Mystical Supper

In the last issue of the article I challenged my readers to think about what they understood to be God’s Divine Plan for them and others? I shall not yet share my thoughts about God’s Divine Plan but, rather, continue with the Anaphor prayer I was parsing in the last several issues, the prayer to the Father that transitions into the actions of the Son when He literally gave us the means to experience His real and true presence with us, namely Holy Communion.

The prayer tell us that Jesus took bread and wine and declared to His disciples that, when they remembered what He did and repeated it, He would truly be in their presence.

In the Eastern Church we do not believe that the transformation of the gifts happens just when we remember the words of Jesus, when He said that the bread and wine were His body and Blood. We refrain from expressing when the gifts are transformed into His presence. We only know that when we pray to our Heavenly Father, remember the words of Jesus, and invoke God’s Spirit, that miraculously the gifts are changed (An aside. The Western Church has a different understanding of when this miracle takes place). We refrain from trying to pin-point the actions of God. We only believe and know that He is true to His word and that the miracle takes place.

Although the bread and wine that we pray over, in imitation of what Jesus did during His last meal with His disciples, truly become His Body and Blood, they become much more than that. They become, in a real way, Him, present in our midst. A living person is more than just their body and blood. Their spirit, their person and their essence makes them who they are. Our Eastern approach is beautifully summarized in one of the prayers that we say later in the Liturgy, and that is that we do not bow to flesh and blood but to You, our awesome God.

We truly believe that our awesome God, in the Person of the Son, is truly present with us and that He truly gives Himself to us if we are joined with Him.

We are joined with Him in several different ways when we: join Him in worshipping God; and put Him on by voluntarily acquiring His mind, His way of thinking and behaving. His gift to us in Holy Communion is His real presence to help us transform ourselves, living and thinking in a way that imitates the way that He lived and thought.