So far I have said that in the eucharist we receive our place in the one loaf of Christ glorified together with his people. In the eucharist all are called and gathered together in Christ, and through him we will be connected to, and so become alive to, all other people. When we are at last connected to one another, we will no longer be isolated entities, are our life be be supplied to us without limit.
It is not only that we are being fitted together in a vast living company of people, but that this company is being fitted to the cosmos. Humanity and nature are in process of reconciliation and integration. The church and the cosmos, like two halves of a single piece of engineering, are being brought together to form one vast entity. We are learning how to get into time with the cosmos, and the cosmos is being brought into synch with us. When humanity and nature are fitted together, and move in step, they will make a single beautiful working whole, called ‘creation’. But in giving the loaf to you, he is making it complete. It is not complete without you, but as you take hold of it and it is so joined to you, it is made complete. You are the completion of the cosmos. So the eucharistic loaf is a world-loaf – all creation united with Christ. We will be complete, and live with, rather than against, the order of creation. When Christ is all in all, we will all be in all.
This bread, which we now understand is the loaf, shows the world the present and the future of the church, which is linked to the future of the cosmos. The loaf we see held up in the eucharist is the cosmos. It is shown to us so we can acknowledge that it is not yet complete, but still fragmented. It is waiting for us, and for many others. (The verb ‘shows’ is scarcely adequate to the case, but I’ll come back to it when I talk about participation and our Amen).
The Lord wants us to acknowledge that it is not yet whole loaf, and that we are all waiting for the rest of God’s creation to come in and join this loaf. This incomplete loaf represents his commission, ‘Go into all the world’: the mass is commission and mission. We have to go out and get these many others and bring them back with us and present them to God here at this point. That loaf is one half of a tally stick: the point is to come up with the other half. So this bread is work. This work of bringing these many in is what is going on in the lifting them up (anaphora) or offering them. This means that we present them to the Lord for his inspection. This work is Christ’s work. It is not our work apart from Christ. It is an invitation to participate in Christ, and so also in his work, to take it for ourselves, and to enjoy with him this labour of his along with its outcome.
Only within this assembly, that recognises and gives the proper name to all things as creatures of God, does this by participating (publicly for the benefit of world) in Christ’s office of lifting up (anaphora) the world to God. Only the assembly-member (represented by the bishop) in the assembly can carry out this priestly office. Thus only the bishop is the priest, and only when all those around him, all the people of God, accompany him in this act, so it is their act because his, his because theirs, their joint act because the act of Christ. In the next post I will talk about the significance of the bishop.
