Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie und Kirche; Tat Gottes, Christi und d. Kirche; Schöpfung (Schaffung aus Nichts) - Erlösung (Leben aus Sünde und Tod); Eucharistie: tiefste Offenbarung Gottes; Aufbau d. Kirche ("Verlängerung" d. Inkarnation)

Kurzinhalt: "In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened ... Heaven is no longer locked up. God has stepped out of his hiddenness." ... the Resurrection brings being and life not out of nothingness but out of the deeper nihilism of sin and death.

Textausschnitt: [5] PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE EUCHARIST

69a The Eucharist calls for two kinds of response from us. It calls for the piety of prayer and the piety of thinking, of theological reflection. It is obvious why the Eucharist makes these demands. In our Christian faith, the Eucharist reenacts the central action that God performed in the world, the redemptive Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This action was performed not only through the power of the divine nature but also through the human nature that the Word of God had assumed in the Incarnation. Redemption was the work of both God and man, a divine and a human accomplishment. This saving event of the Death and Resurrection of Christ is made present again in the Eucharist; it is the substance of the eucharistie celebration. Nothing could deserve our devotion and our contemplation more than this. (Fs)

The Eucharist and the Church

69b The Eucharist is the central action performed by the Church. In the Eucharist, the Church accomplishes what she has been established to do; she enters into Christ's offering of himself to the Father and she makes Christ present to the world. She joins with him before God the Father, and she manifests him to the world in his most perfect act of obedience and charity. The Church is completed in the Eucharist. More precisely, however, the Eucharist is not just the moment during which the Church acts; it is also the moment when Christ accomplishes what he was sent to do, the moment at which he fulfills the mission given him by the Father. The Eucharist is not just the action of the Church but the action of Christ himself. And still more precisely, the Eucharist is the moment during which God acts, the moment at which the Creator achieves his second, more perfect creation and reveals to believers and to all the world who and what he is. The Eucharist is the definitive action of the Church, of Christ, and of God. Everything else the Christian does takes its bearings from this decisive sacrament and sacrifice. (Fs) (notabene)

70a The Eucharist tells us about God. It speaks more eloquently to us about God than do the heavens and the earth. The heavens and the earth are the visible signature of God's creative power, but the Eucharist speaks to us about the internal life of God in the Holy Trinity and about the charity that exists in God before and beyond Creation. The Eucharist does this because it represents the redemptive Death and Resurrection of Christ. Speaking about our redemption, Joseph Ratzinger says, "In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened—here we see who God is and what he is like. Heaven is no longer locked up. God has stepped out of his hiddenness."1 The created universe, in all its splendor, is no longer the ultimate witness to God's goodness; it is no longer the final expression of his wisdom and power; the created universe now becomes merely the stage where God, in the person of the Son, became part of what he had created, and where he accomplished a new Creation through the redemptive Death and Resurrection of the Incarnate Word. To quote Cardinal Ratzinger again,"... Creation exists to be a place for the covenant that God wants to make with man."2 One reason why the Resurrection is more powerful than the Creation narrated in the book of Genesis is that the Resurrection brings being and life not out of nothingness but out of the deeper nihilism of sin and death. This saving action of God, this recreation of the world, brings with it the promise that the resurrected and living Christ will come again at the end of time. It is this redemptive action that is reenacted in the celebration of the Eucharist. (Fs) (notabene)

70b According to the faith of the Church, the Eucharist presents the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, and in performing this action the Eucharist builds up the community of the Church, the Body of Christ. It is not the case that we are faced with an alternative, that in the Mass we have either a sacred action or the establishment of a community. The Church is not just any kind of community; she is the society that was born on the cross, through the action of Christ, the action of God, that is embodied again in the Eucharist. When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, she both reenacts the Death and Resurrection of Jesus and confirms herself as the community established by this event. (Fs) (notabene)

71a Furthermore, through the Eucharist, the members of this community are enabled to participate actively in the Death and Resurrection of Christ. They become able to do so because they are adopted into the sonship of Christ and hence into the action that he performs. They form a community because they are incorporated into Christ through the Eucharist as his Mystical Body. This community of the Church, therefore, could not be established except through the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist and through the identification of the Eucharist with his saving Death and Resurrection.3 The mystery of the Incarnation is prolonged in human history, not only in the words of Scripture, but also in the action of the Eucharist, and consequently in the witness, the martyrion, given by those who participate in the Eucharist. The Church would be a very different thing if she were built up merely through the use of words, without the central action of Christ that gives the words their substance, and without the imitation of Christ in the lives of those who are her members. (Fs) (notabene)