Audio only:
Joe explains how the early Church Fathers understood the Eucharist, and demonstrates how immensely powerful the Paschal meal in bringing us to eternal life.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And last episode I mentioned this. I’m really looking forward to just doing an episode on how Gregory of Nisa shows the Eucharist is connected to bodily resurrection and glorification because it’s incredible. Yes, Joe, I agree with you. The early Christians were convinced that the Eucharist was key to our rising from the dead. And at first blush, that idea seems pretty strange even to Catholics. And yet we find this connection being made over and over again by the earliest of Christians, even seemingly by Jesus himself. So today I want to explore this question in two parts. Number one, where do we find the early Christians making this connection? And number two, why? Now the quick side note, this is one of the reasons why I’m so incredibly grateful to those of you over on my Patreon, shameless joe.com, because it’s your financial support which makes it possible for me to both share the gospel and also just geek out about beautiful parts of the Christian faith like this.
Even researching and writing and recording these short episodes, it takes me a long time and it’s your generous support, which enables me to do it without having to live and badai by YouTube’s algorithm. Plus, you’re an incredible community. I mean, look at this delightful story from Audrey about how her 2-year-old learned to say God bless you by imitating the ends of my episodes. I love it. Now for the rest of you, if you’d like to join, there’s plenty of room for you over@shamelessjoe.com. But now let’s get back to this curious connection. Right around the year 1 0 7, Saint Ignatius, the Bishop of Antioch has been arrested and is being taken to Rome to be martyred, but the Romans tended not to feed prisoners very much. Now this helps to explain several things you might encounter. For instance, Jesus’s stress on visiting the imprisoned. If you leave them to themselves, they could die.
It’s also why the Roman governor of Felix permitted Christians to take care of St. Paul in prison. St. Ignatius is being escorted under Roman guard to Rome from Syria. He’s visited by Christians from the churches of Asia Minor, the area that we now know as Turkey, and he writes to these Christians about some of the difficulties that they’re facing. In particular, he writes to the Christians of Smyrna and he warns them about this heretical group called Dous who taught that Christ only appeared to have a human body since they didn’t believe that the divine could be truly united to corruptible flesh. Now, that’s a big problem because if Jesus doesn’t really have a body, then there’s no incarnation, then there’s no crucifixion, there’s no bodily resurrection, and also there’s no Eucharist. And so Ignatius warns that these heretics abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the father of his goodness raised up.
Again, that’s a powerful statement of Eucharistic theology from an early bishop, particularly since Ignatius is believed to be a former student of the Apostle John. But it’s actually the part that comes right after that that I want to focus on. He says, those therefore who speak against this gift of God incurred death in the midst of their disputes, but it were better for them to treat it with respect that they may also rise again. So Ignatius seems to take for granted that if you have the Eucharist in a right relationship with it respectful, you’ll rise again. But that if you spurned the Eucharist, you won’t, you’ll incur everlasting death instead. And this isn’t a stray comment either. In his letter to the Ephesians, he refers to the Eucharist as the medicine of immortality and the antidote to prevent us from dying, which causes that we should live forever in Jesus Christ.
Now that’s an amazing promise. Treat the Eucharist respectfully and you are immortal. Now, obviously Ignatius knows the word literally going to die. He is on his way to martyrdom after all. Instead, his point is that even though we’re all going to die, the Eucharist is powerful enough to overcome the grave and to cause us to live forever. So the Eucharist really is Jesus in the flesh and somehow receiving Christ in this way is key to our eternal life and our bodily resurrection. And you might be asking, but how Ignatius treats this connection as so obvious that he doesn’t seem to feel the need to explain it. But don’t worry, an explanation is coming. We get the first hints of an explanation from St. Justin Martyr. Now he’s written in the mid one hundreds, he talks about how the Eucharist isn’t ordinary food and drink instead just as the word became flesh in the incarnation, Justin says that when the bread and wine at mass are blessed by the prayer of his word, two things happen.
One, it becomes the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh. And two, our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished by the Eucharist. So the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, and the Eucharist somehow transforms or trans mutates our bodies as well. That first one I think is pretty predictable. The early Christians clearly believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The second one is very surprising that this somehow causes us to be changed, and we get a much more thorough explanation of how that all works in the latter part of the one hundreds. Now, now we’re up to about the year 180. Saint I of Leone is continuing a lot of these same themes and like Ignatius before Reina is writing against the heresy of gnosticism and is rejection of bodily resurrection. So how does Iranis make the case for bodily resurrection against gnosticism?
Well, he starts from the fact that the bread and wine literally become the flesh and blood of Christ. Now, I know that you’ll find some Christians today who no longer believe in this, but back in the one hundreds we see the earliest Christians took for granted that this was the Christian understanding of the Eucharist. Reina is even explicit that our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion. Now, if this is true, it shows that Christ wants to redeem our bodies, not just our souls. After all, if Christ is willing to transform mere bread into his body, then it makes sense to believe that he also wants to transform us, all of us, including our bodies into his body. Now, here again, you’ve got Christians today who will say, oh yeah, sure, we’re made to be part of the body of Christ, but they understand the body of Christ is some purely spiritual reality, kind of more of an idea.
But RNAs points out that the whole point of a body is that it’s visible. So the body of Christ isn’t some spiritual and invisible man, and this idea that the eucharistic body of Christ makes the church the body of Christ. This isn’t some crazy notion he’s dreamt up. St. Paul himself explicitly says that we are the body of Christ because we all partake of the one loaf. Now, if we are body and soul part of the body of Christ, then our bodies and our souls are meant to be glorified with Christ forever. Now, as Jesus says, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit so the grain of wheat dies and bears much fruit, and that then is transformed into the body of Christ in the Eucharist. So to Ernie says, our bodies which have been nourished by the Eucharist still die.
They’re deposited in the earth and they suffer decomposition there, but they shall rise at their appointed time. Now look, speaking for myself, I was blown away by how clear and how sophisticated the Eucharistic theology is of these early Christians, people like Ignatius and Justin and Nias, because remember, all of them are writing in the one hundreds, but they all understand this connection between the Eucharist and bodily resurrection in a way that I think many people today, including many of us Catholics just miss entirely. So why do the earliest Christians believe that there’s a connection between the Eucharist and bodily resurrection? Well, maybe the most obvious reason is because Jesus teaches this connection. In John six, Jesus says that he’s the living bread which came down from heaven, and that if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread which he shall give for the life of the world is his flesh.
And he says that he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day. That raising up at the last day is the resurrection of the dead. And so when we hear Jesus say that he who eats me will live because of me, and he who eats this bread will live because of me, he’s not just saying that our souls will fly off to heaven. He’s promising the redemption of our bodies. This is why the catechism of the Catholic Church calls the Eucharist, the seed of eternal life and the power of resurrection. But still, how does all of this work? Now, I personally love the explanation that St. Gregory of Nisa gives in his great catechism. Now he’s writing about 3 85, so he’s quite a bit later than the other Christians that we’ve heard from, but he does such a good job of explaining these things that these earlier Christians often kind of took for granted.
So if I may paraphrase his argument, he basically makes an argument with four steps. Step one, Jesus turned bread and wine into his body and blood through metabolism. So here’s some Bibles trivia for you. I’ve kind of given it away, but prior to the last supper, did Jesus ever turn bread and wine into his body and blood? This is a fun question to ask people who know about the Bible because the answer is yes. And he might say, well, where? Well, Jesus says in Luke seven that unlike John the Baptist who ate no bread and drank no wine, the son of man came eating and drinking. And so when Jesus ate bread and he drank wine, he metabolized it. He turned it into his body and blood. I don’t mean miraculously here, I mean in the very same way that you and I convert bread and wine into our bodies and our blood.
But why does that matter? Well, step two, Jesus does the Last Supper supernaturally what he’d done his entire life naturally. So the last supper, Jesus once again is going to transform bread and wine into his body and blood only this time, as Gregory points out, instead of doing it naturally, Jesus transforms the bread and wine instantly. And miraculously reading this, I’m reminded of CS Lewis’s argument in his book miracles that in every one of the miracles that Jesus performs, the incarnate God does suddenly and locally something that God has done or will do in general. In other words, the supernatural events that Jesus performs look like the natural events that the father performs. For instance, Jesus turns water into wine at the wedding Feast of Cana, but you know who else turns water into wine grapes? They soak up the rainwater and they turn them into what becomes wine.
Or you could say God the Father through nature, through grapes. Now, Lewis is going to call this the hereditary style. The son’s miraculous behavior looks like the father’s behavior in creating the order of nature. Contrast this with two things. When the devil tempts Jesus, for instance, he tries to get him to turn a stone into bread. That is not the hereditary style. There’s nothing in nature that resembles a stone becoming bread or second, you could imagine fairytales, fairytale stories don’t look like the miracles of Jesus. For instance, a pumpkin becoming a stage coach doesn’t resemble anything in nature to use Lewis’s terms. These are simply arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of nature. Christ never does that. He does not mock the laws of nature even when he supersedes him through a miracle. He’s always doing this in a way that reflects and honors what the Father has already done through the order of nature.
So Gregory’s point is that Christ’s supernatural action at the Last Supper in the Eucharist, step two looks like what the Father has already established in the order of nature. That’s step one. So the Eucharist has the look and feel of an authentic miracle rather than a demonic mockery or a fairytale. But Gregory isn’t just arguing that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ. Again, people knew that back then. He’s instead going to use that as a starting point to show us some things we might not know. Step three in the Eucharist, Jesus metabolizes us into his body. Now, we’ve already seen this point expressed in different ways by both St. RNAs and St. Paul. When we receive the body and blood of Christ, it’s not that we’re metabolizing him into our bodies so much as we are being metabolized, so to speak, to become his body.
We become one body through the Eucharist. Now, this was actually a critical realization for St. Augustine as he recounted in his confessions. When we feed on Christ, we don’t turn him into us. We are converted into him. And that naturally leads to step four by metabolizing us into his body. Jesus saves us from bodily corruption. Now this fourth of Gregory’s four steps is the one that I find the most mind blowing. He says that Christ disseminates himself and every believer through that flesh whose substance comes from bread and wine, blending himself with the bodies of believers to secure that by this union with the immortal man to maybe a sharer and incorruption. Now that’s a mouthful, literally. So let’s unpack it. Without a bunch of chemical preservatives, bread and wine, they go bad pretty quickly. The bread gets moldy, the wine becomes vinegar, but if you eat the bread, it won’t decompose.
It’ll be spared from corruption by becoming part of your body. It’s not as if a few days after you eat the bread, you suddenly get bread mold on your arm from where all those bread molecules went. No. Instead, by eating the bread and drinking the wine, those things now become part of your body and blood and can last and last is anyone who’s ever tried to work off those carbs will tell you. And Gregory’s point is that something similar happens to us, left to our own devices. You and I are destined for the grave and our bodies will corrupt and they’ll rot as surely as the bread will get moldy or the wine will become vinegar. So how does Christ spar us this fate? Through the Eucharist, he metabolizes us into his body and he makes us part of him. And so our bodies, once they are part of Christ last as long as Christ does, which is to say beyond the grave into eternity.
Now, this message is at the heart of the good news of the gospel, and it’s something that we badly need to preach more clearly after all. As int Wright observed in his book, surprised by Hope, many Christians today seem to have more or less agnostic view of the afterlife rather than a Christian one. Plenty of churchgoing Christians don’t believe in a future bodily resurrection. There’s this idea that we’re saved from the body rather than saved through the body. But that’s gnosticism in a nutshell. In contrast, Christianity has always taught that we are saved through the body, beginning with Jesus dying and rising bodily and culminating in us, rising bodily with him in glory. But even today, you’ll find people acting as if the soul is good and the body is evil, and these gnostic ideas, which are not Christian, have nevertheless crept into parts of Christianity itself. So where do we find these false teachings today and what can we do to combat them? Well, for the answer to that, you’re going to have to click this video to find out more. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.