The difference is important as it allows us to recognise that the Eucharist is central to “ordinary salvation” because it pertains to the heart of Christ’s love for humanity.[1] In terms of its requirement, our focus is not on “extraordinary salvation” because that would be to encroach into God’s sovereign freedom. In a sense, “extraordinary salvation” is nothing more than a shameful failure on our part to cooperate with God’s grace. Indeed!
Often it is touted that God’s salvation is universal. There are more non-Christians[2] than there are Christians. A pluralistic perspective views such diversity of religions as part of God’s universal salvific will. In other words, Christianity is not that special. All religions are supposedly the same. What this outlook fails to consider is Christianity’s minority status might not arise from God’s universal salvific will but rather from “OUR” bad examples. Through the centuries, we have behaved abominably. We have not been good stewards of Christ saving love.
If anything, “extraordinary salvation” just means the Lord has to “work harder”. Furthermore, the reality that 4/5 of the world remains unconvinced does not abrogate God’s salvific will through the Church of His Son. It only means that Christians have a demanding role to play in terms of living according to our belief that the Eucharist is the source and summit of our lives.
To recap, so far, we have established that God can choose to save extraordinarily. Precisely, it must be extraordinary because any other mode of salvation other than ordinary would run counter to His salvific will. What is clear is that in heaven there is no Eucharist. However, we are not in heaven and therefore, here on earth, we do require the Eucharist as food for the journey back to the Father and when we have arrived in heaven, the sign (Eucharist) must give way to the reality of (Jesus Christ).
While on earth, the Eucharist is prerequisite for salvation?[3] Perhaps our tepid conviction is symptomatic that our world has become inverted. We live in a world where bad is confused with the good, so it seems, “badass”! And it is the same inversion noted in the debate between “ordinary” and “extraordinary”. The “extraordinary” is preferred even though “ordinary” is what God has intended.
Our usage of the word “ordinary” suggests that it is common, ho hum or mundane and consequently uninteresting. Extraordinary suggests of grandiosity etc but the etymology of the word is “order”. Hence, the Eucharist is cosmological and ordered by the Lord. Salvation is via the Church and through His Church, the Jesus gives us the Sacraments.
The centrality of the Eucharist is illustrated in the context of John Chapter 6. On many occasions, Jesus corrected His disciples misunderstanding of His teaching. For example, when He pointed to the “leaven” of the Pharisees, He told them that He was speaking figuratively. However, in the case of this Eucharistic discourse, the entire dialogue takes place during the Passover. There is a Mosaic echo which harkens back to the time when to escape the 10th plague, the Israelites were ordered to eat the unblemished lamb and splatter its blood on doorposts and lintels. Jews do not drink blood because the belief that the soul or the life of a creature is in the blood. Here Jesus was categorical, almost agitating the crowd to break this Mosaic Law by His insistence that eternal life was predicated on the consumption of His Body and Blood.
The Israelites understood Jesus perfectly and because they realised that eternity has to be purchased through the eating and drinking of the Body and the Blood of Jesus, they balked. They could not overcome their psychological and religious distaste.[4]
There is no doubt that the Eucharist is the only food fit for our heavenly pilgrimage. It is not a new teaching. Even as early as St Ignatius of Antioch who said, “Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes”.[5]
The Institution Narrative itself confirms what Jesus meant that we should eat of Him because the change in language takes place from a 3rd person narrative to a 1st person performative utterance. “On the night HE was betrayed” to “Take this all of you and eat of it. This is MY Body”.
In conclusion, contexts are pertinent to reflexions. As we wrap up this Johannine detour, we have also arrived at a context which makes the Eucharist even more relevant.
A reality which has not fully permeated our consciousness is the proximity of “death”. When we speak of death, we are accustomed to the generic notion that people die in the course of nature. Somehow, this “lack of consciousness” might just be emblematic that too much of our faith has been in science all along. We appear “unafraid” simply because science will save us. Thus far, our deity has been the vaccine. Now that many are “fully vaccinated”, restrictions are slowly lifted up. Yet, in these last couple of weeks, the Delta variant is making inroads into our “six-decree of separation”. Many amongst us are touched intimately by the death of our spouse, children, parents, siblings, relatives, friends and etc.
It is in the context of those who are dying around us that we must recognise that the pandemic is not only fearful. For more than a year, we have focused on staying alive to the point that we have become forgetful. We have forgotten that the Eucharist is the food for the immortality steeped in the desire to stay alive. The Eucharist is the only nourishment that can immortalise and divinise us. If we lack this sense of urgency, perhaps the explanation can be found in what I mentioned earlier about the inversion between “ordinary” and “extraordinary”. We seem to have arrived at a plane where we do not need to change for God, that is, transformed through our divinisation. In this plateau, it is God who needs to change for us by “approving” whatever choices we fancy. It is amnaesia when we forget that the Eucharist is the proper food for our immortalisation. Even as we pray for the pandemic to end, may this Eucharistic desert remind us that the Body of Christ is the only key to our divinisation. Therefore “Grant us, almighty God, that we may be refreshed and nourished by the Sacrament which we have received, so as to be transformed into what we consume”.
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[1] He saves us ordinarily through the Church. He saves extraordinarily but always through the Church because it cannot be that the Head works independently of the Body.
[2] This label is now considered politically incorrect. A term more in vogue term “Other Religions”.
[3] A question like this must be set in the context of the discussion of ordinary vs extraordinary. In a way, it begs the question that if it were required, what about the 4/5 of the world’s population? And would this question of necessity be reduced to “your god vs my god” and who is the stronger god?
[4] The Jews are not the only ones rejecting the Eucharist. The same rejection of Jesus teaching on the Real Presence can be detected from the Protestant focus on the phrase that Jesus used. “The flesh has no avail”. Grammar itself will indicate that Jesus did not say “MY flesh” but refers to the flesh which is a reference to human nature “APART” from grace or apart from the Spirit.
[5] Letter to the Smyrnaeans.
