Five Sermons on the Mass 4: Communion

“Holy Communion” is probably the most widely used name for the Mass in the Church of England, but I hope that in these sermons so far I’ve made it clear that the Mass is far more than just a “Communion service”, whose only purpose is for the priest to say a lot of prayers so that we can all then take Communion. The Mass is also an invitation into the very mystery of God’s being; a celebration of our calling to be the Body of Christ in our world; the offering of our life and our world, in union with Christ’s offering, to God; and many other things too.

But, yes, amongst these other things it certainly is a service of Holy Communion, and that is what we are to explore today. What is this “Communion”? I had quite a lot of difficulty choosing hymns for today; not because the hymn books aren’t full of hymns that come under this title, but because the great majority of them interpret “Communion” in such a narrow way: all Me and Jesus, Jesus and Me; all to do with the vertical relationship between each one of us and God, so little to do with our communion with one another.

This concept of Communion is also expressed in the expression “my Communion” which one sometimes hears: I am going to make my Communion today. Yet, if you think about it, this expression is a contradiction in terms. The Greek word for “Communion” is koinonia, which can equally well be translated “Community”: the two words are interchangeable, they both mean the same thing. So, by definition, Communion cannot be an individualistic thing, you can’t have Community on your own: Communion is not an individual thing but a shared thing, an expression of the whole Body, the whole Church, the whole Community. And when we take Communion we do it not alone but together - an obvious point, but one that can easily be overlooked. The Body we receive is indeed the Body of Christ, but that is all of us! Holy Communion is the Sacrament, the sign and the making real, of our unity with Christ and with one another.

So who does it consist of, this Community, this Communion we celebrate? with whom do we make koinonia as we share the Body and Blood of Christ? With each other here, obviously; with the rest of the Church of England as it comes together today for this same purpose all over the country; with all those who are “in Communion” with us (if only just, at present) as our fellow Anglicans across the world. And need we limit it to Anglicans? in God’s eyes we must surely also be coming together with all our fellow Christians of every denomination, with everyone who comes to God’s altar today.

And, of course, our Communion is not limited by time any more than by space. At the altar, we are also in Communion with all Christians who have ever come to the altar and taken Communion: all the Saints, and all the humdrum Christians too: the whole company of the faithful departed. And, if our Communion isn’t limited by time, it follows that we are in Communion, not only with our fellow Christians who have been but also with all those who will ever be: an exciting thought.

In fact, you could say that it is this future aspect which is the most important thing about Communion. Why? because if we think of it as a present reality, it is imperfect and broken, both with God and with one another. There are the formal denominational splits which cause us to say that we are “not in Communion”, and the less formal things which impair Communion between individual people - the rows, the dislikes, the disagreements. They’re there in every church. But we are looking forward to a perfect day, the “day of the Lord”, when, in the words of that beautiful prayer, “all things shall be brought to perfection through him from whom they took their origin”. This isn’t the place to go into detail about the exact nature of that day, whether it will be in time or beyond time, and so on; but scripture and theology always describe it as somehow in the future, a Day to end all days. And, biblically speaking, Holy Communion does not just look back, to the Last Supper and the historical story of Jesus, but forwards: it is an anticipation of the Heavenly Banquet, to which so many of Jesus’ parables point, and which is so beautifully and erotically described in today’s reading from the Song of Songs.

And, on that Last Day, when all things are brought to perfection, when “Christ is all in all”, as St Paul says: then lions will lie down with lambs, swords will be beaten into ploughshares, camels will pass through the eyes of needles; Ian Paisley will embrace the Pope, Richard Dawkins will find God in the discoveries of science, Forward in Faith will embrace women priests, and members of Reform will rejoice in the company of their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters; Jews and Muslims will understand why we worship God as Trinity, and we shall see why they won’t eat pork. And the Body of Christ shall know no limits: it won’t consist of a holy few, but of all Christians; no, of all who seek God; of all humanity; of all living things; of all creation. All barriers to Communion shall fall (and thank goodness Common Worship has replaced “we commend ourselves and all Christian people” with “ourselves and the whole creation” at the end of the Prayer of Intercession at Mass.) Then, as St Paul writes to the Ephesians, we shall know “what is the breadth and length and height and depth, so that we may be filled with all the fulness of God”.

And it is this fulness which we celebrate and anticipate at Mass, at the Holy Communion. Not just what has been and is, but what is to be, in the fulness of time. That is why I believe people are ultimately wrong when they say “we shouldn’t have ‘intercommunion’ between the churches now, because it wouldn’t be expressing the truth: it would be pretending to a unity that doesn’t exist”. But Holy Communion is not supposed to represent present reality but future glory: it takes us forward to the Day when there shall certainly be no denominational barriers.

There are two ways of understanding the word “we”. There is the “exclusive we”, meaning “I and those around me, but not you”; and there is the “inclusive we”: “I and you and all those around us”. Our Communion looks forward to the Day when our “we” shall be wholly inclusive, when our church shall be a wholly inclusive church; for only that kind of Communion can rightly be called Holy. Amen.