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The Sacrament of The Risen Christ
by Rev. J. Howard Cepelak Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19; I Peter 1:17-23, | |
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From the Gospel According to St. Luke:
Let us pray.
The words that I just quoted from St. Luke's Gospel should sound very familiar to all of us. We quote them every time we institute and celebrate the Sacrament of Holy Communion. We do so because we celebrate the sacrament as the sacrament of the risen Christ remembering full well that the bread is His broken body and the wine His shed blood as He instructed His disciples - and through them, us as well - at the last supper that they shared together on the night of His betrayal. We also typically, but not always, use risen bread to emphasize the risen nature of our Savior. Christ's church it around the world and throughout the generations has celebrated the sacrament using either risen or unleavened bread. Either form carries with it profound meaning and conveys the great truth that in Jesus Christ and in Him only can we experience the full grace of our salvation. The unleavened bread bears witness to the fact that the last supper was the Passover meal that our Lord and His disciples shared as they remembered that God had delivered His chosen people from the bondage and oppression of slavery in Egypt. In that great miracle of liberation, God's Angel of Death passed over those houses marked by the blood of the sacrificial lamb. Hence, we proclaim that Jesus Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us since He was - and is - and will be forever - the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world - the Lamb of God whose blood liberates us from the powers of sin and death and unto eternal life. Our Lord accomplished this on the cross of His crucifixion and manifests it in the power of His resurrection. Both His crucifixion and His resurrection bring us salvation. They stand together constituting the astounding miracle of God's saving grace. Now, as we proclaim this great and miraculous mystery of salvation, it helps us to look closely at the Gospel accounts of what God the Father has done in God the Son. One of the most interesting details about all of the resurrection accounts - often overlooked in sermons but nonetheless very much present in the gospels - is the fact that Jesus was not immediately recognized in His resurrected body, not even by His closest friends.You will remember that in John's Gospel, Mary Magdalene, who hadbeen among those very close to our Lord, did not recognize Him until He spoke her name. When He appeared to His own disciples and others on various occasions, they too failed to immediately identify Him as their risen master. On this occasion, on the evening of the day of resurrection, two men who had apparently known Jesus actually walk some distance with Him without recognizing Him. They were on their way to a little town called Emmaus, some seven miles west of Jerusalem. We don't know just why they did not recognize Him. The account states that their eyes were kept from recognizing him but, again, we really do not know just what those words mean. Was their failure in perception an act of divine intervention that they were kept from recognizing him or had Jesus so dramatically changed in His appearance due to the resurrection that they failed to recognize this man as the crucified Lord? We don't know for sure. But the fact that Jesus asked them to recount the events of His own arrest, crucifixion and resurrection indicates that perhaps He wanted them not to recognize Him so that He could determine what they would say about Him - a kind of test of faith. Jesus' response to their narration further supports this interpretation. With some degree of impatience or even frustration, Jesus scolds them saying, O foolish men and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! He then instructed them in all of the prophesies from Moses onward that indicated that the Christ would have to suffer and die before He would enter His glory. Yet even with that lengthy instruction, they still did not perceive that this man was the risen Christ. Recognition came when Jesus, having accepted their invitation to stay with them in Emmaus, sat down to supper with them. When He took the bread, blessed it and broke it and gave it to them and their eyes were open and they knew Him. Then He vanished from their sight to appear to the eleven in Jerusalem that same night. Again, the eleven did not immediately recognize Him either. They thought they had seen a spirit. But when He showed them the marks of His crucifixion visible in His flesh, then they knew Him. And we know that He had done the same for doubting Thomas when He let Thomas touch His wounds to prove to him that this wounded man was also the risen savior. As I said last Sunday when we talked about Thomas' coming to faith through the wounded and risen Christ, we, unlike that doubting disciple, come to foil faith because the Christ touches our wounds rather than our touching His. And that's the power of this sacrament of the crucified and risen Christ - a power that God makes available to us if we believe. Our belief, our faith, opens up this sacrament in all its saving power. Some foolish people, to quote Jesus Christ, slow of heart to believe, do not access that power because of their lack of faith in it. They perceive the sacrament as just a sign of redemption or merely as a symbol of salvation. By perceiving the bread and the wine as merely signs and symbols they fail to recognize them as the Lord's body and blood with the Christ truly and spiritually present in, on, over, under, around and through the same creatures of bread and of wine. Remember, all of this comes to us as a miracle. This Christian faith and religion is the faith and religion of miracles, the greatest of them being the miracle of our salvation. If we perversely insist that we understand what God has done for us in terms of a naturalistic explanation, thus making the supernatural God subject to the elements of His creation, then we entirely miss the point. We cannot understand for our immense human intelligence remains radically inadequate to comprehend the divine intelligence. If we bind ourselves to nature, we remain bound by natural sin and death. Sin and death, entirely natural, hold in bondage natural man. If we live natural lives, we will naturally die. And that will be the end of our story. But through faith in the supernatural God who miraculously frees us from both sin and death, we can and will live forever. In His broken body. He makes us whole. In His shed blood. He makes us holy. As St. Paul proclaims, we die with Him we also rise with Him . In the full power of this sacrament, the sacrament of the crucified and risen Christ, the Angel of Death passes over us and we will inherit eternal life. So come to this sacred table, not because you must but because you may, Receive Jesus Christ by taking His broken body into your brokenness and feed on Him in your hearts by faith and thanksgiving . Let us pray.
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