The second part of the trilogy which we are publishing to mark the tenth anniversary of Geoffrey Preston's death.
We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the outstanding young preacher Geoffrey Preston by publishing this trilogy. It was written not very long before he died and has not appeared in print before. Its other two parts, ‘The Church of the Son’ and ‘The Church of the Father’, we will be publishing in our July/August and September numbers.
Jesus of Nazareth is said to be the sacrament of the saving grace of God and of man’s response to God in that grace. In himself Jesus is the encounter between God and mankind, the Immediator of man and God, the Word of God made world and history, man in his concrete dimensions and the total nexus of his relationships taken up into God. According to the apostolic preaching, in him alone, in his ‘name’ alone, is there the means of passing from a lethal situation into the possibility of survival. If men are going to pass from the world that is doomed to death, that can only be by entering into him, into his name, by in some way becoming him, by living out the biography of the one who, alone, no longer belongs to the dead past. Living it out, amongst other ways, sacramentally. Sacramentally we put on Christ, we are conformed to Christ, we are made one body, one spirit, with him.An old problem reconsideredSacramentally we enter upon the life of Christ by the rites of initiation, or rather by the single but modulated initiation-rite of baptism-confirmation. In those Churches where Christian initiation (rightly or unfortunately) has come to be divided into two rites separated by a more or less lengthy interval of time, there has always been a serious problem about how to speak of confirmation, a problem that has compromised attempts at an effective catechesis of the sacrament and, incidentally, often created something of an embarrassment in speaking of the place of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. Only a very few theologians have felt able to deny that a baptized, unconfirmed person is a Christian.
The present renewal of the eucharistic liturgy can be seen as an attempt to remove some of the long-term effects of the imposition of extrinsic rites and ceremonies on the once-and-for-all given sign which is the means by which believers have access to the mystery of God in Christ. But what is that given sign? Bread and wine, certainly, but bread and wine precisely as bread and wine, in their full reality, bread demanding to be eaten to be bread and wine requiring to be drunk to become what it is. Not two substances which could be any other two substances, which could be say wood and iron, but bread and wine to be eaten and drunk. The sign is not therefore simply the two substances of bread and wine but all that these substances involve in the very understanding of them as bread and wine: people, and people to eat and drink them. The sign is the meal. The sign is the gathering of people eating and drinking the bread and wine, and the present liturgical reforms aim at making that sign as transparent as possible.Questions can of course be raised as to just how little of such a sign there has to be in order for it still to constitute the authentic sign. What is meant by ‘people’? Does there have to be anybody there at all for the sign to be the sign? And if obviously there has to be (since a sign of this sort is a sign only for people), then how many people?
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