Mystical Supper

In the last issue I began to raise the issue of when the gifts of bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ – when Christ truly becomes present to us in the gifts of food, which represent human life.

The Western theologian’s of liturgy answer to this question is: at the moment when the priest pronounces the words of institution: this is my body… this is my blood. These words, for Western Catholics, constitute the “consecratory formula,” the formal, “necessary and sufficient” cause of the transubstantiation (changing of the gifts into the Body and Blood of Christ). We, as Eastern Christians, reject this notion. Eastern Christians believe and affirm that the transformation is only accomplished through the Epiklesis, the prayer of the invocation of the Holy Spirit. These words immediately follow the words of Christ.

We must remember that we believe, as Eastern Christians, that God accomplishes all things in Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Western Church established the reality of a “formula” by which the gifts are transformed because they envisioned a hypothetical situation. What if a bishop/priest should die during the liturgy at the anaphora. How do you deal with the gifts. Are they transformed or not. So, they reasoned, if the Amen is said to the words of Jesus, whether for the bread or wine, then those gifts are transformed.

The Eastern Church believes that this is all a mystery of faith and we cannot pin down when God decides to act. She professes her belief that God always acts in the Son (because he has a human nature and therefore is connected to the world) THROUGH the Holy Spirit which represents the power of God. So the Eastern Church states that she doesn’t know when the transformation takes place but she believes it can only happen after we (1) pray to the Father, (2) remember the words of the Son, and (3) invoke the Holy Spirit.

This approach, as you might guess, is in line with the Eastern Church’s understanding of how the Creed was originally expressed. In the Eastern version which we use, both the Son and the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father. In the Western version, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

A fine point? It all amounts to how we think that God works, even though we (i.e., Eastern Church) profess that we don’t really know HOW GOD WORKS. This is supposed to be a mystery, beyond our understanding.