On Sunday we keep the Feast of Corpus Christi, and hold our Valedictory Mass for the graduating choristers. It is also the Puerto Rican Parade on 5th Avenue. The early and 9am masses will not be affected. The Parade will start during the 11am mass, but our security will be on the North East corner of 53rd Street and 5th Avenue to help parishioners cross. Access from the West side is unimpeded. We were delighted that so many of you came in-person last week in spite of another large parade.
“Faith our outward sense befriending, makes the inward vision clear.”
A few years ago, I was visiting Nashotah House Theological Seminary for their commencement exercises. Suddenly, next to me, a colleague’s iPhone started ringing – that particular ringtone that apple invented for FaceTime; his wife wanted to talk to him. As I listened to the ringing while he was desperately trying to find his phone in his cassock pocket, I pondered on the juxtaposition of the mystery of the mass that was unfolding before me and the fact that someone wanted to FaceTime him.
The mass is one of the ways that we come close to Jesus, and we come close to him. He told us: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” (John 6:56).
Jesus came to reveal to us the Father’s love; you could say that the incarnation was the greatest FaceTime experience in all of history and, even after his resurrection and ascension, Jesus left the means by which his friends could be close to him – particularly through the Eucharist. After walking the road to Emmaus with him, the disciples said “Were not our hearts burning within us as he talked to us on the road?” (Luke 24:32) But Luke also shares how those two disciples explained the encounter with the risen Jesus to the Apostles: “They told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” (Luke 24:35).
The late Professor John Macquarrie, formerly Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity (founded in the early 1500’s) in the University of Oxford, explored the presence of God with three different types of presence:
Temporal, spatial, and personal.
He explored these different types of presence in his beautiful book ‘Paths in Spirituality’ (which is still in print and available on Amazon – I would certainly recommend it to you) in order to delve deeper into the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. Some people, of course, have argued that there is no need to even talk about God’s presence since God is everywhere. In that case, argued Macquarrie, why speak of presence at all? In fact, it is precisely because we experience the presence of God in different ways that we can talk about God’s presence. We experience the presence of God when we pray, when we read the Bible, when we visit a church or shrine, or when we find ourselves watching the sunrise in the middle of the Catskill Mountains. But ultimately, Macquarrie argued, for the Christian, the Eucharist is the sine qua non of experiencing God’s presence. Speaking of the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, Macquarrie says,“If there were no particular places where one might find Christ present, I do not think he would be present anywhere.”
Simply put, temporal presence is the presence of God experienced now as opposed to the past or in the future. The presence of God in history is important: “‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.” (Exodus 3:6). Equally, we will experience God in the future, “And he who sat upon the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’” (Revelation 21:5). But God is also experienced now, in the present. This is expressed in the heart of our liturgy in many of the contemporary Eucharistic Prayers across all traditions when we say “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”
Spatial (or we could say local) presence is that which is experienced here as opposed to at a distance. For example, I FaceTimed my daughter in England yesterday; in one respect she was not present at all because she was in England and I was in New York, but in another sense, she was very present to me; I felt her presence even though I could not touch her. Soon I hope to see her, and when she walks in the room, her presence will not just be temporal, it will also be spatial – she and I will share the same space.
But personal presence implies communication and communion between two people. For example, I have a personal relationship with my daughter and we communicated yesterday, albeit through an electronic device. There are times when my wife and I sit in the car on a long journey and say nothing; our communion is deep yet there are no words. When she speaks to me, I feel her presence in a very personal way.
On the road to Emmaus, the two disciples experienced a new kind of presence of Christ and this would help them understand how he would be with them after his Ascension. While Jesus walked with them and explained the scriptures, they did not recognize him even though he walked with them in his Resurrection body – when they could have touched him. When he broke the bread their eyes were opened, yet he had vanished from their sight. Their hearts were burning; they had experienced his presence in a temporal way, a spatial way but also in a personal way – it was the real Jesus who had given them a promise: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)
This is what we celebrate in the Eucharist; Jesus is present in the Eucharistic action in a temporal way. We feel his presence now – the Eucharist is a sacrament that we repeat daily and, in many churches, several times a day. Christ is present in the here and now. The mass looks back to Calvary and forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb, but, nevertheless, Christ is experienced in the present moment.
Similarly, Christ is present in the Eucharist in a spatial or local way – we feel his presence and worship him. “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him that taketh away the sins of the world” – we stretch forth our hands in love and eat his body and drink his blood. His presence fills our individual lives: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
And the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is also personal. We gather as the body of Christ, to consecrate the body of Christ, to receive the Body of Christ in order to be the Body of Christ in order to build community, but we also receive his body individually. Christ comes to each one of us; it is why we call it ‘Holy Communion’ – we truly communicate with Jesus through the bread and the wine.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, of course, puts this far better in one of his beautiful Eucharistic hymns that is in our hymnal. One line, for me, sums up the mystery of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It encourages us not to try and understand the Eucharist like a mathematical equation, but, rather, to experience it: “Faith our outward sense befriending, makes the inward vision clear.” May the Lord come again into our lives today – now – in this place – and in our hearts.
I leave you, today, with a sonnet by Malcolm Guite.
‘Hide and Seek’ by Malcolm Guite
Ready or not, you tell me, here I come!
And so I know I’m hiding, and I know
My hiding-place is useless. You will come
And find me. You are searching high and low.
Today I’m hiding low, down here, below,
Below the sunlit surface others see.
Oh find me quickly, quickly come to me.
And here you come and here I come to you.
I come to you because you come to me.
You know my hiding places. I know you,
I reach you through your hiding-places too;
Touching the slender thread, but now I see –
Even in darkness I can see you shine,
Risen in bread, and revelling in wine.
Affectionately,
Your Pastor and Priest,
Carl
