MYSTICISM AND CHRISTOLOGY
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Moreover, such a flux and reflux of the mystical and Messianic readings of life is one of His most strongly
of Jesus.
marked characteristics. What, then, did the words and acts in which the Eucharist originated mean for those who heard them; before the of St. Paul had " received of the Lord " genius
and found in them the Mysterium Fidei, the shall never mystical focus of the Christian life? know yet that they were felt by the earliest Christians to be of unique significance is plain from the careful their secret,
We
:
the report of all three Synoptics. This much is clear essence of the rite, as it now appears in the is a gospels, drama of utmost self-donation, a sacramental imparting, :
1
The new life, the more abundant which Jesus knew Himself to possess, in virtue of which He dwelt in the Spiritual Kingdom, and with which He had struggled as the true Messiah or Liberator to infect other men, is here presented under the most solemn symbolic forms, as the " secret " of that Kingdom. It is, as Clement and Augustine afterwards called it, " the food of the full-grown" a divine sustenance which is given in the Here-and-Now, and yet is a foretaste of " in which man's " Messianic that banquet spirit, wholly lifted up into the Eternal Order, shall at last have full fruition of the Divine Life. Though the Eucharist was almost certainly understood by the first generation of a sharing, of Life.
vitality,
:
Christians in the eschatological sense alone, as the earnest of a transfigured life to come, the Synoptic writers are probably far reading history in the light of experience " blood simply meant for hearers of that time " for Hebrew thought the essence of since my life place, " Flesh with the life thereof, Cf. Gen. ix. 4, life resided in the blood. " which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat "; and Lev. xvii. II, The life and I have given it to you upon the altar of the flesh is in the blood to make an atonement for your souls for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul." All New Testament imagery concerning " blood of Christ " or of the " Lamb " must be the interpreted with 1
and
The words "
"
this
this
is
is
my
:
:
:
reference to this idea.