Christianity Cannot Exist without the Eucharist

You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Today I want to defend a maybe controversial claim that Christianity cannot exist without the Eucharist. I’ll explain what I mean as I’m going, but in a real sense is that the Eucharist is what holds Christianity together. It’s the glue that makes the rest of Christianity makes sense. And that if you don’t understand this, you’re missing something really vital about Christianity. You’re not just missing like one doctrine, you’re missing something much deeper than that.

But before I get there, I have some exciting and related news. A book. My newest book called The Eucharist Is Really Jesus is Coming out. The subtitle is How Christ’s Body and Blood Are the Key to Everything We Believe. You can probably imagine how that’s going to be tied in to the theme of today’s episode.

But in the book I explore several different questions. Things like what do Catholics believe about the Eucharist and why? What’s the connection between the Eucharist and the covenant? The new covenant especially, but idea of covenant more broadly. How does the Eucharist make sense of the bloody nature of the cross and of Old Testament sacrifices? What is worship for a Christian anyhow? And then how can I incorporate a greater love of the Eucharist in my own spiritual life? Just to give a little bit of shameless self-promotion here.

A lot of good books exist that answer that first question, what do Catholics believe about the Eucharist and why? And it’s important in a book on the Eucharist to do that work. But I want to do something different that I don’t see other books doing, which is show how all of these seemingly unrelated doctrines, these seemingly unrelated themes are actually united in the Eucharist.

The second Vatican Council refers to the Eucharistic sacrifice as both the source and the summit of the Christian faith. Source of the Christian faith. You don’t have Christianity without the Eucharist. That’s very much the theme of today. Also, the summit, the high point that everything flows from the Eucharist as well as the Eucharist being the high point of Christianity.

If those two things are true, we talk a fair amount about the Eucharist being in the summit. This is a big issue, it’s the biggest issue. We can disagree on other things, but this is a really important one. But then the idea of the Eucharist actually is the source of covenant theology. It’s the source of morality, it’s the source of all these other things. A lot of people would say, “What in the world are you talking about?” Well, hopefully in this book it’ll make a little more sense.

If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to check it out. If you’re watching this the day this comes out on Thursday, it’ll be out in four days on Monday. If you’re watching this, basically anytime after it first comes out, it probably already is out. You can get it in the links below. You can get it on Amazonshop.catholic.com, which is the Catholic Answers Bookstore. If you want to do bulk deals, I know there’s really good deals if you get 20 for your parish or if you’re in a men’s group or women’s group, a Bible study, whatever. All of those things hopefully are good and helpful.

Okay, I have to plug that. Right? I can’t have a book on the Eucharist come out, do a theme episode on the Eucharist and not mention that. In fact, this week and next week I’m going to be exploring some themes that I touch on in the book and just taking a couple of the chapters and then sort of turning them into episodes. This is not going to cover everything in that chapter, and this is not going to cover by any means, everything in the book. If this strikes your interest and you say, “I’d like to hear more about that,” I know what place you can go.

All right, so with that said, how do we defend the claim that the Eucharist is key to Christianity? I want to do it in two points. The first point is just that the new covenant is essential to Christianity. That if you don’t understand the new covenant, you don’t understand Christianity. I mean, that doesn’t mean you understand nothing, it just means you don’t understand what Christianity is.

I hope that doesn’t sound too harsh, but it really is that important. And we can show that in a pretty simple way by asking what is the New Testament? Now, if I asked you this, chances are you would not incorrectly say something like the following. Well, it’s a book or it’s a part of a book. It’s half of the Bible. You got the Old Testament and you got the New Testament, or it’s 27 books that are put together as one sort of book within a broader book. It’s confusing, right? But we’d be thinking in terms of texts: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, and so on.

But that’s not what the word testament actually means. And strikingly, even though we as Christians refer to the Old Testament and the New Testament, scripture never calls either set of books the Old Testament or the New Testament. Where is this Word Testament coming from and why do we use it to describe these books? Well, testament comes from the Latin testamentum, which was a translation of the Greek word for covenant. And so calling these books the New Testament are calling them the books of the New Covenant.

As Pope Benedict, before becoming Pope, points out in a book entitled Many Religions One Covenant. He says, “We call the slim volume that forms a basis of the Christian faith the New Testament.” And he says, “This word isn’t imposed on the scriptures. We actually find it in scripture. But, nevertheless, the early Christians apply this term to the books.” And he says why. He says, “Well, this very word testament is in a way an attempt to utter the essence of Christianity in a single summary expression, which is itself drawn from this fundamental source.”

In other words, the early Christians were forced to say, “What are we going to call these 27 books?” Because scripture often just calls it scripture. Now scripture just means writings. We could just say, “Oh, yeah, the book.” And sometimes people do. The Book or the Good Book. But if you want a term so people know which book you’re talking about, it’s helpful to have a term like Bible or scripture or more specifically New Testament.

Thematically, the early Christians were saying this is the story of God creating a New Covenant with His people. And there are slightly different ways you’ll hear this worded. You know, that it’s one covenant in two expressions. First in the old expression, the old covenant. Now in a new expression, a new covenant. That’s one way. Another way is to say that he’s created a new covenant with his people. That I think is the more directly biblical kind of way as we’ll get to.

But nevertheless, that’s how the early Christians understood it. They believed that the essence of Christianity was the New Covenant. That if you don’t understand that you are actually missing not some ancillary point, not some secondary point, not even some important point. You’re missing the essence of Christianity. That’s how important the New Covenant is.

Now, I know many Protestants watch this show and you might say, “Well, yeah. Cardinal Ratzinger doesn’t carry magisterial weight with me.” Fair enough. This isn’t a magisterial writing. And maybe you say, “I think the early Christians are perfectly capable of getting major things wrong.” Fair enough. Nevertheless, this is something that as Ratzinger points out, is being drawn from the way the New Testament talks about what’s going on in Christianity.

It’s true. There’s no point where it says these books shall be called the New Testament, but you do have things like this. In II Corinthians chapter three, St. Paul talks about how God has qualified us to be ministers of a New Covenant. Not in a written code, but in the Spirit. There’s a clear sense that what is new here is a New Covenant, or if you want to put it that way, a New Testament and that these are ministers of the New Covenant, ministers of the New Testament.

There are a lot of Protestants who actually agree with everything I’ve said so far. Particularly within reformed theology, sometimes called Calvinism. You’ll find this very much stressed and hammered home, and we would agree, I would say about 80 to 90% of the way with what you’ll find reformed theologians saying. To give a couple of happy examples, the 19th century Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, has a sermon called Not Sufficient and Yet Sufficient, in which he’s talking about that passage which is heard from II Corinthians three.

In it he said, “We’ll see how Paul puts it. We’re sufficient ministers of a New Covenant.” And then he laments, “In some congregations, people never hear the word covenant, and yet that understands the two covenants has the key of theology. The covenants are the diamond hinges on which the golden doors of grace are made to turn.”

Getting the covenant right is really critical. That’s what Ratzinger says. It’s what the early Christians clearly believed. It’s what you find these Protestant theologians and preachers saying as well. And that might raise for many of us to question where we say, “Okay, well then what is a covenant? Because how do I know if I understand the covenant correctly if maybe I’m not familiar with even what a covenant is?” Good question.

I’m going to get a little bit in the weeds here, but not for long. Broadly speaking, you’re going to find two groups. You’re going to find theologians that say that the Hebrew word for covenant like beriyth stands for the relationship between two parties, between two people, between two nations, between God and His people. The that’s one theory that it is the relationship itself.

The other theory is in the one that’s Gert Kwakkel, the Dutch Old Testament scholar that I quote in the book argues for is that it’s better to say that it denotes the agreement or convention that’s at the base of a relationship and regulates it. If that sounds really weird and nuanced, let me give an example.

Is your marriage the whole relationship you have with your spouse, or is your marriage the agreement that you make at the altar? And I think most people say, “Well, sort of both.” You can say, “Well, this is when I entered into my marriage, I already had a relationship. Now it’s in a new key and something that’s happened. And now if I were to describe my relationship with my wife and not mention she’s my wife, I would not be describing my relationship with my wife adequately. And if I’m to understand my relationship with my wife, I need to know that we have this agreement before God, something beyond a contract.”

And what makes this analogy difficult is marriage actually is a covenant so it’s not really an analogy at all. It’s just saying, okay, take the concrete case of a marriage covenant. Is that the contract looking thing you did on your wedding day? Is that the whole relationship you had, or is it sort of both? And so he’s going to say it’s the agreement or the convention that A, is at the base of your relationship and B, regulates your relationship. That this actually has quasi independent standing.

A good way to test that is you can imagine something where a couple says, “You know what? People have an open marriage. Let’s both violate our marriage vows consensually.” Well, maybe you can’t point to something between the parties because the parties agreed to it, but nevertheless, there’s still a mutual violation of this quasi independent thing. The covenant that you’ve entered into together.

Okay, hopefully that makes sense. I know it’s kind of maybe a weird example, but thinking about marriage could help in terms of thinking about the covenant between God and His people.

Okay, the other one I want to look at in terms of answering the what is a covenant is a reformed theologian by the name of J. I. Packer who has a great introduction. I’m going to agree with it again, like 80, 90%. A great introduction called On Covenant Theology. It’s actually an introduction he wrote to a reprint of an older reformed theologian’s book. And he describes it, the covenant, as the life embracing bedrock reality of the covenant relationship between the creator and Christians.

He says, “A covenant relationship is a voluntary mutual commitment that binds each party to the other.” And then he points out, you can enter into this in a couple of ways. You can have a negotiated one, a business merger say, or a marriage contract, or you could have something unilaterally imposed. He points out all of God’s covenants are … God doesn’t say, “You bring your best lawyer, I’ll bring my best lawyer, we’ll hammer something out.”

God introduces the covenant to the people saying, “Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s what I’m going to give you in return.” That’s a covenant. But so you can have a unilaterally, you can have a bilateral if you really want to get in the weeds, there’s different forms of covenant. In the ancient world, like a stronger nation might impose a covenant on weaker nations. Nevertheless, it’s the terms of the relationship.

Packer goes on, “The reality of the relationship depends simply on the fact that mutual obligations have been accepted and pledged on both sides.” I hope it’s clear that covenant sounds very legal and technical, but it is deeply relational and this is something that scholars point out. For instance, Samuel Ferguson, his book The Spirit in Relational Anthropology and Paul makes a point that the paradigm of the covenant, which is central to Israel’s self understanding as well as to St. Paul’s background, is inherently relational. That it would be a mistake to put covenant over here and relationship over there or try to juxtapose the two. In the same way that it would be a mistake to put your relationship with your spouse as something that’s independent of your covenant relation with one another.

Okay, the last point I want to raise here is from Scott Hahn ’cause I love the way he describes this. He says, “Contracts usually exchange property, goods and services, but covenants exchange persons.” I think that’s a very helpful way of understanding the difference between a covenant and a contract. A contract says I will do this for you, you’ll do that for me. Where a covenant says something closer to I am yours, you are mine.

Now we can quibble with all of these attempts at defining it because again, you can have stronger nations imposing covenants on weaker ones, but it’s still even in those cases, it’s something deeper than just, here’s a contract, we’re going to send you iron, you’re going to send us timber. It’s something deeper and richer than that about defining the relationship between the parties. There’s something inherently relational about a covenant, and I like this description ’cause he points that marriage and adoption both have these covenantal aspects to them. They are an exchange of persons.

If you want maybe a helpful example, I’ve stolen this from focus missionaries, they probably stole it from somewhere else, I don’t know. And they give the example of family living on a block. If you are a son of your father, you might be expected to mow the lawn. There’s some work that has to be done, but that work doesn’t create your relationship, and your relationship is deeper than you mow the lawn for me, I go to work for you. It better be. Right?

The neighbor kid might come over and say, “This week, could I mow the lawn? I’d like to earn some extra money.” “Okay, you can come over and mow the lawn.” That’s a contract. I’ll give you this money if you mow the lawn. But what you have with your child or between father and son there, that’s covenantal. Even though both of them involve mowing the lawn. There’s something deeper going on and that has to do with the exchange of persons.

Now we’re going to return to that motif I think in a little bit, but it’s important to get this idea that covenant means in our context, God’s relationship with His people and the terms of God’s relationship with His people. The promises God’s making about His relationship with His people. Why is it so important? Why do we care about covenant so much? I want to return to Packer, the reformed theologian I said has a largely good essay and he makes a really bold claim.

He says, “Biblical doctrine from first to last has to do with covenantal relationships between God and man.” He gives several examples. Biblical ethics has to do with expressing God’s covenantal relationship to us and covenantal relationships between ourselves and others. That is part of the mutual relations between God and man is that God says, “I want you to treat your neighbor well. I want you to love your enemies. I want you to,” so you can’t love God and hate your neighbor. This is very clear in 1 John, which we looked at last week, because one of the things God has called you to do is love your neighbor.

When we’re talking about biblical ethics, a mistake would be to take it away from the realm of the covenant because then you’d be left with just a moral code. And that, for many people, is what they understand Christianity to be. And they’ll say, “Why do I need Christianity? I can be good without God.” What they’re saying is I can do this part of the covenant without God. That’s like the neighbor mowing the grass. Fair enough, you can to a certain extent. But that’s not really the heart of this. That’s not what we’re talking about. There’s something deeper going on, but you’re missing that if you lose the covenantal dimension to it.

Okay, that’s ethics. Christian religion has the nature of covenant life in which God is the direct object of our faith, hope, love, worship and service all animated by gratitude for grace. Another way of putting that would be if you think about every aspect of Christianity, it’s all about one of two things. How do I love God? Or how do I love neighbor out of love of God? That’s everything, right? When Jesus is asked, he sums up Christianity as loving God with all your heart, mind, and soul and loving your neighbor as yourself. These are the two great commands. Excuse me, He sums up the law that way, but this is also the twofold fulfillment of all of Christianity.

If you’re doing those things, that’s everything. But all of that is covenantal. Right? How do I properly love God? Look to the covenant. How do I properly love my neighbor? Look to the covenant. That’s why covenant theology is so crucial. Well, Packer’s going to go on and say that from what’s been said so far, and he actually says a lot more than what I just gave you. Three things become apparent. Those three things are first, the gospel of God is not properly understood until it is viewed within a covenantal frame. Second, the Word of God, he means here the Bible, is not properly understood until it is viewed within a covenantal frame. In his words, covenant theology is a biblical hermeneutic, meaning a way of interpreting the Bible as well as a formulation of biblical teaching.

Hopefully that’s clear. What he’s saying is we know about the covenant from the Bible, but we also make sense of the Bible through the lens of the covenant. The third thing, the reality of God is not properly understood till it is viewed within a covenantal frame. Now here he’s making a pretty bold claim and we might quibble around the edges, but the basic idea is this. God reveals himself to be a trinity, a triune communion of persons; father, son, and spirit. And there’s something that looks very covenantal about that.

It would be a mistake to imagine from all eternity God signing a contract with himself or forming a legal agreement with himself. But there’s something structured and relational with terms as it were. That there are roles, each person of the trinity plays there. There’s a reason, for instance, the son becomes incarnate and not the Father or the Spirit. There is an order and structure within the trinity, even though these three are co-equal in majesty and glory.

Nevertheless, there’s a structure order relationship. All of that of that looks very covenantal. You can say that in a couple of ways. You could describe it as a covenant within the trinity. I think that’s going too far. A better way might be to say this structured inner life of God is expressed and revealed in covenant. In other words, a basic principle of theology is if you want to understand the inner life of God, which we have no direct access to, you understand that through the outer life of God. How does he express himself in the world?

And the same way that if you want to get to know an author, you can’t read his mind, but you can read his books. And in reading his books, you can come to say like, “Oh, Stephen King is obsessed with Maine and alcoholism,” or whatever. Those kinds of things are how we get to know any author. And the same way you get to know a person, you encounter your neighbor, you encounter your spouse, your kids, whoever. If you want to get to know them, it’s probably going to be from what they show you, what they’re externally doing. You’re not reading their mind, you’re talking to them, you’re watching them, you’re observing them.

Well, likewise, if you want to know about the inner life of God, you do that by looking at how does God act in the world? And he acts in the world in this relational structured way that is kind of an echo of the way he describes his own inner life; father, son, and spirit. All that is to say covenant theology is pretty darn important. He goes on to give, actually this is before that. I’m jumping back in the essay, but this is such a nice example that I want to draw it out.

He gives the example of a globe. Imagine a globe, and if you’re watching the YouTube instead of listening, you’ll see I’ve got the wrong ocean here. I’ve got the Indian Ocean. I couldn’t find a really good non-copyrighted globe zoomed in on the Pacific Ocean. It was surprisingly hard to find. Nevertheless, suppose you’re looking for a Polynesian island and you’ve got your finger, you’re trying to find Micronesia, Fiji, Tuvalu, wherever, Vanuatu. What you can miss there, because it’s actually so big it sort of jumps off the page are the giant words Pacific Ocean.

And he suggests that sometimes as Christians, this is what we do as well. He says, “God’s covenant of grace and scripture is one of those things that are too big to easily be seen, particularly when one’s mind is programmed to look at something smaller.” And so we run the risk of focusing in so much on trying to find some particular doctrine or detail that we miss the big picture. We’re so looking for the particular tree that we miss the whole forest. That’s what he’s saying. That’s how big covenant is.

As Scott Hahn points out, this isn’t just true of the way reformed Christians understand covenant. This is true of how Catholics understand it, but even more how Jews understood it before. He says, “For the covenant defines religion for Christians and Jews. We cannot discern God’s design or his will if we do not meditate upon his covenant. The covenant then is a principle that unites the New Testament, the Old, the scriptures with tradition, and each of the various branches of theology with all the others. The covenant does more than bridge the gaps between these elements. It fills in the gaps. The biblical scholarship, Doug, manic theology and magisterial authority all stand on common ground, solid ground.”

If you want to make sense of anything in Christianity, it’s really important that you’re getting the covenant right? Otherwise, you might have an accurate vision of the one tree, but you still don’t really get the tree if you don’t get the forest. I hope that makes sense, that really understanding like the liver is only possible if you understand the body. It’s not that you can’t distinguish the liver from the body. It’s that making sense of the liver and its role only makes sense within the broader context of the body.

Well, this is true as well here with covenant that it’s binding the whole thing together. It’s the agreement, the relationship, the kind of terms and conditions that put all of these parts of Christianity and before that all these parts of Judaism together into one package. Okay, so that’s the first point that the New Covenant is vital for understanding Christianity. If you don’t understand that you’re not getting the forest. You’re not really getting the essence of Christianity.

The second point then is that the Eucharist is essential to the New Covenant. That just as someone who doesn’t get the covenant doesn’t get Christianity, someone who doesn’t get the Eucharist doesn’t get the New Covenant. And here I want to part ways a little bit with Packer. Remember the globe example I just gave? Well, he describes all of these issues. He points out faith, the plan of salvation, Jesus Christ, the God man, our prophet priest and king. The church in both testaments along with circumcision, Passover, baptism, the Lord’s supper, the intricacies of Old Testament worship and the simplicities of his New Testament counterpart and many more such things. He puts all of those as just little islands, each one anchored in the Pacific that we need to understand within the ocean of the covenant.

But you may notice that he just dropped the Lord’s supper in there as one doctrine among many. I mean, for that matter, he drops Jesus Christ in there as one doctrine among many. And I think we want to say no. That’s that’s where we would part company. That’s not a good way of understanding it. Now there’s actually a few places in which we would part company from the reformed understanding of covenant. We’d say the reformed theologians are absolutely right to say covenant is crucial. But when you ask them about covenant, they have a really strange understanding where they’ll say there’s a covenant with Adam that isn’t mentioned in the Bible, but is really important for how we understand the Bible called the covenant of works.

It’s not called the covenant. It’s never mentioned in all of the biblical discussions of covenant. But nevertheless, we’re to believe that is a covenant. And then the covenant of grace, which happens at the moment of the fall is what replaces it. When reform theologians speak of two covenants, they usually mean those two. You have this imaginary covenant of works or maybe still, I don’t want to go too excessive. You can read what God says to Adam where he tells him to work in the garden and say, maybe there were some implicit promises that if he did this, he would be glorified and go to heaven. God doesn’t ever say that, but maybe that would’ve happened. That’s the first covenant reform theologians imagine must be there.

And the second covenant is the one that God doesn’t mention at the time a covenant of grace that happens at the moment of the fall. That makes the decisive a creation of the new covenant sin strangely enough, or the fall. It’s somewhere in Genesis 3 you’d get the New Covenant, but none of that is true. Christianity, when St. Paul’s becoming a minister of the New Covenant, he means that Christ has created a New Covenant, not Adam and Eve through sin. Not the devil by leading people into sin, but that Jesus Christ himself has created a New Covenant.

This is not just like one Jesus in the Eucharist. They’re not just little islands in this big ocean of covenant. Rather, we need to understand Jesus and specifically we need to understand Jesus in the Eucharist. Now, how would I prove that? I’d prove it by asking a question. How often does Jesus explicitly mention the New Covenant in the New Testament? Remember, the whole New Testament is named the New Testament because the story of Jesus coming into the world and bringing a New Covenant. How often does Jesus explicitly mention the New Covenant by name? Do you know? Because it’s one time. Do you know where that one time is? You could probably guess from context. It’s at the last supper. Jesus lifts up the chalice and he says, “Drink of it all of you for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

And it goes on from there. But there are different accounts in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But it’s very clear that the understanding is that here he is lifting the chalice and it’s as if he said, “Here it is, boys, the Pacific Ocean,” to use Packer’s analogy. This is the thing that holds everything else together. This is the blood of the New Covenant. The new and everlasting covenant is right here. That’s what it is. I mean, it’s as if he’s saying all of that.

You can’t understand Christianity without understanding the covenant. And if you’re going to listen to what Jesus teaches on the covenant, it’s right here at the Last Supper. Now, a few things follow from this. I think this changes how we understand Christianity. Let me go back to the Scott Hahn thing I mentioned earlier that contracts are an exchange of property, goods and services, typically. Covenants are an exchange of persons. Well, this is an exchange of persons. Jesus is giving himself to us to enter into communion with us. He’s creating this full exchange of persons.

There is this impulse that many people have to say, “We’re missing something crucial about Christianity if we miss that relational dimension.” And you’ll find people say it in kind of silly ways. It’s not about rules, it’s about relationship. Or you’ll even hear people say it’s not about religion, it’s relationship. Those aren’t good ways of understanding it because Christianity is very explicitly a religion. It refers to itself as religion in the New Testament. But nevertheless, their right to see the heart of this relationship as something relational. I should have said the heart of this religion as something relational.

Benedict XVI, I really love the way he puts it the beginning of day is Caritas Est. He says, “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or of a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” It’s something that’s an encounter, it’s something that’s a relationship, it’s an encounter with a person as well as an event.

That’s what we’re finding here at the Last Supper, that we’re encountering Jesus. He’s giving us not just a new teaching, he’s giving us himself. He’s not just giving us new instructions, he’s giving us himself. There’s something deeply covenantal and deeply relational about that. That’s how we should be understanding this.

Now, all of that makes sense if at the Last Supper, Jesus is giving us himself. Like this presupposes that Jesus actually means what he says when he says, “This is my body, this is my blood,” that he’s giving himself to us to receive, and he is uniting himself with us in this incredible way.

We can probably explore this in another episode. I don’t have specific plans for it. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but the early church fathers were really clear about something. That one of the key things to recognize here is that we are body and soul. We’re not just bodies without souls, but neither are we souls without bodies. We’re not animals, we’re not angels. We’re this fascinating creature that is ensouled with an everlasting soul but is still bodily.

And so St. Basil points out that if we were just spirits, faith alone would be how we would encounter Christ. But because we’re bodily, we commune with him not just intellectually at the level of faith but bodily, and he points to the Eucharist as where that happens. Gregory of Nyssa. Excuse me, I said Basil, but Gregory of Nyssa. Basil actually says similar things. All that’s to say that there is this incredible encounter that we have with Christ, and then this should be the shape and form of Christianity.

As I’ve said, like whether we’re talking ethics or whether we’re talking theology, whether we’re talking you name it. If we’re going to make sense of any of those things, we should be understanding that in these relational terms. How is this an expression of my love of God? How is this an expression of my love of my neighbor? And this is the part where we would part company with the not a religion, but a relationship folks, is that a healthy relationship has boundaries. In the same way that you and your wife, you and your husband, it’s not just do whatever you want in the name of love. There are boundaries and terms to your relationship. That’s what makes it healthy.

We live in a culture that thrives on ambiguous relationships that leave people deeply upset and unhappy with expectations that get thwarted and abused. Christianity’s not like that. It’s not free love. It’s not any of those things. It’s excessive extreme love, but it’s not free love. It’s love that’s infinite but not undefined or unbounded. It has terms to it, and we see this in the Eucharist, that Christ gives himself to us in a particular way, shape, and form. There’s something ritual about it. It’s connected. You may notice from his words to what’s about to happen on the cross. He refers to this being the blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

In those few words, you have the idea that this is a covenantal relationship, but also one that’s connected with the cross and as a remedy for sin. All of that is wrapped up in here. If you get that, if you get that, then you understand the story of the covenant and you understand the story of Christianity. If you don’t get that, if you’ve overlooked the theme of the covenant or if you believe in the covenant but have overlooked the reality of the Eucharist and it’s being the expression of the covenant, then I would say go back and reread. If you want something else to read, you can pick up my new book.

For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Next week, by the way, it’s going to be more on the Eucharist looking at what this means about Christian worship. Because a lot of people have been trying to figure out what does it mean to worship as a Christian? What does that word mean and how do we do it? How do we know if we’re actually worshiping God or not? Thanks a lot. God bless.

Thank you for listening to Shameless Popery, a production of the Catholic Answers Podcast Network. Find more great shows by visiting Catholic Answers podcast.com or search Catholic answers wherever you listen to podcasts.