Five Sermons on the Mass 5: Consecration

So today to the final aspect of the Mass we are looking at in these sermons - consecration. Why did I put this last, when in the order of service the consecration clearly comes before Communion? Well, we’ll see…

Anyway, here’s the consecration, right in the middle of the Eucharistic prayer, as the climax of it all (climaxes don’t have to come at the end). Words are spoken, the elements are lifted up, bells ring, incense is swung, candles are raised: it’s a moment of adoration and wonder. In earlier days (I’m looking back at both the middle ages and my own childhood, if these are not coterminous) this moment of consecration was even more central than it is now. In the middle ages it was rare for anyone but the priest to receive Communion: what mattered was that people should be present for the sacrifice, above all for the moment of elevation. Some people even took to just popping in for that moment - they heard the Sanctus bell ringing, scurried to church in time for the elevations, then scurried back out again. At the rather Anglo-Catholic school I attended, the priest was still the only one to receive Communion at the main Sunday Mass: the rest of us just knelt and adored (or that was the theory, anyway). And, here and now at Horfield, we still signal that the consecration is the Big Moment, by ringing the outside bell at that point, so that all the world can take note.

But what is happening? what is this “consecration”? Does the priest say some magic words so that hey presto! (or rather, hocus pocus! which is actually a corruption of hoc est corpus, this is my Body) the bread and wine become something different, they cease to be bread and wine at all and are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ?

It’s dangerous to think about the Eucharist without thinking about Christ; for the Eucharist is an experience of Christ, an extension of the Incarnation: the two go together. So what happened at the Incarnation? did God take a human being and change him into something different, no longer human but only divine? Since the earliest times this idea has been seen as heresy: orthodox Christianity has always said that, in Christ, humanity and divinity go together, that God is revealed, is incarnate, in and through a proper human being. So if it is heresy to say Jesus was not human, mustn’t it be the same to say that the consecrated Bread is no longer bread, but only now the Body of Christ? Rather, it is still bread, but it is now divine bread, the bread of heaven, the vehicle of God’s glory as Jesus was.

But we must go further. It’s often said that the Incarnation was a miracle, because how could two things so unalike as God and humanity come together in one person? How could these “two natures” co-exist in Jesus, when they are so utterly far apart? But no, just the opposite: humanity and divinity are not utterly different at all, in fact they belong together. Genesis 1 tells us that man and woman are made in God’s image, and the New Testament affirms that in Christ, at last, we see this image clearly - in Christ we see true humanity, divine humanity: God shining through humanity. This is not something freakish and uncomfortable, it is what humanity has always longed for: the real thing! and St John in his first chapter says that, now, Christ has offered everyone else the power to share this same divine humanity, to be God’s children in our turn. Christ shows us humanity as it is meant to be, as it is to be at the end of all things.

Now if that is true of the Incarnation, what about the consecration at Mass? By the same token, it can’t be that bread and wine are uncomfortably made to bear a character utterly divorced from their original nature; but, just as the Incarnation of Christ brings out the true nature of humanity, so the consecration brings out the true nature of these elements. God shines through them, and we through them glimpse the Kingdom of Heaven as we do in Jesus. This is bread and wine as it is to be in the Kingdom.

We can find references to this in the gospels: in the Our Father, Jesus tells us to pray for “daily bread”, but actually that isn’t the right translation of the Greek epiousion, a mysterious word apparently meaning “the bread of tomorrow”, or rather, the bread of the day to come - the bread of the Kingdom, the bread of heaven. And remember how, at the marriage feast of Cana, the steward tells the bridegroom that he has “left the best wine till last”: it’s the same best wine as we drink here at Mass, the wine of the Last Day. Once again, we find that the Mass is an anticipation of the Day that is to come, the Kingdom at the end of all things. At the consecration we actually glimpse things as they are to be in that Kingdom, as God’s light shines through them: no wonder we have all those bells and candles and incense!

But that isn’t all. It is not only bread and wine that are offered for consecration at Mass. A small denomination called the Christian Community calls the Eucharist “the act of consecration of humanity” - a marvellous title and an important insight. For, in most versions of the Eucharistic prayer, we ask God to send the Spirit on us also: we too are consecrated, we glimpse ourselves also as we are to be in the Kingdom on the Last Day. In the sharing of the Peace, and at Communion, we too are celebrated as the Body of Christ. In the Kingdom, on the Last Day, we shall enter fully into his divinity which actually is true humanity, and here at Mass we are given a foretaste of that true humanity, even if it soon fades.

There is a story of a rather rigorous priest who always insisted that the Sacrament should be accompanied by two candles if it was being carried anywhere. One day he noticed a woman leaving the church immediately after she had received Communion: so he immediately sent two acolytes with candles to go with her, since the Blessed Sacrament was not yet digested (history does not relate how far they went). Silly, but there’s a spark of truth in it. For (and this is why this sermon is last) we are indeed being sent out as consecrated people. Consecration is not a process which lifts one off the earth into some eternally religious and unworldly sphere: but something done in order to send us out into the world. So we come to the last, and the commonest, name for this service: the Mass. “Mass” means “sending out”; the same word as we find in dismissal, and in mission. So the “dismissal” is not just a polite way of telling people to go away - it is the sending out of a consecrated people into a world which longs for healing.

Go in peace, says the Deacon. Go in peace, you consecrated people, fed with the consecrated Body and Blood of Christ, to love and serve the Lord; in your hearts and your lives, in yourselves and in others and in all creation. Go out and live as if humanity, yours and other people’s, were already divine, as if the Kingdom had already come. Go out in the name of Christ, to listen with his ears, see with his eyes, speak with his mouth, bless and heal with his hands; to celebrate and to consecrate the true humanity of all people; longing and praying and living for all brokenness to be made whole, all sin to be forgiven, and all humanity to be made, at last, divine.