A defining feature of our life in Christ Jesus might be said to be memory. Not memory as something static or distant, and certainly not nostalgic, but memory as something alive and visceral.
After all, when we remember the saving life and death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus, we know that this Jesus lives. As we discussed in our first all-ages formation last Sunday, somehow the life and death and resurrection of Jesus is both something complete and something still happening to us. The church’s worship and sacred year does this in a special way: time after time, in our hearts and minds, in our own body and blood, we recall the sacred stories of our God.
And we receive into our very selves the body and blood of this living Lord Jesus in that memorial that God’s son commanded us.
Here at Rosemont, the church space is dominated by one visceral aid to our memory: the rood screen. The rood screen is so obvious and defining that, especially when the church is dark, it seems to disappear into the shadows. We could almost lose sight of the figures that define the screen: the Crucified Jesus with his mother Mary and John the Beloved Disciple.
We have to literally lift our heads up to remember what this screen is all about.
The solid, weightier stiffness of the bottom part of the screen—rising from the church floor like slender trees—fractures into increasing detail. The screen rises through more tracery which creates a geometric netting like that of the forest canopy. The Blessed Virgin and Saint John inhabit these traceried realms near the pulsing source of this thriving, ever growing structure.
That source, of course, is the Cross of Jesus—the rood itself—whose three tips fracture still into six-pointed organisms. Even the tips of these six-pointed terminals feature little buds that might burst forth any moment.
And it is through this great structure that we pass time after time to approach the altar to receive in our own selves the body and blood of this Jesus who hung on the Cross. The heights of the colorful chancel ceiling, the bright glass showing the radiant Good Shepherd, and that sacred moment of taking the bread and the wine into our bodies is impossible without first passing through the Cross.
Notice, even, how the base of the screen is decorated with shields showing symbols of the passion of the Lord: the nails, the tunic, the crown of thorns, the pierced heart and so on.
The sacred meal of the bread and the wine of our world taken up into the fulness of Christ’s presence was always, in the first instance, to be consumed in remembrance of the Cross.
St. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth two thousand years ago (indeed our earliest mention of what we would come to know as the Holy Communion) made it clear that the bread and wine were first offered by Jesus on that night that ‘he was betrayed.’
And: ‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.’ And of course, there are the vital words that link memory of the sacrifice to the present: ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’
Even if the earliest Christians did not take up depicting the Crucifixion visually in the way that we are now familiar with (that took some time), they understood that the bread and the wine—and the fulness of Christ’s presence these transformed earthly materials brought—were inseparable from the reality of the saving passion and death of the Lord.
There could be no beating about the bush, no softening of the bread broken and the wine poured into a nostalgic memory. Here was a kind of memory so seriously real that, as St Paul put it, those who were to take the body and blood had to seriously examine themselves. And he warned that those who partook ‘unworthily’ induced judgement upon themselves.
Such talk of a kind of unilateral judgement probably leaves many of us to flee in a little hesitancy. It would be better to soften the body and blood into a memory that is less demanding.
But we might remember that for St. Paul the taking into our bodies of the body and blood of the Lord Jesus is not an isolated action. Memory is not only visceral and alive in the moment of Holy Communion, but the very memory of Christ’s offering of love calls us forth to actively live in memory. We are taken up into the fullness of life in Christ time after time.
The Holy Communion does not operate in the judgement of condemnation, then, but reconciles in the judgment of true love. As the bread fractures and the wine disseminates in our bodies, we find an astonishing truth: That the body and blood of the Lord Jesus desires to be so near us that the fulness of his sacred body willingly reaches both the bright plains and shadowy crevices of our own beings. And in so communing with our entire selves—especially those parts so hidden and so fearful and so worried and sad—the body and the blood of the Lord Jesus calls us forth to a new life which, day after day, assures us that even the things of this world, just like bread and wine, are not and will not be beyond transformation.
The very nature of bread and wine, offered and consumed in the memory of the God who become so entirely flesh as to die, the very nature of bread and wine to fracture within us, together, at the altar—there is the defining feature of the Christian life, which is to remember and so abide in the very nature of the Lord Jesus.
Only once this is known day after day can the life of action, of prayer, be sustained. Only then, it seems, does ministry of all kinds, the work of justice small and great, the daily challenge to actually love one another and ourselves—only once we approach the promise of the true indwelling of the Lord in us in bread and wine can our life in Crist Jesus burst forth.
And so we come back to the rood, to the Cross. Whether we look at it or not when we pass through it day after day, the memory of the Cross is there.
The Lord of life, of all time and space, is hanging on a tree of death that has, in that great paradox, become the way of true life and love. The way of true life and love not because we must suffer and die like Jesus to live and love, but because God has and does come as close to us as possible. The Cross, sprouting forth only if we look upwards, calls forth in us time after time the sacred memory that God has and is becoming flesh and blood. And in so raising our eyes, our hearts, and our bodies, may we come to know—gradually—the astounding truth that adoring his body and blood may teach us to perceive within ourselves the ever-growing fruit of his redemption.
Sermon by Mr. John Hager
The Feast of Corpus Christi
June 22, 2025