Sunday after Ascension, 2003

Alexandria was a large and prosperous city in Egypt. It was mainly Christian in the year A.D. 451. Towards the end of that year news arrived from Chalcedon that threw the city into revolt. The uprising was so fierce that troops sent to quell it retreated, then fled. One regiment sought refuge in the ruins of a pagan temple. They ended up burned alive. The government responded by shutting off food supplies and closing the baths and theatres. The ferment never did die out. What was the news that set off such a convulsion? The Council of Chalcedon had ruled that Christ, after His Incarnation, possessed two natures, not one. The Patriarch of their land had insisted that there was only one nature. He would not be swayed. For his intransigence, he was defrocked. That christological controversy eventually led to a schism in the Church, the Monophysite Schism that continues to this day in the Coptic and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches. They are the ones who believe that the Son of God possesses only one nature.

Today, on this Sunday after the Ascension let us explore how the Lord's two natures play out in the Lord's Supper. Specifically, we want to see if it is possible for Christ's ascended human flesh and blood to descend to be part of the Holy Communion celebration on earth, and what that means for us who partake.

We start with the fact that the one person, Jesus Christ, was both a divine being and an earthly man. Scripture alludes to both the deity and humanity of Jesus, yet clearly refers to a single subject or a single person (John 1:14; Gal. 4:4; I Timothy 3:16). Once the Church declared that Jesus was fully God and fully man, she had to decide what it means. What is the precise relationship between the two natures?

It took the Church a long time to get the recipe just right. She had to cook up all the appropriate Bible texts on the subject, spoon out any taste of heresy, and come up with a good answer. The Holy Spirit guided the Church in that process. Only Scripture is infallible, but the Spirit allowed the Church to avoid major theological pitfalls and arrive at a correct understanding. Four hundred years of painstaking reflection and refinement proves just how much we need Church history. True, the three persons of the Godhead, and the two natures of Christ are spelled out in the Bible, but it takes a long and vast collective effort to get it just right. Jesus is a very complex person. It is arrogant for people to rely on the Bible alone for their theology without any recourse to the great tradition of the Church. They run a constant risk of coming to heretical conclusions.

A man named Nestorius was installed as the patriarch of Constantinople in A.D. 428. He was a firm advocate of both Christ's deity and His humanity. This was good, but he rejected the use of the term theotokos or "God-bearer" to describe the Virgin Mary. Rather, he preferred the term christotokos or anthropotokos , ("Christ-bearer" or "man-bearer") as a theological label for the Virgin Mary. Cyril of Alexandria insisted that the theotokos title did perfect justice to the scriptural understanding of Christ. Actually, the debate had less to do with Mary than with Christ's natures. What was the source of Nestorius' uneasiness? Nestorius recoiled from the idea that a member of the Godhead could have a mother. God simply could not have been carried for nine months in a mother's womb, nor been wrapped in baby clothes. Hence, his opposition to Mary as the Theotokos. Nestorius felt that the term theotokos contained the Arian view of the Son as a creature. In order to resolve the problem, Nestorius abstracted Christ's deity from his humanity. It was Christ's humanity that was present in the womb of Mary but this human flesh could not be in any way united to divinity. His solution was to split the Person of Christ. At best, the two natures merely exist side-by-side. What did he gain by this assertion? He thought the only way to maintain the transcendent deity of the Son of God while holding to the completeness of Jesus' humanity was to sever the two natures. For him it was a good explanation. But what did he lose? He lost the unity of the two natures of Christ. His position forces Jesus to look like two people.

The newspaper recently showed a photograph of twins from Iran. The twin sisters have been joined at the head since birth. For twenty-eight years these women have walked through life side by side, sharing the same skull. Besides the appearance of freakishness, it poses monumental inconvenience to both. A surgeon from Singapore will attempt to separate them sometime in July. If successful, one of the twins will settle in Tehran, the other in a rural Iranian city.

Nestorius split apart the two natures to a freakish degree. He lost the possibility of interchange between the human and divine or any communication or union between the two. The Council of Ephesus met in A.D. 431 to settle the issue. They decided that Nestorius' separation between Christ's human and divine natures was anathema to Scripture. Christian orthodoxy unites the two natures in the one person of Christ.

The next council was called the Council of Chalcedon of A.D. 451. This fourth Ecumenical Council dealt with the opposite error. If Nestorius wanted to pull the natures too far apart, Eutyches went to the opposite extreme: he blended them into confusion. Who was Eutyches? He was the head of a monastery in Constantinople. Whereas Nestorius desired to disconnect the two natures of Christ, Eutyches desired to blend them into one. How did he do this? The Council of Ephesus had established that Jesus had two natures, one divine, the other human. Eutyches was unhappy with that formula. Rather than give Christ two natures after the Incarnation, he would tolerate only one. Instead of Christ being fully God and fully man, He would be neither. If the color red represents Christ's divinity, and the color yellow represents His humanity, Eutyches would paint Jesus orange. He wasn't fully divine, nor fully human. He was a hybrid between the two natures. This is not a war of words confined to the fifth century. Meno Simons, the founder of the Mennonites, held a view resembling Eutyche's. He taught that Christ had only one nature ­ a divine one. Not one speck of Christ's flesh was human. Those who forget Church history are condemned to repeat the errors of the past.

The Council of Chalcedon denounced Eutyches and his followers. They announced that Jesus had two natures, "truly God and truly man, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation" The Council prohibited the positions of both Eutyches and Nestorius. When it says the Christ has two natures "without division and separation" they are forbidding Nestorianism. When it says that Christ possesses two natures "without confusion," the bishops of the Council are clearly outlawing Eutychianism.

Despite the bloody uprising in Alexandria, the Definition of Chalcedon became the supreme expression of an orthodox, biblical faith. There is a distinction in the two natures of Christ without a separation. That Definition became enshrined in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. Now what does this mean for Holy Communion? For those of us who believe that the consecrated bread and wine of communion contains the real presence of Christ, it is an important issue. As the second person of the Trinity, Christ is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable, and eternal, to name just a few of His divine attributes. After the Holy Spirit conceived Him in the womb of the Virgin Mary, He kept all these attributes. Nothing was subtracted from His divinity, rather something was added to it, that is, a human nature. In His human nature Jesus walked and wept, suffered and died just like all human beings. The same human body that died on the cross, rose gloriously from the dead; and that risen body ascended into Heaven. Jesus came up to the Father in His perfect humanity and is even now seated in majesty as the King of Heaven and earth. He is the first-fruits of those who die. As He rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven with a glorified body, so shall we follow in His path.

The problem is this: when we consider the humanity and divinity of the ascended Christ, how does He come to be present in the elements of bread and wine when we celebrate Holy Communion? For instance, how do we interpret John chapter six where Jesus states, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed" (John 6:53-55). Even if you can't see this passage referring primarily to the Lord's Supper, you have to admit that a secondary reference is at least possible, if not inevitable. The language is explicit. Christ is telling us that we must feed on Him for everlasting life and the resurrection of the body. Moreover, Hebrews 10:22 calls on us to seek the presence of Christ. "Let us draw near," says the writer to the Hebrews. In some sense, real nearness or presence of Christ is in view. So again the question: How does He feed us with His flesh and blood in the sacrament of Holy Communion? How is He present in the elements of bread and wine? Is He present in His divinity? Most would agree with this.

The difficulty arises touching His humanity. Is His human nature present in the consecrated bread and wine of communion? Here we should be careful. Either way, a yes or no answer runs into potential christological problems. If we say "no, His humanity is not involved" we may be guilty of splitting the two natures of Christ like Nestorius. On the other hand, if we hold that the humanity of Christ is present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, wouldn't that endanger the humanity of Christ? How can the flesh of a man in Heaven be brought down and distributed wherever the Eucharist is being celebrated on earth? Can flesh stretch that far? Aren't we guilty of confusing the two natures of Christ as Eutyches did?

This question is important because Christ is the first-fruits of what we shall one day become. The First Adam hurled us down into sin and death; the Second Adam restores the humanity we lost at the Fall. What Christ is now in His humanity we will one day become. What is the substance of the ascended humanity of Christ? Is He truly human with a glorified body? Then we also shall one day be like Him.

Calvin is helpful in answering our original question. Is it possible for Christ's ascended human flesh and blood to be part of the Holy Communion celebration on earth? Calvin had no doubt about it. He held to a conjoining of the believer with the humanity of Christ. The union is not merely with Christ's divine nature, or with Holy Spirit, it is with the resurrected Lord, with Christ's divinity and humanity inseparably united in His glorified Person. According to Calvin, the very purpose of the Incarnation was to make possible our union with Christ. Since divine life is communicated to Christ's human nature, when we are united with Christ, it is possible for that divine life to be communicated to us. This is why we must partake of Christ's body and blood, and not merely the Holy Spirit or the divine nature of the Son of God.

Calvin furthermore deals with the problem of Christ's ascended body and the challenge of bringing that down to earth during the Eucharist. He writes in the Institutes :

"Even though it seems unbelievable that Christ's flesh, separated from us by such great distance, penetrates to us, so that it becomes our food, let us remember how far the secret power of the Holy Spirit towers above all our senses, and how foolish it is to wish to measure his immeasurableness by our measure. What, then, our mind does not comprehend, let faith conceive: that the Spirit truly unites things separated in space" [This citation comes from Given For You by Keith Mathison, pp. 25, 31. See also The Mystical Presence by John W. Nevin for a brilliant explanation of Calvin's sacramental views. Jim Jordan's insights are very good as well, Christ in His Supper II .]

Turning to the question of presence, the Bible urges, "Let us draw near." We draw near to Christ in worship. After the ascension Christ remains in Heaven. Does the Person of Christ come down to us, or are we drawn up to Him? "The Bible speaks both ways. John was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and Christ came down to him (Rev. 1:10). Later, John was caught up to observe the worship service in heaven (Rev. 4:1). We could also say that Heaven is opened (Rev. 19:11), so that when we worship we see, by the eye of faith, the Lamb and throne of God, the departed saints and angels in the heavenly balcony, the Spirit proceeding from the throne to us, and we on earth in the orchestra section." [Jordan. p. 22.]

Let us draw near in faith. With faith this Eucharist becomes a supernatural mystery. The Holy Spirit unites you to the Second Adam in such a way that you become "bone of His bones, and flesh of His flesh" (Gen. 2:23). Come now to the table of the Lord. Draw near and partake of the resurrection life of Christ.

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