Hebrews 7:8

EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF THE EUCHARIST

‘It is witnessed that He liveth.’

Hebrews 7:8

Amidst the manifold, the inexhaustible significance of the Holy Communion, there is one side or element not very often dwelt upon, but which is fit to be of the utmost help in some states of the soul. I mean the evidential aspect of it.

I. It is the supreme thanksgiving of the Church; and this it has been, in all reasonable certainty, from the very first. And from the very first, from a time long before the writing of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, it has been the commemoration of precisely the Lord’s Death. To us, habituated to Christianity, the collocation of Eucharist and Crucifixion is hardly seen, without an effort, to be the immeasurable and eloquent paradox which it is.

II. But reflection as simple as possible carries us to the consideration, which then only gains in felt solidity and force as we test it from every side, that nothing could conceivably have put those two things together—could have called out the adoring Thanksgivings of the Church in immediate connection with the murderous execution of her Lord—but His victory, out and out, and from every point of view, over death; His resurrection from the dead, ‘in the power of an indissoluble life.’

III. Do we want to reassure ourselves that, in the faith by which we live, the holy love-power of the Unseen and an impregnable history fuse themselves into one unique truth of light and peace? Let us frequent the Holy Communion. There, made concrete to our very senses, is the whole Gospel of the grace of God. There, poured at the same moment into our reason and into our love, is the certainty, across all enigmas, that Jesus died and rose again.

—Bishop H. C. G. Moule.