OUR EUCHARIST
‘Be ye thankful.’
The service of Holy Communion is a Thanksgiving, so named in the Prayer Book, which calls it ‘our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving,’ and from this it takes one of its names, the Holy Eucharist. It has other names and other characters; but now let us think briefly of this, for it answers to one of the brightest and most attractive and at the same time difficult features in the Christian life. ‘Be ye thankful.’
I. Thanksgiving is difficult, and yet it is a very simple and elementary thing; it comes naturally, we see, where there is any real religion at all. When you receive something, you feel, if you have any heart in you, inclined to thank somebody, and it is only the same feeling carried higher which, when good comes to us, prompts us to thank God.
II. Thankfulness is to be expected of all.—It is natural for a nation to be thankful when peace comes after war, when a king is raised up from a great sickness or a great danger, or when he is crowned upon his throne. So it is natural to many of us in the simpler matter of our own lives. In the Old Testament we notice that when the people thank God for the greater blessings they do not forget the simpler ones, and the Psalms praise God for all the good things of earth and sky, they tell out His works with gladness. And so we come to the thankfulness of Christians; and the great key and source and centre of it is that it begins with the greatest of all blessings—that is with Christ, God’s gift to man, with what He did for us, the Light that shone, the death that He died, the mercy that He brought and won, the love that through Him was made known. ‘Thanks be to God,’ exclaims the Apostle, ‘for His unspeakable gift.’ This tunes the Christian heart to thankfulness.
III. The thankful heart finds reasons for thankfulness in all about it—in all smaller blessings, the little happinesses of life, in thinking good thoughts, ‘for this is the will of Christ Jesus concerning you.’ Yes, in everything. Not in the happinesses only, but the troubles too, the losses and disappointments and sufferings. These have become reasons for thankfulness; for in view of the Cross and the glory that followed it men learn to be thankful when they suffer, even because they suffer. So the great thankfulness seems to wake echoes of itself in all the little thankfulnesses of every day. It is to this, it seems to me, that this our Eucharist, our service of thanksgiving, answers so well.
IV. The gladness of Christ’s Eucharist, though it has in it the glory of the Resurrection and the power of His endless love, is a joy into which is woven (let the service speak and tell you so) the remembrance of sin forgiven, the commemoration of suffering borne, of the discipline of death accepted, of the utter loss which turned to perfect gain. And so here the sad and sorrowful, the disappointed and lonely, and those who feel that worst trouble of their own besetting sin, may draw up and join in their note, not the less true and pure though it may be in the minor key, in the Church’s Eucharist, offered through her gracious, patient, and redeeming Lord, to the Father Whose Love He reveals.
Bishop E. S. Talbot.
Illustration
‘The value of the smaller blessings rests on the value of the one great blessing in Christ. The deep and pure happiness of love granted to us but a few hours or years have in themselves the scent of death.
The noblest troth
Dies here to dust.
The poet has bidden us take—
This test for love: in every kiss sealed fast
To feel the first kiss, and forbode the last.
But from Christ Jesus there enters into them a savour of life, and they gain sureness and worth as they are known in His light, for they are gleams, and signs, and instruments of that great love from which they come, and into which they will be gathered to be found again.