The Eucharist: Sacrament of Christ's Presence in the World

Extract

I want to take one aspect of the theology of the eucharist and try to show how a shift in our understanding of this leads to a corresponding shift in our understanding of the society in which we live. The aspect I have chosen concerns the presence of Christ in the world.

THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST

We must begin by being quite clear about one thing. If Christ is simply absent from human history since Easter Day, then there is no such thing as Christianity. There are people for whom Jesus of Nazareth is simply an historical memory. Such people may acknowledge his nobility of character, respect the force of his ethical teaching: but they are not Christians. It is clear from the New Testament that what constituted the primitive Church was the consciousness of this community that it only existed, as a community, in the presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ. To put the point another way: to tell people, on the basis of the New Testament, how they ought to live, does not constitute the preaching of the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ. To announce to a society that its attitudes and structures are negative and inhuman, and to tell it that things ought to be otherwise, is hardly good news. It is a depressing statement of what most people are dimly aware of anyway. The witness of Christianity is only the announcement of good .news if its primary statement concerns the here-and-now availability of the resources with which to revolutionize human society in the love of God.