I have earlier on this blog reminded us that the call to the Table in the Church of the Nazarene presupposes Christ's real presence in the consecrated bread and the cup -- and that early Nazarene's were required to partake in the elements while kneeling. Yet today I'd like to share from some an essay by Alexander Schmemann in his book For the Life of the World. Schmemann was an Eastern Orthodox theologian in the middle of the 20th century of great wisdom and insight. He reminds us that "In the early Church, in the writings of the Fathers, sacraments, inasmuch as they are given any systematic interpretation, are always explained in the context of their actual liturgical celebration, the explanation being, in fact, an exegesis of the liturgy itself in all its ritual complexity and concreteness" (p. 137). Schmemann reminds us that we cannot isolate our teaching about the Eucharist from the context within a concrete gathering of a people of God whose worship in Spirit and truth heads towards its end in the Eucharist. To understand Christ's presence in the Eucharist demands that we not isolate the Eucharist to merely "one particular activity" within a worship service.

In this essay Schmemann reminds us that modern categoris tend to place an either/or issue for Christ's presence in the Eucharist: it must be "real" versus "symbolic." But these terms distort the early Christian teachings. In early Christians "real" and "symbolic" stood together. Schmemann writes "symbol is a key to sacrament because sacrament is in continuity with the symbolic structure of the world . . . in virtue of its [the world] being created by God . . . the symbol being not only the way to perceive and understand reality, a means of cognition, but also a means of participation" (p. 139). To divorce cognition from participation, one's thoughts about the Eucharist from what really takes place in it, is a very modern move that leads to the fragmentation of Christian unity by separating the rites "meaning" from its "practice", the "private" from the "public". As soon as we allow ourselves to state the issue of Christ's Eucharistic presence in terms of "real" versus "symbolic" we will have lost. Thus the "absolute newness" that the Eucharist pre-sends is that it "reveals, manifests, and communicates . . . Christ and His Kingdom. . . . The 'mysterion' of Christ reveals and fulfills the ultimate meaning and destiny of the world itself" (p. 140). The Eucharist above all must be, not about our understanding, but about our participation in Christ as the One who initiates and will complete the Kingdom as He unifies the church. We cannot make "the identification, on the one hand, of symbol with means of knowledge, the reduction, on the other hand, of knowledge to rational and discursive knowledge about, rather than of reality" (p. 142).

The Eucharist, therefore, "is precisely the fulfillment of a symbol by Christ, and therefore, its transformation into a sacrament. It is thus an act . . of fulfillment and actualization. It is the epiphany -- in and through Christ -- of the 'new creation,' not the creation of something 'new.' And if it reveals the 'continuity' between creation and Christ, it is because there exists, at first, a continuity between Christ and creation whose logos, life, and light He is" (pp. 143-44). The Eucharist reveals Christ to us in our participation in Christ in the bread and wine, and thus conveys true knowledge about the nature of God, the world, and ourselves. Yet insofar as it does this, we cannot separate the Eucharist from the gathering of the congregation in the prayers and under the authority of the Word of God in Scriptures, a Word that calls the congregation to be a people among whom the poor are blessed, because theirs is the kingdom of God. It is in the sharing of the body and blood of Christ that we are rightfully empowered by the Spirit to witness to the world of God's kingdom in Christ. This is our need; this is the gift of God for the people of God.