In the Early Church the rite of Christian initiation was not divided. Three of the sacraments belong together: Baptism, the Holy Chrism (Confirmation), and the Eucharist. The Initiation described by St. Cyril, and later on by Cabasilas, included all three.
Sacraments are instituted in order to enable man to participate in Christ’s redeeming death and thereby to gain the grace of His resurrection. This was Cabasilas’ main idea. “We are baptized in order to die by His death and to rise by His resurrection. We are anointed with the chrism that we may partake of His kingly anointment of the deification. And when we are fed with the most sacred Bread and do drink the most Divine Cup, we do partake of the same flesh and the same blood Our Lord has assumed, and so we are united with Him, Who was for us incarnate, and died, and rose again… Baptism is a birth, and Chrism is the cause of acts and movements, and the Bread of life and Cup of thanksgiving are the true food and the true drink. In the whole sacramental and devotional life of the Church, the Cross and the Resurrection are “imitated” and reflected in manifold symbols and rites. All the symbolism is realistic. These symbols do not merely remind us of something in the past. Through these sacred symbols, the ultimate Reality is in very truth disclosed and conveyed. All this hieratic symbolism culminates in the august mystery of the Holy Altar. The Eucharist is the heart of the Church, the Sacrament of Redemption in an eminent sense. It is more than an “imitatio.” It is Reality itself, veiled and disclosed in the Sacrament.
It is “the perfect and final Sacrament,” says Cabasilas, “and one cannot go further, and there is nothing to be added.” It is the “limit of life” — ζωής τό πέρας. “After the Eucharist there is nothing more to long for, but we have to stay here and learn how we can preserve this treasure to the end.”
The Eucharist is the Last Supper itself, again and again enacted, but not repeated for every new celebration does not only represent, but truly is the same “Mystical Supper” which was celebrated for the first time by the Divine High Priest Himself, “in the night in which He was given up or rather gave Himself for the life of the world.”
The true Celebrant of each Liturgy is Our Lord Himself. This was stressed with great power by St. John Chrysostom on various occasions. “Believe, therefore, that even now it is that Supper, at which He Himself sat down. For this one is in no respect different from that one. For neither doth man make this one and Himself that one, but both this and that are His own work. When therefore thou seest the priest delivering it unto thee, account not that it is the priest that does so, but that it is Christ’s hand that is stretched out.” And again in hom. 82, 5, Col. F.44: “He that then did these things at that Supper, this same now also works them. We hold the rank of ministers. He who sanctifieth and changeth them is the same. This table is the same as that, and hath nothing less. For it is not that Christ wrought that, and man this, but He doth this too. This is that Upper Chamber, where they were then.” And “Christ now also is present, He who adorned that table is He who now also adorns this… The priest stands fulfilling a figure, but the power and grace are of God.”
All this is of primary importance. The Last Supper was an offering of the sacrifice of the Cross. The offering is still continued. Christ is still acting as the High Priest in His Church. The Mystery is all the same. The Sacrifice is one. The Table is one. The priest is the same. And not one Lamb is slain, or offered this day, and another of old; not one here, and another somewhere else. But the same always and everywhere. One very Lamb of God, “who ‘taketh’ the sins of the world,” even the Lord Jesus.
The Eucharist is a sacrifice, not because Jesus is slain again, but because the same Body and the same sacrificial Blood are actually here on the Altar, offered and presented. And the Altar is actually the Holy Grave, in which the Heavenly Master is falling asleep. Nicolas Cabasilas put this in these words: “In offering and sacrificing Himself once for all, He did not cease from His priesthood, but He exercises this perpetual ministry for us, in which He is our advocate with God for ever, for which reason it is said of Him, Thou art a priest forever.”
The resurrecting power and significance of Christ’s death are made manifest in full in the Eucharist. The Lamb is slain, the Body broken, the Bloodshed, and yet it is a celestial food, and “the medicine of immortality and the antidote that we should not die but live forever in Jesus Christ,” to use the famous phrase of St. Ignatius. It is “the heavenly Bread and the Cup of life.” This tremendous Sacrament is for the faithful the very “Betrothal of the Life Eternal.” Because Christ’s Death itself was the Victory and the Resurrection, this Victory and this Triumph do we observe and celebrate in the Sacrament of the Altar. Eucharist means thanksgiving. It is a hymn rather than a prayer. It is the service of triumphant joy, the continuous Easter, the kingly feast of the Lord of Life and glory. “And so the whole celebration of the Mystery is one image of the whole economy of our Lord,” says Cabasilas.
The Holy Eucharist is the climax of our aspirations. The beginning and the end are here linked together: the reminiscences of the Gospels and the prophecies of the Revelation, i.e. the fullness of the New Testament. The Eucharist is a sacramental anticipation, a foretaste of the Resurrection, an “image of the Resurrection” (ό τύπος της αναπαύσεως; the phrase is from the consecration prayer of St. Basil). The sacramental life of believers is the building up of the Church. Through the sacraments, and in them, the new life of Christ is extended to and bestowed upon the members of His Body. Through the sacraments the Redemption is appropriated and disclosed. One may add: In the sacraments is consummated the Incarnation, the true reunion of man with God in Christ.
Ο Christ, Passover great and most Holy! Ο Wisdom, Word, and Power of God! Vouchsafe that we may more perfectly partake of Thee in the days of Thine everlasting Kingdom. (Easter Hymn, recited by the priest at every celebration.)
~Fr. George Florovsky, The Eucharist and Redemption, taken from: Synaxis Orthodox Study Group, http://synaxisstudy.blogspot.com/2011/07/fr-george-florovsky-eucharist-and.html
