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Introduction by Gregory Peter XV Cardinal Agagianian. Merton's subject in this book is the sacrament of the Eucharist.
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Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, is perhaps the foremost spiritual of the twentieth century. His diaries, social commentary, and spiritual writings continue to be widely read thirty years after his untimely death in 1968.
I
UNTO THE END
1. Christ’s Love for Us
In writing or speaking of the Blessed Sacrament, which is the very heart and focus of the whole Christian life, there are two extremes to be avoided. On one hand we must not degrade the great sacramental mystery to the level of mere sentimentality by an abuse of pious imagination, and on the other hand we must not treat that mystery in such pure theological abstractions that we forget that it is the great sacrament of God’s love for us. The simplicity of the Gospels keeps us from either of these extremes.
The Gospels tell us the sublimest mysteries of our faith in terms that are concrete and easy for any human mind to understand. Of the four evangelists, no one has given the loftiest revealed truths a more concrete embodiment than St. John the author of the Fourth Gospel. The disciple whom Jesus loved opens his account of the Last Supper and of the Passion with these deeply moving words: “Before the feast of the Passover, knowing that the hour had come for Him to pass out of the world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them unto the end” (John 13:1). And from these words it is immediately clear that the Sacrament and Sacrifice of the Eucharist which Jesus instituted at the Last Supper are, like His Passion and Resurrection which they perpetuate until the end of time, the ineffably perfect embodiment of His Love for us. I say “embodiment” rather than expression, because in this divine sacrament the infinite Love of God continues to be incarnate, to dwell among us in His bodily substance, hidden beneath the species of Bread and Wine.
The Christian life is nothing else but Christ living in us, by His Holy Spirit. It is Christ’s love, sharing itself with us in charity. It is Christ in us, loving the Father, by His Spirit. It is Christ uniting us to our brothers by charity in the bond of this same Spirit.
Jesus often expressed His desire to share with us the mystery of His divine life. He said that He came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly (John 10:10). He came to cast that life of charity like fire upon the earth, and He longed to see it enkindled. He especially desired that He might undergo the “baptism” of His Passion and death, because He knew that by this alone He would be able to incorporate us into His mystery, and make us, with Himself, sons of God. No wonder then that He said He was “straitened,” that is to say He felt like one bound and confined, like a prisoner in chains, until this baptism was accomplished. His infinite charity, imprisoned within His Sacred Heart, longed to burst out of its confinement and communicate itself to all mankind, for as God, He is substantial goodness, and the very nature of the good is to be diffusive of itself.
That is why the Church, in her liturgy, continues to apply to Christ in the Blessed Eucharist those words which Jesus spoke to the suffering men of His time: “Come to me all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you”1 (Matth. 11:28). For in the Eucharist the Christ of the Last Supper still breaks bread with His disciples, still washes their feet to show them that unless He abase Himself and minister to them they can have no part in Him (John 13:8). In the Eucharist, He still blesses the sacred chalice and hands it to those He loves. There is only one difference. At the Last Supper, Christ had not yet suffered, died and risen. Now, at our daily Mass, the Christ Who enters silently and invisibly to become present in the midst of His disciples is the Christ Who sits in glory at the right hand of God the Father in heaven. It is Christ the immortal King and Conqueror. It is Christ Who, having died once for us, “dieth now no more” (Rom. 6:9). At the same time, He comes to us in all the simplicity, the poverty, the obscurity which we have learned, from the Gospels, to associate with His Incarnation.
In rising from death, Jesus lost nothing of His humanity. Ascending in glory into the inaccessible mystery of the Godhead, His throne, He did not cease to love us with the same human tenderness and completeness which St. John describes in three simple words: “unto the end.” The Blessed Eucharist opens up to us the depths of meaning which those three words contain.
In saying that Jesus loved His own “unto the end,” the evangelist is not merely telling us that Our Savior loved us to the very end of His earthly life, that He loved us so much that He died for us. Jesus said: “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). And yet Jesus Himself has done more than lay down His life for us. He has loved us with a love that cannot be confined by the ordinary boundaries of human life. In giving us the Eucharist as a “memorial” of His passion, death and resurrection, He has made present, for all time, the love with which he died for us. More than that, He has made the Passion itself present in mystery. And He Himself, Who knew and saw us by His divine foreknowledge when He blessed bread in the Cenacle and when He took up His Cross, wills to be substantially present in the Eucharist, to know us and love us, to share His presence and love with us sacramentally until the end of time.
Now this desire of Christ was far more than an expression of the purest human tenderness. It is not merely as a gesture of fond affection that He remains with us in the Eucharist. His divine work was accomplished, objectively, when He breathed forth His soul on the Cross. But, as He said through the lips of the Psalmist (Ps. 15:10) there would be no value in His Blood if it went down into corruption. He consecrated Himself as a sacrificial offering (John 17:19) in order that we might be “sanctified in truth” (idem.). If He comes to us in the Blessed Sacrament, He comes with work to do: not in Himself, but in us. And what is this work? John tells us, in the great eucharistic chapter of the Fourth Gospel: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 6:29). And if we know the Gospels, we realize that the word “believe” here implies far more than a simple intellectual assent to revealed truth. It means the wholehearted acceptance not only of the Gospel message but of the very person of Christ. It means doing the works of Christ, for “he who believes in me, the works that I do he also shall do” (John 14:12). It means loving Christ, and by virtue of that love receiving the Spirit of Christ into our hearts. It means keeping His commandments, particularly loving one another (John 14:21). It means realizing that Christ is in the Father, and we in Christ, and Christ in us (John 14:20).
In a word, the work Christ does in the world, through the action of His Spirit, through His Church, and through His holy sacraments, is the work of incorporating and transforming us into Himself by charity. This is the work above all of the Holy Eucharist.
Now in the reception of the sacraments, it is of course first of all necessary that we believe in Christ, Who sanctifies us through the sacraments. We must be baptized Christians. We must live according to our baptismal vows, and renounce sin. We must consecrate ourselves to God and to His divine charity. We must live unselfishly, that is to say, we must find our own fulfillment in loving God and other men. But in order that the sacraments may produce their full effect in us, in order particularly that our eucharistic life may be really a life and not a mere outward formality, we must strive to increase not only our appreciation of the sacramental mystery itself, but also our understanding of the love of Christ Who is present and Who acts on us in the Sacrament.
These two are simply different aspects of the same thing, which is Christ’s love for us. On the one hand, the marvelous reality of Christ’s sacramental presence, a mystery of God’s wisdom and power, bathes and purifies our intelligence with a clean light that awakens the depths of our will to a love beyond all human affection. On the other hand His love for us awakens in our hearts a spiritual instinct to love Him in return, and by this love we come to know God.
Love for God is the deepest fulfillment of the powers implanted by God in our human nature which He has destined for union with Himself. In loving Him, we discover not only the inner meaning of truths which we would otherwise never be able to understand, but we also find our true selves in Him. The charity which is stirred up in our hearts by the Spirit of Christ acting in the depths of our being makes us begin to be the persons He has destined us to be in the inscrutable designs of His Providence. Moved by the grace of Christ we begin to discover and to know Christ Himself as a friend knows a friend—by the inner sympathy and understanding which friendship alone can impart. This loving knowledge of God is one of the most important fruits of eucharistic communion with God in Christ.
St. Paul, in his Epistles, repeatedly sums up the whole meaning of the mature Christian life. Writing to the Ephesians, he tells them how important it is for them “to be strengthened with power through His Spirit unto the progress of the inner man and to have Christ dwelling through faith in your hearts, so that being rooted and grounded in love you may be able to comprehend with all the saints . . . and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge, in order to be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:16-19). Here in a few words we see something of the purpose of Holy Communion, considered as the summit of the life of faith and of the sacraments. Nourished by the Gospel message, by the life of fraternal solidarity in Christ, by liturgical and private prayer, the Christian finds that his inner life reaches its highest peak of ever increasing intensity when, in his eucharistic communion with the Lord, he is united directly and sacramentally to the Incarnate Wor...
UNTO THE END
1. Christ’s Love for Us
In writing or speaking of the Blessed Sacrament, which is the very heart and focus of the whole Christian life, there are two extremes to be avoided. On one hand we must not degrade the great sacramental mystery to the level of mere sentimentality by an abuse of pious imagination, and on the other hand we must not treat that mystery in such pure theological abstractions that we forget that it is the great sacrament of God’s love for us. The simplicity of the Gospels keeps us from either of these extremes.
The Gospels tell us the sublimest mysteries of our faith in terms that are concrete and easy for any human mind to understand. Of the four evangelists, no one has given the loftiest revealed truths a more concrete embodiment than St. John the author of the Fourth Gospel. The disciple whom Jesus loved opens his account of the Last Supper and of the Passion with these deeply moving words: “Before the feast of the Passover, knowing that the hour had come for Him to pass out of the world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them unto the end” (John 13:1). And from these words it is immediately clear that the Sacrament and Sacrifice of the Eucharist which Jesus instituted at the Last Supper are, like His Passion and Resurrection which they perpetuate until the end of time, the ineffably perfect embodiment of His Love for us. I say “embodiment” rather than expression, because in this divine sacrament the infinite Love of God continues to be incarnate, to dwell among us in His bodily substance, hidden beneath the species of Bread and Wine.
The Christian life is nothing else but Christ living in us, by His Holy Spirit. It is Christ’s love, sharing itself with us in charity. It is Christ in us, loving the Father, by His Spirit. It is Christ uniting us to our brothers by charity in the bond of this same Spirit.
Jesus often expressed His desire to share with us the mystery of His divine life. He said that He came that we might have life, and have it more abundantly (John 10:10). He came to cast that life of charity like fire upon the earth, and He longed to see it enkindled. He especially desired that He might undergo the “baptism” of His Passion and death, because He knew that by this alone He would be able to incorporate us into His mystery, and make us, with Himself, sons of God. No wonder then that He said He was “straitened,” that is to say He felt like one bound and confined, like a prisoner in chains, until this baptism was accomplished. His infinite charity, imprisoned within His Sacred Heart, longed to burst out of its confinement and communicate itself to all mankind, for as God, He is substantial goodness, and the very nature of the good is to be diffusive of itself.
That is why the Church, in her liturgy, continues to apply to Christ in the Blessed Eucharist those words which Jesus spoke to the suffering men of His time: “Come to me all you who labor and are burdened, and I will refresh you”1 (Matth. 11:28). For in the Eucharist the Christ of the Last Supper still breaks bread with His disciples, still washes their feet to show them that unless He abase Himself and minister to them they can have no part in Him (John 13:8). In the Eucharist, He still blesses the sacred chalice and hands it to those He loves. There is only one difference. At the Last Supper, Christ had not yet suffered, died and risen. Now, at our daily Mass, the Christ Who enters silently and invisibly to become present in the midst of His disciples is the Christ Who sits in glory at the right hand of God the Father in heaven. It is Christ the immortal King and Conqueror. It is Christ Who, having died once for us, “dieth now no more” (Rom. 6:9). At the same time, He comes to us in all the simplicity, the poverty, the obscurity which we have learned, from the Gospels, to associate with His Incarnation.
In rising from death, Jesus lost nothing of His humanity. Ascending in glory into the inaccessible mystery of the Godhead, His throne, He did not cease to love us with the same human tenderness and completeness which St. John describes in three simple words: “unto the end.” The Blessed Eucharist opens up to us the depths of meaning which those three words contain.
In saying that Jesus loved His own “unto the end,” the evangelist is not merely telling us that Our Savior loved us to the very end of His earthly life, that He loved us so much that He died for us. Jesus said: “Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). And yet Jesus Himself has done more than lay down His life for us. He has loved us with a love that cannot be confined by the ordinary boundaries of human life. In giving us the Eucharist as a “memorial” of His passion, death and resurrection, He has made present, for all time, the love with which he died for us. More than that, He has made the Passion itself present in mystery. And He Himself, Who knew and saw us by His divine foreknowledge when He blessed bread in the Cenacle and when He took up His Cross, wills to be substantially present in the Eucharist, to know us and love us, to share His presence and love with us sacramentally until the end of time.
Now this desire of Christ was far more than an expression of the purest human tenderness. It is not merely as a gesture of fond affection that He remains with us in the Eucharist. His divine work was accomplished, objectively, when He breathed forth His soul on the Cross. But, as He said through the lips of the Psalmist (Ps. 15:10) there would be no value in His Blood if it went down into corruption. He consecrated Himself as a sacrificial offering (John 17:19) in order that we might be “sanctified in truth” (idem.). If He comes to us in the Blessed Sacrament, He comes with work to do: not in Himself, but in us. And what is this work? John tells us, in the great eucharistic chapter of the Fourth Gospel: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent” (John 6:29). And if we know the Gospels, we realize that the word “believe” here implies far more than a simple intellectual assent to revealed truth. It means the wholehearted acceptance not only of the Gospel message but of the very person of Christ. It means doing the works of Christ, for “he who believes in me, the works that I do he also shall do” (John 14:12). It means loving Christ, and by virtue of that love receiving the Spirit of Christ into our hearts. It means keeping His commandments, particularly loving one another (John 14:21). It means realizing that Christ is in the Father, and we in Christ, and Christ in us (John 14:20).
In a word, the work Christ does in the world, through the action of His Spirit, through His Church, and through His holy sacraments, is the work of incorporating and transforming us into Himself by charity. This is the work above all of the Holy Eucharist.
Now in the reception of the sacraments, it is of course first of all necessary that we believe in Christ, Who sanctifies us through the sacraments. We must be baptized Christians. We must live according to our baptismal vows, and renounce sin. We must consecrate ourselves to God and to His divine charity. We must live unselfishly, that is to say, we must find our own fulfillment in loving God and other men. But in order that the sacraments may produce their full effect in us, in order particularly that our eucharistic life may be really a life and not a mere outward formality, we must strive to increase not only our appreciation of the sacramental mystery itself, but also our understanding of the love of Christ Who is present and Who acts on us in the Sacrament.
These two are simply different aspects of the same thing, which is Christ’s love for us. On the one hand, the marvelous reality of Christ’s sacramental presence, a mystery of God’s wisdom and power, bathes and purifies our intelligence with a clean light that awakens the depths of our will to a love beyond all human affection. On the other hand His love for us awakens in our hearts a spiritual instinct to love Him in return, and by this love we come to know God.
Love for God is the deepest fulfillment of the powers implanted by God in our human nature which He has destined for union with Himself. In loving Him, we discover not only the inner meaning of truths which we would otherwise never be able to understand, but we also find our true selves in Him. The charity which is stirred up in our hearts by the Spirit of Christ acting in the depths of our being makes us begin to be the persons He has destined us to be in the inscrutable designs of His Providence. Moved by the grace of Christ we begin to discover and to know Christ Himself as a friend knows a friend—by the inner sympathy and understanding which friendship alone can impart. This loving knowledge of God is one of the most important fruits of eucharistic communion with God in Christ.
St. Paul, in his Epistles, repeatedly sums up the whole meaning of the mature Christian life. Writing to the Ephesians, he tells them how important it is for them “to be strengthened with power through His Spirit unto the progress of the inner man and to have Christ dwelling through faith in your hearts, so that being rooted and grounded in love you may be able to comprehend with all the saints . . . and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge, in order to be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:16-19). Here in a few words we see something of the purpose of Holy Communion, considered as the summit of the life of faith and of the sacraments. Nourished by the Gospel message, by the life of fraternal solidarity in Christ, by liturgical and private prayer, the Christian finds that his inner life reaches its highest peak of ever increasing intensity when, in his eucharistic communion with the Lord, he is united directly and sacramentally to the Incarnate Wor...
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- PublisherFarrar Straus & Cudahy
- Publication date1956
- ISBN 10 1121828124
- ISBN 13 9781121828124
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages157
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The Living Bread
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ISBN 10: 1121828124
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