Autor: Sokolowski, Robert

Buch: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Titel: Christian Faith & Human Understanding

Stichwort: Eucharistie u. Transsubstantiation (himmlischer Aspekt);

Kurzinhalt:

Textausschnitt: The celestial focus of the eucharistie action

97c A feature of the Eucharist that is important for both issues is the focus of the central prayer of the Eucharist, the Eucharistie Canon, which extends from the Preface to the Great Amen. This entire prayer is directed toward God the Father. The Preface speaks to the Father and recalls his saving actions in a manner appropriate to the feast of the day. The Sanctus is especially important for determining the direction of the prayer. It places us among the choirs of angels, as we repeat the song of the Seraphim cited in chapter 6 of Isaiah. The last part of the Preface, which leads into the Sanctus, often mentions the articulated ranks of angels and it also mentions the saints. As we say the Eucharistic Canon, we join the angels and saints and take part in the celestial Eucharist, the glory given to the Father by the Son who redeemed the world, the Lamb presented in heaven as slain, the Mystic Lamb, so profoundly depicted by Jan van Eyck in the Ghent Altarpiece. Our worldly Eucharist joins with the celestial. Dr. Eric Perl, who is a member of the Orthodox Church, once said that he was asked by a student in a religion class whether there would be a Eucharist in heaven; he said that he answered, "There won't be anything else." The angels and saints in heaven participate in the action of the Son toward the Father, and we now in our Eucharist join in their participation; in the Roman Canon we pray to Almighty God, "that your angel may take this sacrifice to your altar in heaven." This celestial focus, established by the Preface and Sanctus, continues till the Great Amen, where Christ, now present on the altar, reconciles the entire created world in a return to the Father: "Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, forever and ever. Amen." The Sanctus and the Great Amen should be taken as directing us toward the celestial Eucharist and associating us with it. This focus and direction are somewhat masked when the priest faces the congregation, because it then appears that his words are being directed toward the people and not toward God the Father, and care must be taken to make this focus clear in the celebration of the Eucharist. (Fs) (notabene)

98a This participation in the heavenly Eucharist is of great importance for both the identity of the sacrifice and Transubstantiation. The celestial Eucharist is beyond time and world history. It touches history because the saving action of the Son of God took place in time, but his action was not just a temporal event. His obedience to the Father, his acceptance of the cross for our redemption, was an action in time that was related to the eternal Father. It occurred in time but touched eternity. It changed the relationship between creation and the Father. The celestial Eucharist is the eternal aspect of the death of Christ; it is not just a memorial or reminder of that event.1 His Resurrection witnesses to the eternal aspect of this action; the Risen Lord bears forever the wounds of his passion. In our present Eucharist, we join with the action of Christ not simply as a past historical action, but as the transaction between Jesus and the eternal Father, the transaction and exchange, the commercium, between time and eternity, which subsists in the celestial Eucharist. It is because of this action that we can join in the Great Amen, in which the created universe is brought back to the Father through the Son, who was the point of creation, the Word through whom the universe was created. (Fs) (notabene)

99a Only because the action of Christ touched eternity can it be reenacted as the very same action now. The identity of the sacrifice, the fact that the Eucharist reenacts an event from the past, the fact that we now are made present to a past event, is made possible because of the nature of that original and singular action. We cannot recover events in worldly and human history. Once done and past, they cannot be redone in the present; they can only be remembered or commemorated. But the action of Christ was not just an action in worldly and human history; it was an action before and toward the eternal Father, it had an eternal aspect, and so it can be reenacted now. (Fs)

99b This celestial focus helps us understand the possibility of the Church's faith in the sameness of the sacrifice in the Eucharist and on Calvary. However, we can look at the same state of affairs from another perspective. The Church's faith in the sameness of the sacrifice is itself a witness to the celestial character of the Eucharist. Our belief that the Eucharist reenacts something from the past implies that the action of Christ was not finished once and for all, but that it is alive now and always. Our belief in the identity of the sacrifice implies that the sacrifice was not just a historical event. The Eucharist does not just remind us of what happened in the past—the Death and Resurrection of the Lord—but proclaims the eternal aspect of that event. It proclaims the fact that Christ, the incarnate Son of God, with his glorified body and blood, lives eternally before the Father. (Fs) (notabene)

99c It seems clear, then, that the celestial focus of the liturgy clarifies for us the sameness of the sacrifice. It helps us bring out the intelligibility of that sameness. But what does this focus have to do with the issue of Transubstantiation? (Fs)

99d The bread and wine of the Eucharist become the body and blood of the Lord, but they become specifically his resurrected and glorified body and blood. Transubstantiation should not be taken as a mere substantial change in the natural order of things. It is not as though we were to claim that a tree became a leopard but continued to look and react like a tree, or that a piece of cloth became a cat but still seemed to be cloth. I think some of the objections to Transubstantiation come from an implicit belief that such a worldly change of substance is what is being claimed. Rather, it is not simply the worldly substance of the body and blood of the Lord that are present in the Eucharist, but his glorified body and blood, which share in the eternity of the celestial Eucharist. The bread and wine are now the vehicles for the presence of the eternal Christ, the eternal Son who became incarnate for us, died and rose from the dead, and is eternally present to the Father. The ontology of the Holy Trinity is part of the Church's faith in Transubstantiation. (Fs) (notabene)

100a In fact, does not the glorified Christ need something like the eucharistie presence in order to allow his death to be present to the world? The teleology of the Incarnation moves not only to the sacrificial Death and Resurrection, but also toward the Eucharist, in both its celestial and its worldly forms; the Incarnation finds its end and completion in the Eucharist, which allows the risen Christ to be "scattered" throughout the world even while he subsists within the Holy Trinity. The glorified body of Christ is present to the Father and to the angels and saints, and it is this body and blood that are the substance of the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Through the eucharistie continuance of the Son's act of obedience, glory is given to the Father not only in the heavens but also on the earth. We might suggest that this eucharistic presence of Christ is in fact a more fitting expression to the world of his glorified life than continued resurrection appearances would have been. (Fs)

100b I would even venture to raise the following question: Does not the denial of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist bring in its train a dilution of our trinitarian faith? Does it not make us drift toward a Unitarian understanding of divinity? If we question whether the Son is truly present in the Eucharist, are we not led to question whether he was truly present in the Incarnation, and then whether he is truly distinguished from the Father? If we begin to think this way, do we not begin to take the sacraments as images and metaphors of a single divine principle? It is true that there are other presences of Christ—in the Church, as his mystical body, in the words of Scripture, in the believer, the confessor, and the martyr—but all these depend on his primary presence, achieved by his own action and through his own words, in the Eucharist. (Fs) (notabene)

101a The Christian tradition of the East, with its strong focus on the celestial liturgy, encounters less difficulty with the true presence of Christ in the sacrament than does the West, precisely because of this focus and the correlative belief in the eucharistic presence of the glorified Christ. We in the West tend to think primarily in terms of human psychology and worldly history, and these concerns make us raise problems that may be less likely to arise in the East. (Fs) (notabene)

101b I have one more point to make concerning the manner in which the Eucharist represents and reenacts the Death and Resurrection of the Lord. The issue is often formulated in the following way: we ask how the celebration of the Eucharist can represent the death of Christ to us. But to pose the question this way is to begin at a derivative stage, not at the true beginning. First and foremost, the Eucharist represents and reenacts the death of the Lord before the eternal Father. The Eucharistie Canon is directed toward the Father, and even the representation of the Last Supper, in the institutional narrative and words of consecration, is directed first and foremost to him. Now, can we truly think that this representation before the Father of the death of the Lord is only an image, only a commemoration, only a human remembrance? God does not remember in the way we do, and the past is not lost to him the way it is to us. The redemptive action of the Son is eternally present to the Father, and this action is carried out by the person of the Son in the Eucharist. The identity of the Eucharist and Calvary before the Father secures its identity before us. The Mass and Calvary are the same before the Father, and therefore they can be the same for us. (Fs) (notabene)