A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Jesus as sacrament

It’s not uncommon for theologians to try and explain, or at least illuminate, the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion by making an analogy with the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the Person of Jesus.

Whether or not this is a case of trying to explain the obscure by the even more obscure, I’ve been wondering if it might be possible to shed some light on the meaning of the Incarnation by making an analogy with the Sacrament.

For instance, we don’t think of a sacrament as a transaction whereby we receive a certain amount of something called “grace.” Or if we do, there’s a good chance we have an excessively mechanical, or perhaps magical, understanding of what a sacrament is.

The Book of Common Prayer defines sacraments, of course, as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace” (BCP 857). Grace, in turn, is understood as “God’s favor towards, us, unearned and undeserved,” by which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills” (858). The concrete, visible things – the bread and wine and water – are signs of God’s grace, but not in a merely symbolic way. They actually communicate it.

So could the Incarnation and Atonement be understood in an analogous way? It’s no secret that theological explanations of the Person and Work of Christ have sometimes been excessively mechanical and transactional, and perhaps thinking in “sacramental” terms could help correct that.

It is sometimes suggested, at least implicitly, that there has to be some transaction (between God and the Devil, or the Father and the Son) before human beings can be received back into God’s favor. And the way this takes place is sometimes couched in equally transactional terms (the paying of a ransom or debt; the receiving of punishment).

This view seems to imply, much like the magical or mechanical view of the sacraments, that God must inject grace into the world where it was formerly lacking or absent. But what if we were to re-think the work of Christ along the lines suggested by the BCP‘s understanding of what a sacrament is?

There is no indication, for instance, that God’s favor is absent from us prior to the sacrament. Rather the sacrament is the means by which God has chosen to make his already existing favor effectually present to us.

Likewise, we could see the entire life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a sacrament of God’s grace. It’s not as though that grace was absent from the world prior to the Incarnation; the Bible describes Jesus as the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. This would seem to suggest that God’s grace was “there” all along, but that Jesus is the “outward and visible sign” of this grace.

At first sight this might seem to be a merely “exemplarist” view of the work of Christ – that Jesus is a “mere” symbol of some eternal truth about God’s love. But this is no more necessary than viewing the sacrament as a memorial or symbol of Christ’s presence.

Most Christians historically have seen the sacrament as the means by which God’s love and favor is specially communicated to us and in which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” And so, in Jesus God does the very same thing: communicates God’s gracious, forgiving, enlightening, and empowering love to us.

Seeing Jesus as a sacrament may also give us some inkling as to why the Incarnation was in some sense “necessary.” One of the aspects of sacramental Christianity that I’ve always found especially appealing is that it recognizes our status as fleshly, embodied beings.

The way we enter into fellowship with God is not by some spiritual “flight of the alone to the alone,” leaving behind the encumbrances of bodily existence. Rather, God graciously descends to be with us in a visible, tangible way, albeit in a way that confounds our expectations of what is proper for the Divine Majesty.

It may be, as Gerhard Forde has said, that as an abstraction God is always a terror to us. Only when God becomes concrete, through God’s self-enfleshment in Jesus, can we receive grace. This doesn’t necessarily mean that God isn’t gracious “outside” of or “before” Jesus; we recognize that other earthly things can be channels of grace besides the dominical sacraments.

But we believe by faith that God has promised to be present, to communicate grace to us in the bread, wine, and water. And similarly we believe that God has specially communicated the divine love to us in Jesus, even though it may well be possible that grace is available to those who have never heard of Jesus, or who, for whatever reason, have been unable to accept the Gospel.

I assume some actual theologian may have already tried to explain things along these lines. If so, I hope a reader more theologically informed than I am will let me know (as well as if this is total b.s. ;-))

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5 responses to “Jesus as sacrament”

  1. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    So the guy says to his friend, “Look. This fork is the goal line, see. And this salt shaker is the goalee.”

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  2. Rick Ritchie

    I think the analogies between the Incarnation and Real Presence do hold well, whether or not they successfully communicate to people.

    I think the transactional ways of looking at Redemption have some grounds in the text. I think they go bad when we elaborate further in that direction. But it isn’t like none of that language was used. We weren’t the ones to invent the idea that we were, for instance, “bought with a price.

    As to whether the favor was there “before the transaction,” there is a sense it had to be, or God would not have been motivated to fix the problem for us. But there is another sense in which, as you note, we can speak of the necessity of the Atonement. How without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.

    The thinking in your post seems motif-driven. And I think there is a lot of promise in theological motifs. Broad categories, when we are familiar with them, make it easy to identify when we’ve headed into problematic territory.

    As to your suggestion that “it may well be possible that grace is available to those who have never heard of Jesus, or who, for whatever reason, have been unable to accept the Gospel,” I have a suggestion. How would this be expressed in Scriptural language? Yes, “grace” is a Scriptural word. But “grace” being “available” is vague and may be substance-like in how we conceive of it apart from concrete instances. I suspect that when people shut the door to all hope here, they themselves have done a bit of elaboration. “No man cometh unto the Father but by me.” “Oh, I see. And I came to the Father when I said the prayer. So if they don’t say the prayer, they can’t get in, and it would be heresy to say otherwise.” I don’t think we’re stuck with that. But I wonder how a more hopeful scenario could be framed.

    One of my hopes is that Romans 10:18 is not “hijacking” Psalm 19 when it talks about the voice that has gone out to the ends of the earth. The heavens themselves tell us what we need to know, and not just Law, but Gospel, since what St. Paul is talking about is faith (verse 17), which the Law does not produce.

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  3. Lee

    Rick, thanks for your comment.

    You’re right, of course, that the “transactional” language is there (ransom, sacrifice, etc.). But I wonder how much of that language has its meaning radically subverted by the event of God becoming incarnate and suffering? For instance, sacrifice is usually understood as humans offering something to God in order to assuage the divine anger. But here God provides the sacrifice, which seems to at least call into question the transactional connotations that the language of sacrifice often carries.

    Also, we often talk about the sacrifice of Jesus and the forgiveness of sins in a kind of cause-and-effect way. We say that Christ won our forgiveness, or made it possible, or something like that. But if, as you point out, the intention to save comes from the Father (as surely it does), does this kind of cause-and-effect talk make sense? Perhaps the incarnation and its effects can’t be separated like that; could it be they are more closely connected: two aspects of the same event as it were? That, by joining divinity to humanity God just is forgiving us and drawing us into the divine life?

    Just thinking out loud here. And I wouldn’t want to drop the language of sacrifice, etc.; it’s there in the text and tradition, after all. But also it’s important, I think, not to import some idea of what “sacrifice” means that might be alien to the quite unique events of the biblical revelation.

    I also like your suggestion about Romans 10:18/Psalm 19. The idea is that grace – the announcement of God’s favor can be “heard” even though one doesn’t necessarily know about Jesus. I like this because it hints at a way to avoid the problem a lot of people fall into when they talk about the salvation of non-Christians: they usually end up saying that “good people” or “people who do their best” will be saved. But of course this is exactly what Luther was reacting against – the idea that if you “do your best” God is bound to grant you grace (and how do we know when we’ve don our “best” anyway?).

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  4. Rick Ritchie

    “Radically subverted.”

    Yes.

    Many points you make are made in Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor. (You probably know it, and perhaps quite well.) I liked where he introduced the word “aufgehoben” to mean the category had been transcended. But in the context, transcended meant something a bit different from “dumped.” It was fully fulfilled, but in the act of being fulfilled, shown to be a lesser category. It’s almost impossible to get all that across at any given time, as people tend either to be “dumpers” or “sticklers” only. Well, if you aren’t a “dumper,” then I trust what you’re trying to do.

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