in, with and through Jesus Christ. It’s good to be thankful, to rejoice in the Lord in all things! And...the Thanksgiving to which we’re called is a reality of relationship, a way of being, that is Eucharist, that is a mutual self-giving, that is love. And even though we’ve not been able to gather to share the sacrament together, the reality of the Eucharistic life is not unavailable to us. The Bread of Life, the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, which Jesus longs for you to claim as the source and substance of your life, is never far from you—in fact, it’s closer to you than your own body and blood! As Archbishop Cranmer writes in the Book of Common Prayer: “if [you] do truly repent [you] of [your] sins, and steadfastly believe that Jesus Christ hath suffered death upon the Cross for [you], and shed his Blood for [your] redemption; earnestly remembering the benefits [you have] thereby, and giving him hearty thanks therefore; [you do] eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to your soul's health, although [you] do not receive the Sacrament with [your] mouth.”

Beloved, on this Thanksgiving Day, I hope that we can remember that Thanksgiving, that Eucharist, is the substance of our lives; that the Real Presence of Jesus Christ is a transformative Reality of Love we can touch and experience even now; that even though we may be apart on this Thanksgiving Day, the Eucharistic lives to which we’re called re-members us to each other and with each other in the body of Christ, in the Bread of Life that is our shared substance and sustenance, that is our common life as Church. I hope that today we can reach out to someone to share with them the Love given us in Christ, the Love to which we’re given in Christ, the Love in which we are found together and bound together as one in Christ.

I hope we can not just celebrate Thanksgiving, but be Thanksgiving, be Eucharist.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+