In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, One God. Amen.
My beloved, welcome to a third part of the third lecture in our deep dive of St. Cyril of Alexandria's understanding of the Holy Eucharist. If you've been paying attention with us on this third lecture, we began by discussing St. Cyril's Christology. We asked the question of Who is Jesus Christ? We then moved on to try to understand how it is that the body of the Lord Jesus Christ is the very body of the Word incarnate; it was not somebody else's body.
And now, we're at the point where we're going to begin to realize if it is His very body and it has taken on His very attributes, then our belief that the Eucharist is the body of the Lord Jesus, that will then translate into understanding fully that the attributes of the Word of God incarnate are also found within the attributes of His very body, which is found on the altar, which is the Eucharistic offering. Let's go ahead and take a look together.
And he goes on to make it even clearer. He ties Christology and Eucharist together and he does this as an argument against Nestorius. So, St. Cyril writes to Nestorius and he tells him: You're wrong in your Christology. Nestorius writes back and he says: Sorry, you're the one who's wrong, it's not me. So St. Cyril writes back to him again and he gives him more evidence... And among the evidence that he gives to Nestorius to try to prove him wrong or to try to educate him and enlighten him, he speaks of the Eucharist; he gives the example of the Eucharist. Listen to the following. This is in Letter 17 of the collection of the letters when St. Cyril is writing to Nestorius directly. He says the following... he says:
''...we celebrate the unbloody sacrifice in the churches... [the unboody sacrifices: this is the same language that we see in the liturgy of St. Cyril, the liturgy that was written originally by St. Mark] we celebrate the unbloody sacrifice in the churches, and we thus approach the spiritual blessings and are made holy, becoming partakers of the holy flesh and of the precious blood of Christ, the Savior of us all. And we do this, not as men receiving common flesh [we are not just receiving the body of someone else], far from it, [for] truly the flesh of a man sanctified and conjoined to the Word according to a unity of dignity, or as one having had a divine indwelling, but as (...) truly life-giving and very own flesh of the Word himself.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 17, to Nestorius)
We are receiving truly life-giving and very own flesh of the Word, the Logos himself. And I want you to notice how he says we're not receiving common flesh nor truly... he says it here... not common flesh nor the flesh of a man sanctified nor of a man who is conjoined to the Word, no! It's none of those ideas that you have, Nestorius. This is truly His body, not someone else's, but truly the life-giving and very own flesh of the Word himself. This is what
we are receiving at the altar, says St. Cyril. And he is using this as the very argument against Nestorius to prove to him what? To prove to him that in the person of Jesus Christ, there is perfect divinity and humanity united in the person of the Lord Jesus.
St. Cyril doesn't stop there. He continues to educate Nestorius and he says:
''For, being life according to [the] nature as God, when he was made one with his own flesh, He proclaimed it life-giving.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 17, to Nestorius)
Now do you see the argument that St. Cyril is making? He is saying here that because the Word of God is life himself... and he says this, he says: I am the way, I am the truth and I am the life... so because He is life by nature, then He proclaims His body as life-giving. So because the attribute is found within His divinity, now that His body has become His own (He's united it to himself), His body now takes on that attribute. So because He is life, His body becomes life-giving.
''Wherefore even if he may say to us, ''Amen, I say to you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood,'' we shall not conclude that his flesh is of some one as of a man who is one of us, (for how will the flesh of a man be life-giving according to its own nature?), but as being truly the very flesh of the Son who was both made man and named man for us.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 17, to Nestorius)
Because it is His body, that means that this body that we have here, we see it the same way that we would see the body which the Lord Jesus Christ himself took on. So, my beloved, really what's happening here is that we really do believe that divinity does not part from His humanity for a single moment nor a twinkling of an eye, which means that that body that we have on the altar, that offering that we have in the form of bread and water and wine, those are His. We are participating in Him.
So here, St. Cyril is actually writing to a bishop by the name of Calosirius. As he is writing to him, he is writing to him and he is telling him: There are people who live among you who are causing troubles and who are saying things that are very foolish. Among the things that the people were saying at that time, some people were saying that...
At that time, you have to understand, the Church was celebrating something called the pre- sanctified liturgy. The pre-sanctified liturgy was a liturgy that the Church used to pray in the early Church in Alexandria and it is still found today among some of the Orthodox churches, where what they would do is that they would pray over the offering and they would keep a portion of the Eucharist for a later time. So that way, they can have a shorter celebration. They no longer have to celebrate the entire liturgy and sanctify it and pray the entire institution again, but they would have a portion of the Eucharist that was reserved and set
aside and kept safe for a while and then they would simply redistribute it to the people if they wanted to come and receive the Eucharist. This was called the pre-sanctified liturgy.
So some people were arguing and saying that no, no, no, if you keep it overnight, it loses its effect; it loses its power. So St. Cyril was saying this is foolish: What do you mean it loses its power? How can you say that the Eucharist loses its power that is life-giving, that it loses its power that was united to the divine, the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ? If it never happened to the person of Christ, it doesn't happen to the Eucharist. Do you see how he puts both of them together? Listen to what he says. He says:
''I hear that [some] say [that] the consecrated sacramental elements [the Eucharist] lose their hallowing efficacy if a portion remains over to another day. To say that is lunacy [he says it's craziness]─Christ is not altered nor will his sacred body change; no, the power of the sacrament, its life-giving grace, inheres in it constantly.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Select Letters, Letter to Calosirius)
That power that was given to His body can never be removed. So people who are saying it loses its mystery because it stays overnight... and I think they're comparing it to the μάννα (manna). You know how in the Old Testament with the time of Moses, the Lord gave a commandment to the people of Israel that if you hold on to the manna overnight, it goes rotten, it goes bad, you have to get rid of it: you can only take it for the very next day. But here, St. Cyril is saying this is... this is foolishness, this is craziness, he says: Christ is not altered nor will His sacred body change, because the power that is found within His body inheres in it constantly.
My beloved, this is a very beautiful testimony to what we believe about the body and the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Truly it has within it the very power and the very divine elements and characteristics and attributes of the Word of God, the Logos who is begotten of the Father before all ages.
So, our Lord Jesus Christ is very clearly this bread of life that gives life to the entire world. In his commentary in the Gospel of St. John, St. Cyril continues and he begins to explain how it is that this bread is offered to you and me. In the same way that it unites His divinity and His humanity, it now has the power to unite us to the Lord Jesus Christ. So he says:
''Let us not work,'' as the Savior says, ''for food that spoils.'' (...) But spiritual bread strengthens the heart and preserves a person to eternal life. Christ himself promises [that] he will supply us with this bread when he says ''which the Son of Man will give you,'' knitting what is human together with what is God-befitting and yoking together the entire mystery of the oikonomia with the flesh in the world. He is also hinting in a way at the mystical and more spiritual food by which we live in him, sanctified in body and soul.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, Volume 1)
When the Lord says that He will give us this bread of life, He was speaking of His very body; He was speaking of His own flesh. And this is revealed to us at that mystical Last Supper when the Lord turns to His disciples and He says: take, eat of it all of you, for this is my body... for this is my blood... this is the covenant...; this is the renewing of everything; this is how you will have life within you forever; this is how you will remember me. And here, the word remember is not just memory; it's how we keep Him alive; this is how He is constantly present within us. St. Cyril continues yet again and he talks about how this body is full of the very activities and the powers of the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. He says:
''The holy body of Christ then gives life to those whom it enters and preserves them [in] incorruptibility when it is mixed with our [body] [when it comes into us and it mixes with us, it gives us the very attributes that He has]. After all, it is understood to be the body of none other than him who is life by nature. It has in itself the full power of the Word, who is united to it. It is endowed with the Word's qualities, as it were, or rather it is filled with his activity by which all things receive life and are kept [into] existence.'' (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on John, Volume 1)
My beloved, this could not be any clearer. It is very, very clear to all of us that what St. Cyril believes is that this body belongs to Him who is life by nature, that this body is the one that is filled with the power of the Word of God; it is filled with the power of the Logos; it is the qualities of the Word that are found within this very Eucharistic offering that we have before us.
So now, what we have seen, and it is very clear to us, that St. Cyril's Christology (who he believes Christ is) immediately has an impact on what he believes is found within the mystery and the beauty and the power of the Eucharist. So, the way he views the person of Jesus Christ is transformed into also what he believes is to be found within the Eucharist, because the Eucharist, to St. Cyril, is the very body of the Word of God who is incarnate.
So, my beloved, this is what we had to discuss first before we get into the next steps. Now that we understand how St. Cyril sees the Eucharist, let us see how St. Cyril explains to us, and we'll discuss this the very next time, how the Eucharist brings us from a state of corruption into a state of incorruptibility. We'll try to understand a little bit more what this meaning is. When we speak of corruption and incorruption, what do we mean by this? And then we will speak about how the Eucharist itself offers us this very state of incorruption.
Until then, my beloved, I pray that you are safe. Please keep me in your prayers. To God be all glory now and forever and unto the ages of all ages. Amen.
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