The Eucharist considered as a participation in the unselfish life of Christ.
I. From the day of his temptation, when He refused to prove Himself the Son of God by doing any work to support Himself, or to make His power manifest, or to take possession of His kingdom from that day forward to His death, He was practising self-denial, and so was revealing the Father to men. The cross was the gathering up of all that previous sacrifice. And having proved this to be the true life of man, the law of human life, He called upon men to enter into it with Him. Self-denial was not to be an occasional act; it is the ground of man's existence, for it is the ground of His.
II. The words, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you," remind us of the daily, hourly temptation to be seeking a life of our own, to be forgetting that we are bound by the eternal law of God, by the unchangeable conditions of our own being, to our fellows, and to their Father and ours, in the well-beloved Son. These words remind us that the selfish life is in truth no life at all, but death; that to choose it is to choose death. They remind us that we are not bound to choose it; that in doing so we are renouncing our true human state, we are trying to cast off bonds which are actually holding us, we are resisting God's Spirit. They remind us that the common life is still with us; that the Son of man is still the same; that His flesh and His blood were really given for the life of the world; that our spirits groan for that life, groan to be delivered from the death into which they have fallen through self-pleasing, self-seeking. Christ bids my spirit partake of the flesh and blood which He shed for the world, as my body partakes of the bread and wine. It is what I need. It takes away the selfish glory which I have coveted; it invests me with the human glory which I have renounced. It bids me cast away that weight of cares about my body and soul which have become intolerable; it bids me throw myself upon that sacrificing love which provides for all and for each, which seeks to make me its minister to others, which can never bless me so much as by forming me after its own likeness.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. iv., p. 127.
References: Matthew 16:24-26. W. Hay Aitken, Mission Sermons,2nd series, p. 125.Matthew 16:24-28. Parker, Inner Life of Christ,vol. iii., p. 10.