Mysterium

The Mithraeum at Ostia Antica

   

Lenten Vespers, Week Four: The Eucharist

A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to St John:

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst … Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” …

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever.”

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

When ancient Romans went to war, back in the days of the Republic, they held a particular care for foreign gods. Who knew, after all, what dangerous deities might lurk within the walls of an enemy city’s temples? So they invoked the ritual evocatio. In an evocatio, the besieging army would basically bribe the opposing gods to abandon their people in exchange for a lovely little temple back in Rome. Rather than pick a beef with the spirit world, the Republic wanted as many gods as possible on the Roman side. These were a very practical people; practical and religious.

This ritual is only attested during the Republic; we have no evidence for it in the Empire. Yet the syncretic impulse appears to have continued on a much larger scale. With every great new conquest, with every fresh slab of provinces added unto the Empire, a new and powerful god emerged in Rome. In the taking of Anatolia, for instance, they gained Magna Mater, “Big Momma.” Greece of course was home to the Eleusinian Mysteries of Persephone and Demeter, with similar spin-off cults to Dionysus and to Orpheus. Seleucid Syria gave to the Legions militant Mithras, whose temples contained metaphorical models of the stars; while Hellenistic Egypt came with the duopoly of Isis and Serapis, a fascinating fusion of many gods into a single pagan monotheism.

Together these new imperial Roman religions—not so much foreign as exotic—shared certain features. They all held private initiations into their religious communities, for example. And they all possessed sacred secret mysteries by which initiates gained hidden wisdom in communion with the gods, often by passing ritually through death and back to life. Because of this, we collectively term them Mystery Cults or Mystery Religions. They had a particular focus on the afterlife, on delivering devotees from Hades.

Oh, and by the way, the Latin word for mystery is sacrament.

Little wonder, then, that historians have often drawn parallels between Roman Mystery Cults and Christianity. Christians had secret initiations, underground Baptisms, because naturally we had to. Publicly worshipping Christ could get you killed. We gathered in catacombs, worshipping atop the martyrs’ tombs, literally to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus Christ our God. Such was our sacred mystery, our Sacrament, whereby we would be joined as one in Jesus’ Body by Jesus’ Holy Spirit.

And all of it—Baptism, Communion, the whole nine yards—it was all about our death and Resurrection. Jesus descends into Hell, rises again, and ascends into Heaven, taking all of us with Him. For when we are one in Jesus, then we are one with God. And this Gospel, this Good News of the Risen Christ, spread throughout the Empire from the conquered Kingdom of Judea, which became the Province of Palestine. As with Demeter, Isis, Mithras, and Magna Mater, Jesus held the thrill of being exotic—worshipping a Galilean Jew!—while also universalizing, open to all of the Empire.

And it isn’t just later generations who have thought so. Many have argued, and I tend to agree, that the Holy Gospel According to St John presents Christianity as a Mystery Religion: the only true Mystery Religion. That’s why John never talks about the Eucharist; not openly, not explicitly. It’s clearly there for those who have ears to hear. But when John tells the story of the Last Supper, he leaves out the Words of Institution; he leaves out the Sacrament; because while the Gospel is proclaimed for all abroad to hear, John reserves Holy Communion only for the Baptized.

Over the last several weeks, we have read a number of biblical stories. The Exodus reveals to us the true God who liberates his people from the false gods of slavery and oppression. The Passover promised us that the story of the Exodus applies to every generation; that God did not simply act once and long ago, but rescues every one of us from vassalage and death. And at the Last Supper, we heard how Jesus flipped the script for a new and greater Exodus, freeing all Creation from our servitude to sin, that God and Man are one in Jesus Christ.

All of these stories are really one story: the story of the Eucharist, the Mystery of our faith. Every Sunday, the Day of Resurrection, we who are baptized—who have been joined to Jesus’ death already died for us, and to His own eternal life already here begun—gather together to receive the grace of God in the forgiveness of our sins. We read the sacred Scriptures in the light of Jesus Christ. And then we come to the Table, to the Altar of the Lord.

And here we share the promise Jesus shared: “This is My Body, given for you! This is the New Covenant in My Blood, shed for all people!” And we pray the prayer that Jesus prayed: “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name.” And we invoke the Spirit of Jesus to descend and make it so: “Pour out Your Holy Spirit, that by this Holy Communion we may know the unity we share.”

This is the Passover of Our Lord, which Christians call Holy Pascha, or sometimes Easter Sunday; for every Sunday is a little Easter, and Easter is our Sunday for the year. For Jews it is religion; for Greeks it is philosophy; for Romans it is mystery; yet all of it is one for us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Jew or Gentile, Greek or barbarian, all are one in Christ, one in His Body, one in His Blood, one in His Spirit.

Such is the Sacred Mystery of our faith: the Sacrament, the Eucharist, Holy Communion. When we gather at this Table, we are there at Jesus’ Exodus, at His Last Supper, at His Cross. He washes our feet and breaks our bread and pours for us His wine. And we hear His last commandment: that we must love one another as He has first loved us. And lo, He is with us, even unto the end of the age.

Traditional, liturgical church buildings often have a rail around the Altar, which we call the chancel. Here we may kneel to receive the Eucharist, and to offer prayer. As a boy, my pastor told me that the circle of the railing continues into Heaven: that here before the Sacrament are not just a single congregation but every Christian who has ever been or who could ever be. My father kneels here, my grandparents, my uncles and my aunts, all gathered around the everlasting life of Christ.

It isn’t just a ritual. It isn’t just a meal. It is Heaven come down to earth, Christ among His people, eternity breaking into time: mystical, metaphysical, mysterious and sacred. He gives us His Body and Blood; He gives us His Name and His Spirit. And when we have the Name of Christ, the Spirit of Christ, the Body and the Blood of Christ, what does that make us? Who does that make us? It makes us Jesus Christ for all the world! That is Christianity: God broken open; God put inside of you.

Thus do the dead now open our hands, to receive Him and to rise.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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