How Bright Appears the Morning Star

I was moved to reflect this past Sunday how incredibly fortunate I am to attend a church that uses an older hymnal. My continuing Anglican church uses the 1940 hymnal. No tuneless "praise songs," no ear-splitting performances. No modernized words. It's a gift.

Advent has some great hymns, many of which were unknown to me in my Baptist upbringing. This is one place where the Anglican tradition has hymns to teach to the Baptists, though hymn-teaching so often goes the other way.

One of my greatest favorites in this category is "How Bright Appears the Morning Star," the translation of Wie Shön Leuchtet der Morgenstern, by Philip Nicolai, but best known in its harmonization by J.S. Bach.

Here are the words:

How bright appears the Morning Star,
with mercy beaming from afar;
the host of heaven rejoices.
O Righteous Branch, O Jesse’s Rod,
thou Son of Man and Son of God!
We too will lift our voices:
Jesus, Jesus, holy, holy, yet most lowly,
draw thou near us; great Emmanuel, come and hear us.

Though circled by the hosts on high,
he deigned to cast a pitying eye
upon his helpless creature.
The whole creation’s head and Lord,
by highest seraphim adored,
assumed our very nature;
Jesus, grant us, through thy merit, to inherit
thy salvation. Hear, O hear our supplication.

Rejoice, ye heavens, thou earth, reply;
with praise, ye sinners, fill the sky
for this, his incarnation.
Incarnate God, put forth thy power;
ride on, ride on, great Conqueror,
till all know thy salvation.
Amen, amen! Alleluia, alleluia!
Praise be given, evermore by earth and heaven.

Here is my earlier post on it. I want to say again what I said there: I defy anyone to be gloomy while belting out, "Incarnate God, put forth thy power. Ride on, ride on great Conqueror, till all know thy salvation."

In the years since 2009 I still have not found a high-quality choral version of this on-line. Someone needs to get together a really good choir and put out a collection of Anglican hymns. But here is a nice organ version:

An undesigned coincidence involving John 6

Those who read my apologetics work know my fondness for the so-old-it's-new argument from undesigned coincidences. I'm feeling too lazy right now to scare up the links to all the posts that I and Esteemed Husband have written on this subject, so I'll have to leave it to readers to Google them or use the "evidentialism" and "apologetics" tags here and at W4 to find mine. Some of my older ones have links to a series of six posts that Tim did on undesigned coincidences (in Acts). I have more written work in the pipeline on this argument--one scholarly article using probability theory and possibly a layman-level book manuscript.

As I have been filling out further a chart originally begun by my husband Tim on undesigned coincidences in the gospels, thinking about what to include in a longer manuscript, I have hesitated to include in such a book-length treatment the UC I plan to discuss in this post. The reason for my hesitation is that this particular UC involves us immediately in some intra-Christian disagreement about interpretation.

I was always taught as a Baptist (both in church and at Bible college) that Jesus' discourse on "eating his flesh" and "drinking his blood" in John 6 had nothing whatsoever to do with Communion. It was just an elaborate metaphor for believing in him with saving faith, and nothing more, period.

In part, my change from memorialist to sacramentalist on the significance of Holy Communion was occasioned by the realization that this insistence is simply interpretively insupportable. To argue that Jesus meant nothing about the Last Supper and hence Communion by the discourse in John 6 is to assert that his use of the same terminology in both places is pure coincidence. But from the sheer perspective of human communication, this must be false. There is no way in the world that Jesus just happened to speak of eating his flesh and drinking his blood in both places, but that in one place it referred purely to believing on him, without even mysteriously foreshadowing his later establishment of the rite of Communion, while in the other place it referred to taking Communion as (on the memorialist view) a purely symbolic act showing one's remembrance of his death.

It seems beyond doubt that the disciples, who must have thought the John 6 discourse very odd (some previous followers forsook Jesus altogether over it), would have remembered his words when he later spoke almost exactly the same words at the Last Supper. In the former case he stresses the importance of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. In the latter case he actually hands them bread and wine and tells them to go ahead and eat and drink, because this is his body and blood. It is extremely likely that the disciples at the Last Supper would have thought something like, "Aha, this must be telling us more about that weird stuff he was saying a couple of years ago about eating his flesh and drinking his blood." Even without any worked-out sacramental theology, they would of course have associated the two sayings of Jesus and would have taken them to be about the same thing.

Moreover, we know that Jesus often did say things that his disciples only understood later. For example, his reference to Jonah in the belly of the whale was a prophecy of his resurrection. His reference to raising up the temple after three days was likewise a reference to the resurrection. His teaching about the Comforter was probably confusing to them, though not unclear in itself, prior to the day of Pentecost.

It would be possible for a memorialist to acknowledge that the disciples would have back-solved the John 6 discourse as an allusion to Communion while retaining his memorialism. Presumably such a memorialist would say that, yes, it was about the Lord's Supper, but it was simply about the particular memorial act of obedience in the Lord's Supper.

I do not think that is satisfactory as an interpretation of John 6 either, because of the peculiar urgency and explicitness of Jesus in his discussion. Jesus insists that you have no life in you if you don't do this act, whatever it is, of eating his flesh. But memorialists don't believe anything like that about the urgency and theological importance and efficacy of taking Communion, even though of course they can be very respectful and solemn about it. (Some memorialists are even more respectful of Communion than some in allegedly sacramental denominations, but I'll say no more about that right now.)

But regardless of whether I consider that a satisfactory interpretation of John 6, it is at least not crazily, wildly implausible, as is the insistence that John 6 isn't about Communion at all at all no no no.

This leads me to the slightly wan hope that I could give this undesigned coincidence to any audience, whether memorialist or sacramentalist, and have it seen as valuable rather than as divisive. But probably not.

So I'll just give it in this post, because I think it has merit. And it is just this: It's a remarkable fact that the Gospel of John does not record the institution of the Lord's Supper. It's amazing how many years I was a Christian without realizing this. John, of all authors! John the theological, John the observant, John who tells us so much else about the night in which Jesus was betrayed, does not record the institution of the Lord's Supper. Instead, John gives a vivid account of Jesus' act of washing his disciples' feet, which is found nowhere in the synoptic gospels. On the other side, the synoptic gospels all contain an account of the institution of the Lord's Supper, including Jesus' words "this is my body" and "this is my blood" and his injunction to the disciples to eat and drink thereof, but they do not contain any parallel of the passage in John 6 in which Jesus says that you have no life in you unless you eat of the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood (vs. 53).

If John had made up the discourse in John 6, it seems undeniable that he did so as a deliberate parallel to the institution of the Lord's Supper found in the synoptics. But in that case, why did he not include the fulfillment of Christ's words? One would, in fact, almost expect him to include not only the Last Supper but some sort of allusion back to what Jesus had said earlier, tying the two passages together. But John's selection interests are different, he is not writing a piece of literary fiction but a piece of memoir-like history, and he includes the discourse but not the Institution. This is to my mind a strong indication that the discourse really occurred and that John included it because he knew that it really occurred. The discourse and the Last Supper fit together as question and answer. Why did Jesus say these strange things in John 6? Because, as was his wont, he was both stretching his audience with somewhat mysterious utterances, demanding that his followers trust him that all would be made clearer in time, and foretelling his institution of the Lord's Supper and teaching its importance in the life of the Church and the individual believer. The discourse itself answers a different kind of question: Would Jesus do something so cryptic as institute the Lord's Supper in the words he used without giving the disciples any more teaching on the matter? Of course, John himself emphasizes that Jesus did and said many things that are not recorded, many more than could be recorded, and it is entirely possible that Jesus taught the disciples more, perhaps during the forty days after his resurrection, about how they were to practice the Lord's Supper and baptism after his ascension. I consider that entirely plausible. But if we actually have teaching from Jesus about the Lord's Supper in John 6, that passage itself partly fills the apparent gap left by the brevity of his remarks on Maundy Thursday.

So the synoptic accounts of the Last Supper and the discourse in John 6 fit together in the classic way that we find in many undesigned coincidences--missing pieces supplied by each passage to fill out the whole picture, questions raised by one passage and answered in the other.

This is, like it or not, evidence of the veracity of the gospel accounts. While one will have to decide on a case-by-case basis when to include it or leave it out in any given presentation, it deserves to be examined and known, despite its apparently anti-ecumenical implications.

For All Saints and All Souls: Speak of me always to Maleldil

At the very end of Perelandra, when Ransom is about to return to earth and is saying goodbye to Tor and Tinidril, Tor and Tinidril ask Ransom to pray for them and promise prayers for him: "Farewell till we three pass out of the dimensions of time. Speak of us always to Maleldil, as we speak always of you. The splendour, the love, and the strength be upon you."

They make no specific request. They simply say that they will speak of each other to God. (Maleldil is, in C.S. Lewis's space trilogy, the space-dwellers' name for God the Son.)

Compare that notion of prayer with this, from Letters to Malcolm:

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to Him? (Letters to Malcolm, p. 106)

Lewis goes on to state the argument against prayers for the dead that the dead are no longer on the road, no longer developing, that "progress and difficulty" are no longer possible for them, and that therefore there is nothing for which to pray for them. In response, he openly states that he believes in Purgatory, and he gives his own theory of what Purgatory is.

But I am interested still more in the paragraph I have just quoted. A couple of years ago when a person I had known only on-line died, I found that what Lewis says there is true. On the day after he had died I was praying, and it was virtually impossible not to speak to God of him and to ask...something. It was psychologically incredibly difficult to feel that there was literally no point in talking to God about him, and with fellow human beings, talking to God about someone invariably means some sort of petitionary prayer. I have had the same experience recently with a loved one who died.

How can one go from praying earnestly for those one loves to having nothing to say to God about them? It is true that, if one doesn't simply believe in Purgatory, as Lewis did, one isn't quite sure what to say to God about them. One is especially unsure what to request. A fragment from the Book of Common Prayer seems suitable and such as even a die-hard Protestant might not mind: "And we also bless Thy holy name for all Thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching Thee that they may continually grow in Thy love and service." That'll work. "Continually grow in Thy love and service." This corresponds to a conjecture that Lewis makes on the way to his comments about Purgatory to the effect that even in heaven there might be a "perpetual increase in beatitude" gained by a process with its own "ardours and exertions."

I think, too, that it is possible to pray for someone without knowing precisely what to ask, leaving that in God's hands. It is in the realm of petitionary prayer for human beings that I feel most of all the truth of Romans 8:26-27: "For we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." How often, when praying for the living, must we leave in God's hands what we should pray, realizing that what we would request spontaneously might not be best? Or, if a friend is no longer present, as in the case of someone who has moved to another state, we might literally not know their present needs, but we ask that God would do all for their good. Can this be extended to the dead? I believe that it can. As Lewis says, only the most compelling theological case that the dead have nothing whatsoever to gain or to do in the afterlife would convince me that it is pointless, at best, to pray for them. In that case, I suppose that the most one could do would be to bless the name of the Lord for them--i.e., to thank the Lord for them. But do we, even we Protestants, have such a compelling case that the blessed dead have nothing left to gain? I think that we do not. It is not necessary absolutely to believe that the dead still have growth before them to pray for them. It is necessary only to think that it might be so in order to pray that God would do all for them that can be done, that God would draw them ever-nearer to Himself, would give them in a continual outpouring of Himself that unimaginable (to us) increase of beatitude, knowledge, and understanding that is now proper to their state.

Notice, too, that a doctrine that Scripture contains all that we need for salvation (some version of sola scriptura) is consistent with such a practice. For it is not necessary to our or to their salvation that we should pray for them in this way. Nor is it necessary to our or to their salvation that we should refrain from praying for them in this way. We already know that Scripture leaves much of our curiosity unsatisfied concerning the afterlife for those who are saved. We are told that we will be with Christ, that this is far better. We are told that we will "know even as we are known." But the sum total is much less than we should like to know, which is, surely, exactly as God intended it.

Now I will push the argument in the other direction, which is yet more delicate.

But first, a pause for Protestantism: I am of the opinion that it is at least somewhat theologically problematic for us to ask the saints to pray for us, and especially for our particular needs and requests. I hope that is not offensive to my Catholic friends, but it seems to me that, to assume that the dead can hear our intercessions, that they know our present state on earth, and that they are speaking of it to God is to attribute to the dead something uncomfortably close to omniscience and to give to them something uncomfortably close to prayer. I will not say that prayers to the saints are definitely and intrinsically idolatrous, but I will say that I think they raise the danger of idolatry, for to treat the dead in this way is to treat them "too much" as we treat God--as an invisible Personage, far greater than ourselves, who can help us in our need, to whom we fly for refuge, who is always present to us, who knows our needs and what is best for us, and to whom we should cry out.

I also disagree with the idea, which I have often seen expressed by Catholics, that certain dead saints have special influence with God the Father or with Jesus Christ ("Doesn't it make sense to ask a man's mother to intercede with him for you?"), so that by going to them we are making our prayers more efficacious than they otherwise would be. This conveys a notion that seems to me theologically false and even unsavory--namely, a notion of needing to be "in with the in crowd" theologically rather than being loved fully by Our Lord oneself and being able and encouraged to approach Him directly with one's petitions. I note, too, that this notion of special "influence at court" is at odds with the other claim one sometimes sees--namely, that asking for the prayers of the saints is entirely unobjectionable because it is just like asking one's friends on earth to pray for one. But in fact, we don't believe that our ordinary friends on earth have this exalted "influence at court" in the heavenly realm, such as we are encouraged to think of the dead saints, especially certain ones like Mary, as having! So the two defenses of prayers to the saints are in conflict.

Having now (sad to say) probably thoroughly succeeded in offending my Catholic readers, I shall proceed, like a good via media Anglican, to try to offend my Protestant readers. All that I have just said notwithstanding, love between ourselves and others does not, cannot, cease simply because death intervenes. If someone loves you on earth, does he cease to love you because he dies and goes to heaven? God forbid. It seems rather that his capacity for love for other human beings should increase with his increased knowledge of Christ and union with Christ in heaven.

If, then, we find ourselves unable to stop praying for the dead simply because they are dead, since we still love them, might it not similarly be the case that the dead, at least those who have known and loved us on earth, find it impossible to stop praying for us? Just as we must speak to God of them, does it not seem plausible that they speak to God of us?

What remains is the question of what they know of us. Perhaps, as our knowledge of their state is blocked by the chasm of death, and we can pray for them only in the general terms suggested above, their knowledge of our situation is similarly blocked or greatly limited. They are finite beings, as we are, and we have no reason to believe that God has ordained that they shall have supernatural knowledge of all that is going on here on earth. As I already stated, to attribute that degree of knowledge to them seems to come uncomfortably close to making them demigods. Yet the blessed dead have no problem concerning us such as we have when praying for them--the problem of wondering whether there are difficulties still to face! They know quite well that we who are still in this vale of tears have many difficulties still to face, much sin in our nature, much needed growth, many dangers, toils, and snares ahead. On the other hand, it does not seem that the blessed dead should be able to experience worry or anxiety, which (one must admit) lies behind much of our own petitionary prayer.

So what would their prayers be like? Well, that is probably beyond our present ability to imagine. But, conjecturing, I envisage something like an outpouring of the entire self to God for the good of the other. We get a tiny glimpse of this in our own best prayers, perhaps for our children or for others whom, just occasionally, we begin to love with selflessness. And if such an outpouring is effective as prayer when uttered here on earth, why would it not have effect when uttered by one in heaven?

In other words, perhaps the dead really do pray for us effectually, and perhaps we really can pray for them effectually, even though we are absent from each other.

Imagine that someone whom you love has gone far away. He is still very much alive, and you know (in some way) that all is well with him, but you know very little else. He, in turn, knows that all may or may not be well with you, but he knows very little else of you. There is no Internet, no telephone, no physical mail. You are, in the ways of this world, separated from each other. Yet you both have the same Lord whom you love and to whom you pray. You have not ceased in love for one another. In those loves--for Our Lord and for each other--you are united despite the miles and limitations that come between you.

Might it not be, in some measure, like this with us Christians on earth and in heaven?

This is all conjecture, but it is conjecture befitting the season. If it is conjecture too timid for Catholic doctrine and too bold for Protestant doctrine, so be it.

I will only say this to those whom I love and who love me: Whether here on earth or absent from the body, speak of me always to Maleldil, as I will speak always of you.

For all the saints who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confess,
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest,
Alleluia! Alleluia!

O blest communion, fellowship divine,
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
Yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine.
Alleluia! Alleluia!

Related post here.

Not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offenses

My title is taken from the prayer of consecration in the Book of Common Prayer. The context goes like this:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee; humbly beseeching thee, that we, and all others who shall be partakers of this Holy Communion, may worthily receive the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ, be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him, that he may dwell in us, and we in him. And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice; yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service; not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We are utterly unworthy of all that we have received, whether it be the gift of the Blessed Sacrament or what the Prayer Book elsewhere calls "all the blessings of this life."

We want to be duly grateful, and this raises an interesting dilemma for those of us who are, at the moment, not suffering and for whom things are going fairly well: On the one hand, if one says, "I am so grateful to God for all His many blessings," it could easily sound like one is implying that God has specially endowed one's precious self with good things that He has deliberately withheld from others. If I thank God for blessing me with a wonderful husband, for example, how might this sound to women who have not been blessed in that way? Might it sound proud or smug? It easily could. This is the tension that arises from the "feeling blessed" phrase (accompanied by smiley icon) one sees on Facebook so often. Does it sound smug? Or is it just the temptation to envy that makes one think so?

On the other hand, we must never fail to thank God. Scripture is adamant on this. We are told again and again to receive all things with thanksgiving and in particular to thank God for our earthly blessings. I could scarcely make a dent in all the passages enjoining thankfulness for our blessings if I listed twenty of them. Psalm 100, Psalm 136, I Timothy 4:4, Colossians 3:17, and on and on and on.

We as Christians must acknowledge God as the giver of all good things (James 1:17).

Interestingly, the Book of Common Prayer shows not the slightest squeamishness about thanking God for our material blessings. The general thanksgiving thanks God for "all the blessings of this life," though it adds that "above all" we give thanks for "thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory." In the section of the American Prayer Book called "Thanksgivings," we find the following:

Most gracious God, by whose knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew, we yield thee unfeigned thanks and praise for the return of seed-time and harvest, for the increase of the ground and the gathering in of the fruits thereof, and for all the other blessings of thy merciful providence bestowed upon this nation and people....

And this:

We give thee humble thanks for this thy special bounty; beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness unto us, that our land may yield us her fruits of increase, to thy glory and our comfort. 

For Rogation days:

Almighty God, Lord of heaven and earth; We beseech thee to pour forth thy blessing upon this land, and to give us a fruitful season; that we, constantly receiving thy bounty, may evermore give thanks unto thee in thy holy Church, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

It seems to me that the secret to feeling blessed without feeling smug must lie somewhere in that phrase "humble thanks." If you simply hold the Prayer Book in your hands and flip through it and read at random, the atmosphere of (in the best sense) piety and true humility arises like incense. Most of the prayers in the "Thanksgivings" section are fairly specific: "For a child's recovery from sickness," "For a safe return from a journey," "The thanksgiving of women after childbirth," "For rain," and so forth. The picture is not of ease and comfort but rather of human life, fraught with all its pains and perils. The one who prays these thanksgivings is one who has turned to God in his deepest need and now turns to God with due relief and gratitude in the time of deliverance. And the very next section after the thanksgivings is the Litany:

O God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Son, Redeemer of the world,
Have mercy upon us.
O God the Holy Ghost, Sanctifier of the faithful,
Have mercy upon us....
Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of ours sins: Spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood, and be not angry with us forever.

Than which nothing less smug can be conceived.

Part of the trouble with conveying due gratitude to God for one's personal blessings lies in the poverty of language, and especially the poverty of personal language. The first person plural is more dignified than the first person singular. To say, especially in the course of corporate or family prayer, that we have been blessed beyond our power to express and far beyond our deserving has a ring of solemnity to it that simply cannot come through if one replaces "we" with "I." And it is difficult, with a straight face, to associate solemnity with Facebook updates. Unless, perhaps, one simply quotes the BCP on one's Facebook status, which isn't such a bad idea.

My life is a gift. It would be a gift, I must acknowledge, even if it were nasty, brutish, and short. For God would still be God in that case and would still love all men, including my unworthy self. But it is much easier as a weak human to see that my life is a gift when it is filled with gifts, with specific gifts.

Somehow, it must be possible to express humble gratitude without being shallow, sentimental, and maudlin. Until we have the power of our own language to do that, we could do far worse than to start with the language of the Prayer Book, which reminds us, in all our gratitude for the blessings of this life, of that which is eternal:

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal. Grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Head That Once Was Crowned With Thorns

If you search this site for posts on the Ascension, you will find quite a few. It's a holy day that I rarely miss at least mentioning, even if I fit a post only into the octave (as in this case). The feast of the Ascension has always seemed to me one of the most unqualifiedly joyful of the church feasts. It's like the great ending to a story. The author of the epistle of the Hebrews says,

Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high. (Hebrews 1:4)

And then there is the Psalmist:

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in. (Psalm 24:7)

St. Paul:

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)

We all know that, in terms of the history of God's work here on earth, there is a lot more to the story. But every story has chapters or sections, and when Jesus ascends to heaven to sit down at the right hand of the Father, to take up His place in His human body as the king of glory, that is a good ending to a huge and important section.

It occurred to me today to wonder what exactly it looked like when Jesus entered into heaven at His ascension. I mean to be precise here: As far as we know, the second Person of the Godhead is now permanently incarnate. That seems to have been the point of Jesus' resurrection in a glorified body. It seems to be an implication of Paul's teaching about Christ as the firstfruits of the resurrection of the dead (I Corinthians 15).

If this is correct, this means that Jesus continues to exist in some sense in time. (Naturally this question occurred to me given my recent work on God and the philosophy of time.) If one has a body, one is automatically in time. We don't know for sure whether angels are strictly disembodied. I gather Christian tradition has varied on whether angels are always disembodied except when they take on bodies to carry messages to human beings and do other work on earth for which a body is required, or whether they always have bodies. But Scripture is clear that angels can have bodies, if only temporarily. So now we have Our Lord incarnate, in a body, and merely created beings, the angels, capable of being embodied. And we also have the holy dead from the time up to Jesus' ascension. They would not be embodied, because the resurrection has not yet taken place for them. But they would be temporal creatures who naturally experience sequentially by way of the senses, and it is entirely reasonable to think of their existence as having some sort of form and sequence to it. Indeed, Jesus seems to allude to Abraham's knowledge of the Son prior to Jesus' incarnation when He says, "Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad."

We can even take it that there must be some place where Jesus, incarnate, now exists and reigns, though in an important sense it must be "another world," a different space-time realm, from our own.

Putting all of this together, one can conjecture, though it is only a conjecture, that there may have been some sort of grand coronation scene at the Ascension, involving angels, the souls of the blessed dead, and Our Lord Himself in His incarnate body. I would love to have been there.

As usual, it is impossible to find a really strong choral version of some of the greatest hymns, but here are a couple of "The Head That Once Was Crowned With Thorns."

Even though it's only forty-five seconds long and doesn't include the first verse, I am charmed by the whole idea of a group's getting up at seven a.m. to go to the top of a tower in London and sing this hymn in honor of the Feast of the Ascension. So kudos to this British church choir:



Here is a fuller version:



And here are the wonderful words by Thomas Kelly:

1 The head that once was crowned with thorns
is crowned with glory now;
a royal diadem adorns
the mighty Victor’s brow.

2 The highest place that heav'n affords
is his, is his by right,
the King of kings and Lord of lords,
and heav'n’s eternal light--

3 the joy of all who dwell above,
the joy of all below,
to whom he manifests his love,
and grants his name to know.

4 To them the cross with all its shame,
with all its grace, is giv'n,
their name, an everlasting name,
their joy, the joy of heav'n.

5 They suffer with their Lord below,
they reign with him above,
their profit and their joy to know
the mystery of his love.

6 The cross he bore is life and health,
though shame and death to him;
his people's hope, his people's wealth,
their everlasting theme!

Gaudete Sunday

Today is Rejoice Sunday, in the midst of Advent. (It's rather a dark, cold, and snowy Rejoice Sunday, and Advent as a whole, where I live. One could call that "seasonal," but I just hope no family member has an accident on the roads!)

In honor thereof, I have a song that isn't really an Advent carol, because it is a Christmas carol. Christmas songs can't, technically, be Advent songs, because Advent songs have to be anticipatory. They can't include lines like "Christ is born," because in liturgically pure terms, we don't start saying that until after sundown on December 24.

Nonetheless, this is a cheerful Renaissance carol with the word "Gaudete" in it, so here goes:



Here are the words to a more "real" Gaudete hymn, based on Jesus' parable of the wise and foolish virgins. "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers."

Rejoice, rejoice, believers, and let your lights appear.
The evening is advancing, and darker night is near.
The Bridegroom is arising, and soon He will draw nigh.
Up, watch in expectation: At midnight comes the cry.

See that your lamps are burning; replenish them with oil.
Look now for your salvation, the end of sin and toil.
The watchers on the mountain proclaim the Bridegroom near.
Go meet Him as He cometh, with alleluias clear.

O wise and holy virgins, now raise your voices higher,
Until in songs of triumph ye meet the angel choir.
The marriage feast is waiting, the gates wide open stand;
Rise up, ye heirs of glory, the Bridegroom is at hand.

Our hope and expectation, O Jesus, now appear!
Arise, Thou Sun so longed for, over this benighted sphere!
With hearts and hands uplifted, we plead, O Lord, to see
The day of earth’s redemption and ever be with Thee.

I have not been able to find a good recording of the tune, Greenland, which is by Haydn.

"Community" and altar rails

Being an Anglican, and not a very good one either, I'm venturing into strange territory by giving an opinion on this subject, but here goes: I understand that it's common in the Novus Ordo Mass in the Roman Catholic Church for the priest to stand facing the people and also for there to be no altar rails. The people instead come up and stand in lines and receive the Host while standing. As I understand it, one point of both practices is to increase a sense of "community" among the people and to emphasize the fact that the original Last Supper was a meal and that the early Church combined the celebration of the Lord's Supper with a meal.

Both of those latter facts are undeniably true as an historical matter. But it's not at all clear to me that they imply that our current liturgical practice should be a self-conscious attempt to "encourage community," still less that this is best done by having the celebrant face the people rather than facing the east and praying on behalf of both himself and the people to God. And how does having people stand in line to receive the Sacrament make them feel more connected to one another?

For whatever this is worth as a fact of personal psychological experience, it occurred to me this morning that, when I go up to the altar rail and kneel with other members of my own small congregation, this gives me a very strong sense of community. It is not a self-conscious thing, not forced in any way. It's just that, in fact, we are going and kneeling together, different though we all are from each other, to receive the Eucharist. Our commonality, our sense of community, does not come from celebrating that community per se. Rather, it comes from a shared focus on God, on our need for God, and our need to kneel before God and receive Holy Communion.

This seems to me to be a fact of human life which C.S. Lewis referred to as "them that asks don't get." What I think he meant was that when we demand a certain feeling as an end in itself, we don't get it. Hence, joy comes not from insistently demanding that life be enjoyable but from focusing on something worthwhile outside of oneself. If we go around demanding peace we probably won't feel peaceful. And so on through the whole gamut of human emotion. And so with community. Esprit de corps is not going to arise from saying, "Okay, folks, we're all one community. What can we do to emphasize that?" Rather, it's going to come from having something that, in fact, we really are all trying to do together.

I suspect I'm preaching to the choir if I tell any of my Catholic readers that you have my sympathy if you don't have altar rails. I hope you get them back again. And if you have anything to do with the decision, definitely plump for the altar rails and for having a bunch of people kneel at them together to receive. Among other things, it's good for community, because it's about Something Else, something much more important, than community.

Blessed Sunday after the Ascension

Yes, I know, I should have posted on Ascension Day. All my purist Catholic friends on Facebook have been posting quips about people who think Ascension is celebrated on the following Sunday. Ascension is on a Thursday. I get that. However, I'm just now getting around to a post, and the way I look at it is that giving Ascension a full octave is a way of honoring the feast and acknowledging its importance. This way there is not simply Ascension Day but also Ascensiontide.

Herewith a couple of great hymns. If you don't know 'em, look 'em up:

The Head that Once Was Crowned With Thorns

The head that once was crowned with thorns
Is crowned with glory now;
A royal diadem adorns
The mighty victor’s brow.

The highest place that Heav’n affords
Belongs to Him by right;
The King of kings and Lord of lords,
And Heaven’s eternal Light.

The joy of all who dwell above,
The joy of all below,
To whom He manifests His love,
And grants His Name to know.

To them the cross with all its shame,
With all its grace, is given;
Their name an everlasting name,
Their joy the joy of Heaven.

They suffer with their Lord below;
They reign with Him above;
Their profit and their joy to know
The mystery of His love.

The cross He bore is life and health,
Though shame and death to Him,
His people’s hope, His people’s wealth,
Their everlasting theme.

Great tune, too. Sing that one when you really need to cheer yourself up.

Now for some excellent Ascension theology:

See the Conqueror Mounts

See, the Conqu'ror mounts in triumph;
See the King in royal state,
Riding on the clouds, his chariot,
To his heav'nly palace gate:
Hark! the choirs of angel voices
Joyful Alleluias sing
And the portals high are lifted
To receive their heav'nly King.

He who on the cross did suffer,

He who from the grave arose,

He has vanquished sin and Satan;

He by death has spoiled his foes.

While he lifts his hands in blessing

He is parted from his friends;

While their eager eyes behold him,

He upon the clouds ascends.

Thou hast raised our human nature
In the clouds to God's right hand;
There we sit in heav'nly places,
There with thee in glory stand:
Jesus reigns, adored by angels,
Man with God is on the throne;
Mighty Lord, in thine ascension
We by faith behold our own.

And here I'm going to quote without shame from a past post of my own on the subject of the Ascension: One of the things I like about Ascension as an Anglican feast is that it's the kind of thing a person with a Baptist upbringing and sympathies can be enriched by without changing one whit of doctrine. It's just a set of ideas that simply never occurred to you before: Jesus took our human nature back to the Father's right hand. Jesus reigns with God, so God and man are on the throne together. We sit with Him in heavenly places. He intercedes for us with the Father. If you are familiar with Scripture, all of that comes back. But if you don't have a liturgical background, you usually didn't think of associating it with Jesus' ascension. But that's when that all started. And of course, as Jesus' words to the disciples just before ascending refer to the promise of "the Gift," the Holy Ghost, so the Feast of the Ascension looks forward to next week, Whitsunday, Pentecost.

I was also thinking this morning about the High Priestly prayer in John 17. If we wonder what Jesus says when He intercedes for us, perhaps that would be a place to start. It is the longest prayer of Jesus to His Father that we have recorded for us. I was much struck by his saying, "I pray not that you would take them out of the world but that you would keep them from the evil." And, "Sanctify them through thy truth." And then, "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word." Jesus is now praying for us all the time like this at the Father's right hand.

Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall  come in!

Blessed Ascension Sunday!

Thy rebuke hath broken his heart

The tabernacle is empty, the door standing open. The altar is stripped and bare.

On Good Friday, we remember the Passion of Our Lord, the Messiah.

The genius of Handel was to choose the words of Scripture, and the words of Scripture only, and to set them musically in such a fashion that they come alive.

The two verses used here are Psalm 69:20 and Lamentations 1:12.



And this, from Isaiah 53.

Palm Sunday and Witness

It is Palm Sunday, and I have nothing much new to say. Years ago I poured myself into quite a few liturgical posts, and they still seem good today. The Anglican liturgy is a gift. The Sacrament is a gift, and therefore we cry, "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord!" The gift that makes all other gifts possible is the Sacrifice of the Cross, the death of Our Lord. One's ability to speak about those gifts sometimes decreases with age rather than otherwise. Here is an old Palm Sunday post, also brief, with a hymn text. Here is a post on the epistle lesson for Palm Sunday on the Holy Name of Jesus. Here is a post on the Passion.

This Lent I have been reading Whittaker Chambers's Witness. Chambers says of himself, "I was a witness." If you have not read the book, read it. This time, I'm going to read it all the way through. To whet your appetite for Witness, please do read Bill Luse's excellent choice of selections.

I also began reading I John through with my younger daughters for the second time recently. St. John, very much like Chambers, thought of himself primarily as a witness: "And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." "That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which our hands have handled of the Word of life." "That which we have heard and seen declare we unto you." "And he who saw it bare record, and his record is true...that ye might believe."

John must have been quite young, in all probability only a teenager, when he lived with Our Lord through His ministry and was the only one of the twelve to witness the crucifixion. It was all burned into his mind in those early years, and then in old age he writes his epistle to "My little children" (a phrase he uses again and again), telling them, as the last living eyewitness, of what he has heard and seen. John was a witness.

This is what Chambers says about the cross, as a witness to his children:

My children, when you were little, we used sometimes to go for walks in our pine woods. In the open fields, you would run along by yourselves. But you used instinctively to give me your hands as we entered those woods, where it was darker, lonelier, and in the stillness our voices sounded loud and frightening. In this book I am again giving you my hands. I am leading you, not through cool pine woods, but up and up a narrow defile between the bare and steep rocks from which in shadow things uncoil and slither away. It will be dark. But, in the end, if I have led you aright, you will make out three crosses, from two of which hang thieves. I will have brought you to Golgotha – the place of skulls. This is the meaning of the journey. Before you understand, I may not be there, my hands may have slipped from yours. It will not matter. For when you understand what you see, you will no longer be children.

I wish all of my readers a blessed Holy Week.

Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation; that we may enter with joy upon the meditation of those mighty acts, whereby thou hast given unto us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sleepers, Wake

Today was Bible Sunday in Advent, but I'm all skejipsed on my Advent schedule anyway, so I don't have a real Bible Sunday post. An older one was better than anything I could write now anyway, so if you're interested in Bible Sunday, read about it here. And by the way: I cannot understand why "O Word of God Incarnate" is not sung in more Baptist churches. It's their kind of hymn!

We sang Philip Nicolai's "Wake, Awake" or "Sleepers, Wake" this morning. I can't seem to find a good choral recording of it with the right words and all the usual verses, but there are many instrumental versions, especially organ. Here are the verses as found in the 1940 hymnal:

1. Wake, awake, for night is flying:
The watchmen on the heights are crying,
Awake, Jerusalem, arise!
Midnight's solemn hour is tolling,
His chariot wheels are nearer rolling,
He comes; prepare, ye virgins wise.
Rise up, with willing feet,
Go forth, the Bridegroom meet:
Alleluia!
Bear through the night your well-trimmed light,
Speed forth to join the marriage rite.

2. Sion hears the watchman singing,
Her heart with deep delight is springing,
She wakes, she rises from her gloom:
Forth her Bridegroom comes, all glorious,
In grace arrayed, by truth victorious;
Her Star is risen, her Light is come!
All hail, Incarnate Lord,
Our crown, and our reward!
Alleluia!
We haste along, in pomp of song,
And gladsome join the marriage throng.

3. Lamb of God, the heavens adore thee,
And men and angels sing before thee,
With harp and cymbal's clearest tone.
By the pearly gates in wonder
We stand, and swell the voice of thunder,
That echoes round thy dazzling throne.
No vision ever brought,
No ear hath ever caught,
Such rejoicing.
We raise the song, we swell the throng,
To praise thee ages all along.
Amen.

By the way, these lyrics use the English epithalamion tradition, which was in turn based on the Latin epithalamion tradition. (I was sure I'd written about this before but can't now seem to find the post.) An epithalamion always began with the call for the bride to awake and arise, because the bridegroom was coming. The bride is supposed to waken from her gloom and dress herself beautifully, usually at dawn rather than at midnight. The combination of calling on the bride to awaken and the reference to midnight is just one oddity that results from melding the English epithalamion tradition with Jesus' parable of the wise and foolish virgins, which was of course based on Jewish marriage traditions. Notice, too, the emphasis on the glory of the groom and what the groom is wearing, which is more Jewish, rather than on the beauty of the bride or what she is wearing.

Why a Protestant believes in the Real Presence

A big topic, to which I doubt that I will do justice. If you faint by the wayside before reading the entire post, no one will blame you, I least of all.

Over at W4 the question has arisen as to whether there is good Scriptural reason to believe in something more than memorialism as a view of the Lord's Supper. In the context the specific alternative being considered is transubstantiation, but in general the question appears to be why memorialism is not a good interpretation of the verses usually used by sacramentalists concerning Holy Communion. In this post I already said that I believe in the Real Presence, but here I would like to go into a little more detail about what I believe and why. These thoughts are presented for those who might be interested and are not intended to be antagonizing to my fellow Protestant readers. Nor, for that matter, to my Catholic readers either, as the position I shall sketch is not exactly the Roman Catholic position. For the record, I'd been thinking of writing this post for some time, so the fact that the question came up at W4 was only a catalyst for doing it now rather than later.

The first question to be addressed here is this: What exactly is the view that I shall be attempting to defend from Scripture? What do I mean by "believing in the Real Presence"? The positions with which most people are most familiar are, on the one hand, memorialism and, on the other hand, transubstantiation. I hope that I shall do justice to both of these by a brief summary without ruffling any feathers, but here goes: Briefly, memorialism is the view that Communion is only a symbolic act which Christians are commanded by Jesus to undertake in memory of Jesus' death. The bread and wine do not change in any respect, nor do they become the objective vehicles of grace (more about which below). They stand as symbols for Jesus' body and blood. I have argued elsewhere that actually there are no mere symbols for important things, in the sense of symbols about which we can be flippant or unconcerned, so the memorialist himself has good reason to be respectful and serious about Communion. The memorialists I know are. But leaving that argument aside, the point is that on the memorialist view the bread and wine are only symbols, not anything with more objective importance. On the Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation, what is partaken of in Communion has what are called the "accidents," which include all of the qualities that could be examined by the senses or physically discovered, of bread or of wine. However, the essence or "substance" of bread or wine has been removed and replaced with the essence or substance of Jesus' physical body and blood. Using this set of metaphysical categories, the Roman Catholic view then is that Jesus' body and blood are literally present and partaken of in Communion but that this is not in any way empirically perceptible, because it is only the underlying essence of the elements that has changed.

I do not hold either of these views. In the case of transubstantiation, I simply do not hold a metaphysical view about such physical entities as bread, wine, and human flesh and blood according to which they have an entirely imperceptible essence which can literally be switched with the imperceptible essence of a different physical type of stuff while leaving all possibly perceptible physical properties the same. This doesn't mean that I'm a nominalist or that I deny that anything has an essence nor that I am unable to imagine situations in which something might appear to be other than what it is. I think that human beings have an essence, for example, and that no matter how disabled or even wicked and degraded a man is, as long as he lives he retains that essence of being truly human. But for bread, wine, and flesh and blood, no, I just really can't accept the view that that is what they are like, which would make transubstantiation possible.

Actually, the main burden of this post will be about why I don't accept memorialism, so more on that later.

What I do believe is that Jesus is specially, spiritually present in the elements of Communion in the sense that they are spiritual food. God has so ordained that those of us who, as the Prayer Book says, have "duly received" Communion are objectively spiritually nourished thereby. In this sense Jesus objectively comes down to us in the bread and wine and gives himself, his life and spiritual strength, aka grace, to us when we rightly receive. (And if we don't rightly receive, we could be in big trouble for profaning this Sacrament which has been rendered holy by God's intention that it should be a means of grace to us.) When the consecrated Host is reserved on the altar, because the Host is that divinely ordained physical meeting point between our Lord Jesus Christ and ourselves, the place where it is reserved becomes a literally holy space, a place where we come before Christ, who is present there in a special way in which he is not present everywhere else.

Now, since I of course believe in the omnipresence of God, and since all Christians believe in the omnipresence of God, and since the Bible expressly says that God dwells not in temples made with hands (Acts 7:48), it might be asked whether such a view is not either a) theological nonsense, meaningless,  b) biblically utterly unprecedented prior to the controverted passages about the Lord's Supper, or even c) positively anti-biblical.

But actually, I think there are foreshadowings and, to some extent, precedents in the Old Testament. For example, the Ark of the Covenant was definitely a place where God was present in a special way. That was why it had to be handled only by certain people and why even a well-intentioned handling by the wrong person could result in death (2 Samuel 6). That was why it was carried before the people when they marched (Joshua 3, Joshua 6). And that is why the Psalmist and other Scriptures repeatedly say that God "dwells between the cherubim" (I Chronicles 13:6, Psalm 80:1, Psalm 99:1, etc.). Hence, too, the Psalmist's repeated expressions of joy at the opportunity to go into "the house of the Lord" and be in God's presence (Psalm 27:4, Psalm 122). That, too, was why when the Ark was taken in battle a child born at that time was given a name that meant "the glory is departed from Israel" (I Samuel 4:22).

It was often a saying among the Baptists when I was a child: "The church is not the building; the church is the people." There was such a horror of idolatry that some even chided old-fashioned pastors who referred to the church building as "God's house." (God forgive me, I once baited a missionary on this very point.) Yet that very notion of a special place that was holy, that was God's house, where one would be in God's presence in a special way, is found repeatedly in the Psalms in clear reference to the Tabernacle where the people of Israel at that time went to offer sacrifices. So it cannot be entirely foreign to the way God works in the world.

Then, too, the Mercy Seat (between the cherubim) was a place where blood was spilled on the Day of Atonement, which somehow was especially able to bring forgiveness for the people's sins (Leviticus 16:14). So the Mercy Seat was, as I have said of the Sacrament, a place where God, by His own special choice and commandment, interacted in a special way with His people.

Another example would be the Shekinah, which was a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day. God led His people in this way. It was evidently a physical entity in which God was in some special sense present so as to help His people. In one of the most harrowing passages of the Bible, Ezekiel actually sees a vision of the Shekinah glory departing gradually from the Temple, illustrating God's judgement on His people (Ezekiel 10:18-19).

These constitute Old Testament precedents for God's being willing in some sense to "dwell" in a particular location, in the sense of interacting with man specially in those places. This despite the fact that God is above and beyond all creation and is, in another sense, present everywhere.

This should establish that the very notion of the Real Presence in the Sacrament, and even of its reservation in a church building, is not intrinsically anti-biblical nor idolatrous.

However, it will be justly answered that that doesn't necessarily mean that the doctrine as I've sketched it is true. There is a burden of proof, and a Protestant will understandably seek evidence for such a doctrine (all the more so for such a vastly important doctrine) in Scripture.

The actual passages I am going to use to argue against memorialism (and hence to support something-more-than-memorialism, which I think can be satisfied by the Real Presence view) will come as no surprise to readers. One of the most important of these is Jesus' discourse in John 6, in which He says,

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world....Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him....This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever. (John 6:47ff)

I want to dispose at once of the argument that Jesus could not have been speaking here of Holy Communion on the grounds that he hadn't yet ordained it. In fact, to speak of something important ahead of time, sometimes cryptically, is exactly the sort of thing Jesus did not infrequently. To give just a few examples, he prophesied his own resurrection by saying, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19), which the disciples understood only after the fact. He told Nicodemus (John 3) that he had to be "born of water and of the Spirit" and went on a bit about being "born of the Spirit," which wouldn't make a whole lot of sense until after the day of Pentecost. The parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) looks an awful lot like a prophecy of  the inclusion of the Gentiles in the church and the negative reaction of the Jews, all of which occurred only after Peter received a special vision, which was itself after Jesus' Ascension. So for Jesus to deliver a disturbing discourse on the importance of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, which would be understood better only by those who stuck it out, though puzzled, and continued to follow him faithfully until the punchline was delivered "in the night in which he was betrayed," would be very much Jesus' modus operandi.

The similarity between what Jesus says in John 6 and the words of institution (quoted below) is far too striking for coincidence. I would go so far as to say that, with the words of institution in hand, we can see that Jesus must have been foretelling Holy Communion in John 6. The two fit together exactly as prophecy and fulfillment do. Jesus first tells them, bafflingly, that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood, and then later he hands them bread and wine and says, "This is my body; eat this" and "All of you drink this; this is my blood." What more do you want? The two things obviously refer to one another, which is to say that they refer to one and the same thing. It's just that, as with most prophecies, we only understand this fully after we see what the fulfillment looks like. Jesus must have known that his disciples would remember his earlier discourse when he spoke the words at the Last Supper. (Brief digression: John does not record the words of institution but does record the discourse on Jesus as the bread from heaven. The Synoptics record the words of institution but not the discourse. I believe that this is an instance of those undesigned coincidences that are the mark of eyewitness history, about which much has been said elsewhere. Were John writing an ahistorical literary work, he would very likely have included the words of institution.)

Once we realize that in John 6 Jesus is talking about Holy Communion, we are (it seems to me) forced to take quite seriously a non-memorialist view. That is, perhaps, precisely why as a Baptist in Bible college I was expressly taught that John 6 is not, not, not about Communion at all but rather is simply about believing in Jesus by faith.

We should take a non-memorialist view seriously based on John 6 because Jesus expressly says that this act of eating his flesh and drinking his blood is necessary for us to have life in us. He says that we obtain eternal life by doing it. It's that important. Words like "have life" come up over and over again in John. They refer to being saved. Being on one's way to heaven. Being made one with Jesus. All those extremely important things. Jesus goes on and on in this passage, hammering home: His flesh is meat indeed. If we eat of this bread, which he says is his flesh, we will never die. He will raise us up at the last day.

Let's admit it, telling us that we have to take Communion in order to have spiritual life in us just doesn't sit too well with the overall theology of memorialism. It seems at least somewhat implausible that Jesus would have spoken in this urgent, insistent, and rather mysterious, not to say shocking, manner about drinking a bit of wine and eating a bit of bread as a purely symbolic act. (As a matter of fact, that's one reason among many why most Baptists strongly object to sacramentalism: They consider that precisely this urgency about engaging in a physical act like taking the Sacrament is a form of "works salvationism.")

Let me address here the argument that when Jesus says, "I am that bread of life" this is just like other "I am" statements where Jesus compares himself to physical objects. These are obviously simple metaphors--for example, "I am the true vine" (John 15:1) and "I am the door" (John 10:9) The comparison is quite instructive, actually. Notice: In no other case where Jesus uses that sort of locution does he subsequently set up a rite that parallels the claim. There is no vine-engraftment ceremony nor any door-walking-through pantomime set up by Jesus and commanded to be continued in the church until he comes again. So actually, the comparison with other "I am" metaphorical statements shows this one to be, in the end, not quite like the others.

Which brings me more directly to the words of institution. Here they are as given in Luke 22:19-20:

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you. This do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood which is shed for you.

And in Matthew 26:26-28:

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it. For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. 

Why do Jesus' words of institution provide evidence for the non-memorialist position? Why is it not plausible to take them, again, as a sheer metaphor, meaning merely "This bread is like my body" or "This bread symbolizes my body"? Well, if I was going to refer to the words of institution to explain John 6, I am also going to refer to John 6 to explain the words of institution! The two fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The words of institution show us that John 6 wasn't just an isolated extended metaphor, somewhat over-literally expressed. Rather, they referred to an actual, physical, historical rite that Jesus was going to set up later on. In the other direction, the explanation in John 6 tells us (as just discussed) that this rite that Jesus is setting up and commanding has an immense spiritual weight to it. In fact, taken straightforwardly, John 6 teaches (at least) the Real Presence view I have laid out earlier: That the elements are objective means of grace, means of receiving spiritual life.

But there is more: The words of institution are not worded like other metaphors Jesus uses of himself. Jesus says, "I am the door of the sheepfold." But he never points to a door and says, "This door is I, myself." Jesus says, "I am the true vine" but never tells us, "This vine is my body." Here, again, we have the dual motion back and forth between the Last Supper and John 6. "I am the true bread" is worded like other metaphors but is the only one that has a later ceremony associated with it. "This is my body" and "This is my blood" are not worded like other metaphors, and that gives us reason to wonder whether they are intended to convey something more, something, in fact, sacramental.

One more point about the words of institution. When Jesus says that this is the new covenant (testament) in his blood, he is alluding to a crucial ceremony in Israel's history. Moses (Exodus 24:8) took the blood of oxen and sprinkled it over the people after they had agreed to do all the words that the Lord had commanded in the Law. Moses said while sprinkling the blood, "Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with you concerning all these words." In instituting the Lord's Supper, Jesus institutes a new covenant between God and his people, and as blood was used for sealing the Old Covenant, so here, Jesus says that the cup is his blood which seals the new covenant. That seems to me, again, very strong language, and a rather surprising historical connection, for a bare memorial or symbol.

Last but not least, we have Paul's teaching in I Corinthians. Paul says,

For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you. That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread. And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you. This do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood. This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world. (I Corinthians 11:23-32)

The first point in this passage that sits oddly with a memorialist position is the  command that one examine oneself before taking Communion. Christians, at least those who have been carefully instructed at all about Communion, are so used to this requirement that we may take it for granted and not recognize the argument it presents against memorialism. Prior to this Paul has been talking about what we might call liturgical abuses connected with the meal that was apparently eaten prior to the Communion rite itself. (He brings this up after the quoted passage as well.) It would be somewhat easy to take phrases like "eating and drinking unworthily" to mean simply "eating and drinking disrespectfully." But Paul is going farther than just telling people to knock it off with the gluttony and behave respectfully during Communion. He's telling the believers to engage in introspection and not to receive Holy Communion until they have examined themselves and, I think we can take it, confessed their sins to God and resolved not to do them again. Why, if Communion is only a memorial? Do we have to undertake a special self-examination before participating in a Holy Week play? Yet that, too, commemorates Jesus' death. We sing songs in which we proclaim, show forth, remember the cross and Jesus' death, yet we aren't expected to undertake searching self-examination before each of those. It would seem overblown in the highest to speak of doing these things "unworthily" because we had not undergone a special examination of conscience before them.

In fact, if the value to ourselves of Communion is primarily memorial, which is to say, the value of meditation, should we not invite as many Christians as possible to partake, just as we would to a revival meeting or to an inspirational concert? Might not the act of proclaiming Jesus' death and remembering the price he paid on the cross bring back the backslider, convict the erring, soften the heart of the prodigal, and reveal our sin to us? But Paul places the order the other way around. We are to get things right with God, to examine ourselves and confess our sins, before coming to take Communion, and it is a fearsome thing to do otherwise.

The injunction to self-examination before partaking make more sense on at least a Real Presence view than on a memorialist view. We can, again, think of an Old Testament parallel. The priests had to wash themselves ritually before doing their priestly duties (Exodus 30:18-21; Leviticus 16:4). Holy places were not to be approached unless you were clean.

Next, we have Paul's rather eyebrow-raising language regarding those who eat and drink unworthily. He might have said that those who eat and drink unworthily will have to face God's wrath for dishonoring God or for being disrespectful in worship. But he doesn't say that. He uses instead the far more charged language--they are "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord," they are "not discerning the Lord's body." I submit that these noticeably literal ways of describing the sin of approaching Holy Communion without due respect and proper self-examination are more to be expected on a sacramental view than on a memorialist view.

Moreover, we have the actual penalties Paul holds over the believers for eating and drinking unworthily. He specifically threatens damnation, bodily sickness, and physical death as possible consequences. If the injunction to examine oneself and repent before taking Communion is more likely on a Real Presence view than on a memorialist view, this is even more the case for the rather shocking penalties for not doing so. Why would God punish his followers in such ways for engaging in what is only a memorial, symbolic act without first cleansing themselves of sin? But if Jesus is truly present in the Sacrament, things are quite different. In fact, this is reminiscent of what happened in the Old Testament. If a priest offered wrongly before the Lord, or if he came disobediently at the wrong time, he might die in the Holy of Holies (Leviticus 10:1-4, Leviticus 16:2). If the wrong person touched the Ark, he could be struck dead instantly (2 Samuel 6). If there is a Real Presence in the Sacrament, then it stands to reason that approaching it in the wrong way or without first examining and cleansing oneself could have serious ramifications indeed. It would be an example of a spiritual law of cause and effect, to wit:

You do not mess with the Holy.

None of these arguments is absolutely conclusive by itself. Of them all, I believe that the connection between Jesus' teaching in John 6 and the institution of Communion is the strongest, for it is the most explicit teaching we have from Our Lord himself on the subject. But they all contribute to a cumulative case, and from them together, from a Scriptural argument, I conclude that memorialism cannot be maintained and that a sacramental view is the biblical view.

We receive spiritual food in the Holy Sacrament. We should approach it with awe. In it, Jesus comes to us and gives himself to us. It is the place where heaven meets earth, where God meets man and bestows grace through the medium of a physical entity. It is a great gift indeed, for which we should be endlessly, joyously grateful.

In the words of Cranmer, in the thanksgiving after receiving Communion,

ALMIGHTY and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee, for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us who have duly received these holy mysteries with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favour and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of his most precious death and passion. And we most humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

Several more Holy Week collects

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified; Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace, through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

O Lord God, whose blessed Son, our Saviour, gave his back to the smiters and hid not his face from shame; Grant us grace to take joyfully the sufferings of the present time, in full assurance of the glory that shall be revealed; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, did institute the Sacrament of his Body and Blood; Mercifully grant that we may thankfully receive the same in remembrance of him, who in these holy mysteries giveth us a pledge of life eternal; the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit ever, one, God, world without end. Amen.

Almighty God, we beseech thee graciously to behold this thy family, for which our Lord Jesus Christ was contented to be betrayed, and given up into the hands of wicked men, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost ever, one God, world without end. Amen.

O merciful God, who hast made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor desirest the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live; Have mercy upon all who know thee not as thou art revealed in the Gospel of thy Son. Take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy Word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy fold, that they may be made one flock under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

Blessed Holy Week

A blessed Holy Week to Extra Thoughts readers.

Assist us mercifully with thy help, O Lord God of our salvation; that we may enter with joy upon the meditation of those mighty acts, whereby thou hast given unto us life and immortality; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest!

He is here

"Not for me the Hound of Heaven, but the never-ceasing silent appeal of Tabernacle, and the sense of starving hunger."

J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter to his son Michael, November 1, 1963

The Hound of Heaven, I would add, may have many ways of catching His quarry, not least with hunger.

I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world....Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him....This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever. (John 6:51ff)

I don't talk theology nearly as often on this blog as I think about theology. And the doctrine of Holy Communion is such a fraught one, over which many a literal war has been fought.

I believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Not being Roman Catholic, I am not required to believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation, and not being an Aristotelian, I'm rather glad of that, because I don't. But the pure memorialist view does not, in my opinion, do justice either to Christ's words of institution or to Christ's teaching in John 6 or to the Apostle Paul's solemn warnings to the Corinthians about Eucharistic abuses and the grave consequences thereof. At a minimum, it seems to me that these Scriptures imply that Holy Communion is a source of real spiritual life and strength--and that not only from the act of meditation on Christ's passion and atonement, but objectively: spiritual food. Beyond that I cannot and do not go--I simply know no farther to go. But, as the Ark of the Covenant was a place where the Lord God met His people and was, in that sense, present, so in the Sacrament. Here God acts. Here God meets man, objectively, on holy ground, in a physical object.

And for that I am thankful. As creatures of flesh and blood, we crave the ability to give and receive tangibly and physically. The Book of Common Prayer says of the Sacrament that Christ has "ordained holy mysteries as pledges of his love." A side note, or maybe not such a side note: Edmund Spenser, when he portrays the lady Charity as married and surrounded by her babies, calls them "pledges" of her husband's love.

Here is the prayer of thanksgiving after receiving the Sacrament. It was, to add to the head-shaking, convoluted uniqueness of Anglican history, apparently written (rather than translated) by Thomas Cranmer, who died because he was unwilling to return to Rome and accept the doctrine of transubstantiation.

Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have duly received these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favor and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of his most precious death and passion. And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

He "assures us thereby of his favor and goodness towards us." By giving us these gifts and coming to us in them, by deigning thus to condescend to us, He continually assures us, week by week, of His favor and goodness towards us.

I am a Protestant and will never be anything else. I will never even be a high Anglican; indeed, I will no doubt always be so low as to be in danger of falling right out at the bottom. There are many times when I feel a distinct reaction against high churchmanship. What's a nice Baptist girl like me doing in a place like this? But the holy mysteries are not the sort of thing one can whip up in one's kitchen, and if (per improbable) they are to be found in the Welch's grape juice and the broken matzos passed in plates from hand to hand in the churches that teach that they are not there, this is more a matter for trembling and fear than a reason to return.

It is impossible to be insouciant about the use I am about to make of a Gospel music song. I would like to make the usual flippant remark about my on-going and ungrateful project of uniting low Protestantism, Southern Gospel, and liturgical Christianity, but it's not just so simple as that.

The following song is one I cannot listen to without thinking of the Holy Sacrament. Yet that is not what it is about, where "about" is taken accurately to refer to the intention of the author and, for that matter, the performers. Quite obviously, it is a work of evangelical, perhaps even Pentecostal, Christianity. The teaching intended is that Jesus is present wherever "two or three are gathered" and that we become especially aware of His presence when reminded of it in the gathering of believers. That is a good teaching, one worth hearing and remembering. But how can anyone who believes in the Real Presence (in any sense whatsoever) hear "Holy, holy," "holy manna," and "You can touch him" and not think of that other Presence?

"He is here, listen closely. Hear Him calling out your name. He is here, you can touch him. You will never be the same."

So, with apologies to Wes Hampton, to the Gaither Vocal band, and especially to Kirk Talley (the composer), I put my own entirely unjustified personal significance on this song and present it for what it is worth, if there should happen to be anyone among my readers who finds it useful, as a meditation before receiving Communion. "He is Here."

Gaither Vocal Band - He Is Here [Live] from emimusic on GodTube.