In Christ, God has reunified humanity. From henceforth and without limit of time or space, it is nothing other than the Body of God. That is what Cabasilas meant when he said that people are more truly related to each other in Christ than they are according to the flesh. Carnal kinship leads to death, kinship in Christ to eternity. The blood that springs from the pierced side of Christ, the wine of the Eucharist, according to the Fathers, intoxicates us with this great love.
The unity of the Blood answers to the diversity of the Fire; indeed they are inseparable, for the Fire is already burning in the Blood. The Spirit is fire, the blood is red; faith, childish yet profound, understands the mystery, that the blood is the original water – the life of the world – set on fire by the Spirit. So the Blood is not only red but warm; in the Eastern Churches, where all the faithful receive the communion of the blood of Christ, a little hot water, symbolizing the ‘fire of the Holy Spirit’, is mixed with the wine beforehand.
While we are a single Man in Christ, cleansed and united by the same Blood, each of us is a unique Person in the Holy Spirit. On the day of Pentecost the flames of the Spirit divided, as they have done ever since, each lighting up an irreducible inner being, establishing its freedom, confirming its particular vocation, bringing to life a personal existence. To be a person is to affirm, within and for the sake of communion, something which has never existed before.
So Christians must not only be integrated into Christ’s unifying Body. They must also freely express in their lives, according to their own vocations, the power of resurrection that this Body contains.
The Church as the Body of Christ requires an attitude of respect, loyalty and obedience, that obedience to death which we see in Christ; but the Church as the extension of Pentecost calls for courage, imagination, the creative transformation of eros, all the conflict experienced by the conscious personality exercising its freedom. But the sole purpose of this conflict is to bring about a communion that is free from the opposing tendencies to individualism and collectivism, self-isolation and fusion. The obedience, ultimately, is the obedience of all to all, so that all may grow together to maturity in love and freedom. Humanity, being one in Christ, is called to the endless diversity of the Spirit.
In its essential nature, that of the womb of a new humanity, the Church is neither a ‘superperson’ nor the mere aggregation of inspired individuals. It tends at the same time towards unity and diversity. The Trinity, exerting its magnetic attraction, ensures that both the unity and the diversity, the one no less than the other, are unconditional.
We must not think of a person as a cell in a body. Each person, while a member of the one body, is complete in itself. Each one is sufficiently important to the risen Christ to be received by him face to face in his kingdom. There is no question of any comparison; Christ prefers each person. We often think of Christ’s love for humanity as if it were egalitarian, repeated over and over again, but such love would be only an abstraction. There are failed monks, stranded between heaven and earth, who talk thus as if God’s charity were impersonal. But God certainly prefers the one who is mad with love, who loves one only, to the death. Love is always a preference. And Christ prefers each one. He turns to each to say, you are the one I choose. For him each one is of absolute worth, and absolute means not being part of anything else, containing everything. The saint contains within himself the whole of humanity, the whole universe, because he has within himself that mad love of God for everyone and everything, that love in which alone he himself can exist.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
