SERMON PREACHED AT St ALBAN’S,
NORTH MELBOURNE
SUNDAY, 28th SEPTEMBER, 1986
Last week Alan[1]
began a series of sermons exploring the meaning of the Eucharist, the Communion,
the Mass, in which we participate here every Sunday. He reminded us that the
Eucharist is something we are all called to do, that it is an action in
which we all take part.
Now it’s my turn, and I have asked Alan if I could speak on
the meaning of memorial, or remembrance, as we find it both in our liturgy and
in the biblical passages about the Last Supper on which our liturgy is based.
Which leaves me with one small problem. In a very few
minutes I’ve got to grapple with one of the most crucial issues that divides
the church today. It’s a contentious issue, and although it wasn’t the cause of
the Reformation it has remained close to being the single most divisive issue
in dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, between various Protestant
denominations, between Anglicans and Catholics, even, dare I say it, between
Anglo Catholics and Evangelicals.
So, given that that kind of significance, the best I can now
do is to offer you a few thoughts on my own understanding of the way we
remember as we celebrate the Eucharist, ideas that have been helpful for my own
spirituality. This is not something about which I would want to be dogmatic.
I guess there are various ways of remembering, and
philosophers in particular have played with them throughout history. Plato, for
example, believed we were born with some kind of a blueprint, a memory of an
ideal world of which our world is only a shadow. That sort of memory is similar
to what we might call instinct – the force, for example, that leads birds to
migrate or humans to care for their young.
Another form of memory is our own memory of past events.
Many of us for example remember clearly what we were doing the day John F.
Kennedy was shot, or the day Armstrong landed on the moon. We remember our
parents and our grandparents, and places we have lived.
The problem is that I believe these kinds of memory are
precisely what Jesus was not talking about when, on the night he was betrayed, when
he took bread and wine and commanded his followers to do in the same way, “in
remembrance of me.”
Jesus, we must constantly recall, was a Jew, and the culture
in which he spoke was that of Judaism. The night of the Last Supper was the
night on which he and all Jews celebrated the events of the Passover – the escape
of the Jews from Egypt in the Exodus.
Every year since the time of the Exodus the Jews remembered
those events of the Passover by celebrating with a special meal. That is what
Jesus and his followers were doing on the night when he was betrayed, in the
upper room.
But the Jews didn’t believe they were merely remembering a
past event and giving thanks for it. Instead they believed themselves to be recreating
that event in their own homes as they celebrated the Passover. Not just a past
event that they remembered, like some of us recall the glorious days when Essendon
won grand finals, but actually recreating Essendon’s glorious events here and
now.
It is in the context of that kind of memory event that Jesus
commands his followers to remember him and the events of that night when he ate
with his disciples.
But, and this is where it becomes complicated, it seems that
he wanted them to remember not only the events of that supper, but also the
events that were about to happen. The events of the Crucifixion, and, as
we now know, the Resurrection. That is why he speaks of the bread as his “body”
and the wine as his “blood.”
So he is asking the disciples not only to remember the
events of that night, but also events that were yet to happen – to remember in
anticipation.
Now for us both the events of the upper room and the events
of the Cross have already happened. But I believe we are not only asked to
remember, to make real in the present those past events, but also are called to
“remember” another event that has not yet taken place. That event is the
Banquet that is to take place in the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of time.
So we remember not only past events, but remember also a
future event. We make both real, real happenings, in the present.
So what happens here each Sunday? It seems to me that,
because Jesus had this very concrete understanding of memory, he was talking
about making something really present. As he celebrated the events of the
Exodus in the upper room those events became really present.
In the same way, I believe that he asks us, in remembering
the events of the Last Supper, the Cross, and the Resurrection, and in
remembering with anticipation the events of the great banquet of heaven, to
permit those events to become truly present around this table as they were in
the upper room, and as they will be at the end of time.
This I believe is what we mean when we talk about Real Presence.
The Catholics have often been criticized for attempting to claim, with various
philosophical words like transubstantiation and transignification, that the
bread and wine really do become body and blood.
I would say that it is unhelpful to believe anything less
than that. Not that these elements are mechanically changed, but that because
the memory of the past and future events is so powerful, these events reoccur, are
recreated and precreated in our midst as we remember them.
So it is an awe-inspiring task in which we are involved. It
is an event of great beauty, and time for great thanksgiving – which is what “eucharist”
means – because in these events we are reminded that we are reunited with Jesus
and made at one with the Father through Jesus by the power of the Spirit, who
binds us together and transforms both us and these elements into something new.
So what do I believe? I believe that as we share together in
the Eucharist we really are experiencing Christ present in these elements as we
receive them in obedience to his command. That, I believe, is what it means to “do
this in remembrance” of him.
[1] The late Fr
Alan Foster was Priest in Charge of North Melbourne in the mid 1980s. He was later the Rector of Coffs Harbour, where, sadly, he died in office after a battle with cancer. He was a significant influence in my own formation both as vicar of St Alban's and, earlier when he supervised my summer work placement in the parish of Pascoe Vale with Oak Park.
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