Advent and Communion (part 1): "Love bade me welcome"

Advent may be an unlikely season for launching a short series of reflections on the Eucharist. Lent, especially the days leading up to Holy Week, or perhaps Paschaltide, might seem more fitting. However, the weeks of Advent are focused on the coming or arrival of the Lord, as the term “advent” makes evident, and this theme has obvious eucharistic implications. In one of his best-known sermons, St. Bernard of Clairvaux stated that there are, in fact, three advents of Christ. “The third coming,” he wrote, “lies between the other two… In his first [coming], Christ was our redemption; in the last, he will appear as our life; in his intermediate coming, he is our comfort and our rest.” Bernard speaks of this “intermediate advent” as Christ and the Father (in the Holy Spirit) coming to indwell the human heart. This occurs, he says, through the constant consumption and keeping of the Lord’s Word (“If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him”; Jn. 14:23). Bernard speaks of this union with the Word – and for Bernard, this always refers back to the eternal Logos, the Son of God – in strikingly eucharistic terms: “Think of the Word of God in the way you think of your food… Feed on it, digest it, allow its goodness to pass into your body so that your affections and whole way of behavior is nourished and transformed. Do not forget to eat your bread and your heart will not wither.” [1] (I think it not at all unlikely that the famous collect of Thomas Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer for the Second Sunday in Advent – and Cranmer certainly read Bernard as did all the Reformers – was partly influenced by this same sermon: “Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ”). Although Bernard’s homiletic stress was on “the Word of God,” he would have regarded the Word as joined inextricably to the Eucharist. Both are received together, and through them the partaker “houses” God within himself (as the communicant says in the Latin Mass, Domine, non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea; “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my soul shall be healed”; cf. Matt. 8:8). This brings me back to Advent and this short series of meditations, in which the Lord’s Supper will be considered in terms of Christ’s coming to us. In the Blessed Sacrament, very simply, we welcome the advent of Christ. This will be made clear, I hope, in these reflections, in which I’ll be moving successively backward in history until I end them in the first century.