Ninth Sunday after Trinity
9th August 2009

The Eucharist

The Gospel of St John does not include the details of the Last Supper mentioned in the other Gospels. Yet Chapter 6 of the Gospel, with its discourses about the Bread of Life, is clearly about the Eucharist.

At this 8.00 am service, we use the Eucharistic Liturgy of Thomas Cranmer - slightly updated for Common Worship. The Reformation was a reaction against the excesses of ritual and doctrine - the reformers rejected the idea that in the consecrated bread Christ - the Son of God - could be carried around and displayed. In fact, Cranmer believed that the full consecration of the Eucharist was not achieved by the end of the Eucharistic Prayer: it was completed only the faithful believer received communion. It is for this reason that Cranmer's original service has no words of invitation: Draw near with faith. To have had those words would have been to imply that the bread and the wine were now consecrated and could be received. Cranmer also placed the Gloria at the end of the service: it was at this point, in the light of the wonder of what had taken place, that the people would glorify God.

Over the years of course, the Church of England has moved away from this principle in the developing Eucharistic liturgy. The Alternative Service Book and now Common Worship both restore the structure of the Eucharist to a form very similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church. Many would say that it has a better structure; it flows better and it seems to meet the psychological and liturgical needs and expectations of the majority. But on Sunday mornings at 8.00 am, and on Wednesday mornings at 10.00 am, we retain the Prayer Book form; and although the words "Draw near with faith..." have been inserted in its Common Worship version, I prefer not to use them. I want to allow that Reformation spirit and the inspired contribution of Cranmer to this Church to prevail because I think he had a point. The reformers wanted to refocus the church on the priesthood of all believers.

Cranmer had been burnt at the stake by the time Elizabeth I (his goddaughter) came to the throne. One imagines Elizabeth constantly surrounded by catholic-minded Anglicans on one side and puritanical Anglicans on the other, all trying to get her to declare for them. She had her own mind of course: when, on her Accession, she was greeted by a party of Bishops all carrying candles she said, "Put away those tapers - we see well enough". Her reply when questioned about the Eucharist is said to have gone something like this: "As the Lord intended it, so I receive it". She was very shrewd and very wise in her difficult situation but I think she was also quite right; whatever we say about the Eucharist and however we conduct it and with whatever beliefs or conditions, it is entirely the work of God to come among us in bread and wine. During the 1988 Lambeth conference a bishop in Africa described how he had returned to his diocese after a long period of exile during which churches were closed and priests activities strictly curtailed. All over his country small groups of lay people had met to break bread together. Among them was a group of women in some far-flung village hut and, when he visited them, they naturally asked him to be the celebrant. He refused. "I want you" he said "this last time to do as you did when I and your priest could not be here"; and so they nominated one among themselves, and she said the prayer. The bishop looked around challengingly at those who were listening in that group at that conference and he said, "And which of you would say that the Lord was not there?"

Amen

© PCC St Martin's and St Paul's Canterbury 2008 - 2009