“I am
the bread of life…This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one
may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” From
the Gospel according to John, chapter 6.
In the
name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
My
talk tonight is not mine. It is by Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk of the 20th
century who established a monastery in India, and who wrote many books. One of
them, Return to the Center, is my
source tonight, particularly the chapter The
Christian Mystery, in which he writes about the Church and the Eucharist.
“The
day before he surrendered his life on the cross, Jesus took bread and wine and
blessed them and gave them to his disciples in a ritual action which he told
them to repeat in memory of him. By this ritual action the mystery of his death
and resurrection, of the divine life communicated to humanity, was symbolized
and made present. Here, under the symbols of bread and wine, the divine life is
present…the eternal Wisdom gives itself to be the food of all, and the unutterable
mystery of the divine love offering itself in sacrifice to the world is shared
in a ritual meal. This in turn is a symbol of the fact that this divine Mystery
is present everywhere, present in the earth and its produce, present wherever
human beings meet and share together, present in every gesture of unselfish
love.
The
Church as a visible institution is constituted by the Eucharist. For the Church
in this sense is simply the community of those who have recognized the presence
of the divine live, of the kingdom of God, in Jesus, and who meet together to
share this divine life in the ritual meal which he instituted. But, of course,
the divine life is not confined to the Eucharist. It is present everywhere and
in everything, in every religion and in every human heart. The Eucharist is the
‘sacrament’ of the divine life – the outward and visible sign of this divine
mystery instituted by Christ – and the Church itself is the ‘sacrament’ of the
kingdom of God, the sign of God’s presence on earth. It has the value of a
sign, of something which makes known the hidden mystery. The doctrine, the
ritual and the organization of the Church all belong to the world of signs, to
the sacramental order, which manifests the divine Mystery, the one eternal
Truth, by means of human words and actions and human organization. The danger
is that the signs may be taken for the reality, the human may overshadow the divine,
the organization may stifle the Spirit which it is intended to serve.
What,
then, is the essential Truth which is signified by the doctrine, the ritual,
and the organization of the Church? If we attempt to put it into words we can
say that it is the presence of the divine life among humans, of the infinite,
eternal, transcendent mystery of being, which is the Ground of all religion and
of all existence, manifesting itself in the person of Jesus Christ. In this
revelation the mystery of being reveals itself as a mystery of love, of an
eternal love ever rising from the depths of being in the Godhead and
manifesting itself in the total self-giving of Jesus on the Cross and in the
communication of that love to men and women in the Spirit. The organization of
the Church, with its doctrine of Trinity and Incarnation and its Eucharistic
ritual, has no other purpose than to communicate this love, to create a
community of love, to unite all men and women in the eternal Ground of being,
which is present in the heart of every person. This is the criterion by which
the Church is to be judged, not by the forms of its doctrine or ritual, but by
the reality of the love which it manifests. [This love] reveals itself in the
depths of the heart. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’
The
essential nature of the Church, therefore, is to be this mystery of love, of
the divine love revealing itself and communicating itself to men and women. All
the sign-language of doctrine and ritual has no purpose but to reveal and
communicate this love. This is the light in which the doctrine, the ritual and
the organization of the Church are to be judged.
The
original message, the essential truth, of every religion is the sacred Mystery,
the presence in this world of a hidden Wisdom, which cannot be expressed in
words, which cannot be known by sense or reason, but is hidden in the heart –
the Ground or Center or Substance of the soul, of which the mystics speak – and
reveals itself to those who seek it in the silence beyond word and thought.
All…ritual, all doctrine and sacrament, are but means to awaken the soul to
this divine Mystery, to allow the divine Presence to make itself known. Myth
and ritual, word and sacrament, are necessary to make known the Mystery,” which
is the Mystery of Love, of Life, of eternal Life, in Jesus Christ.
“I am
the bread of life…This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one
may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven.”
In
the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
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