Until He comes...

1 Corinthians 11:26:  For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.  Those words are not simply doctrinal but liturgical.  As often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord's death until He comes.  Not that many words later, we proclaim His death by eating and drinking what He offers, His flesh for the life of the world and His blood to cleanse us from all our sin.  This is the anamnesis or remembrance He has commanded us to make of what was, once for all, but it is also the foretaste of that eternal feast to come.

Strange, though, that there is no mention here of the resurrection.  Strange especially because so many treat the cross as if it were merely a bus stop along the way to the greater glory of the resurrection.  How many empty crosses have been justified by this faulty idea that the resurrection speaks more loudly than the suffering?  The cross and its redemptive suffering are not a mere momentary diversion from the greater goal and glory of the resurrection.  At least not according to St. Paul.

So why the cross until He comes and not the resurrection?  At least in part, it is because the suffering is where we live right now.  We experience death and suffering and pain.  It is part of our normal everyday lives.  No one escapes such in their mortal lives.  We experience death and suffering and pain but we believe in the resurrection.  None of us have yet had our flesh and blood raised from death never to die again -- none but Jesus.  For now we must deal with suffering.  Everyone of us must come to terms with suffering and with death.  We can choose to make a fragile peace with it or we can live in the death of the One who has killed it for us until we pass with Him to our own joyful resurrection.  So a theology of suffering is and must always be the theology for today.  There is no such thing as a blessed life without a blessed death.  It is His death that makes blessed the graves of the dead and vindicates their hope.  But that is not a finished fact -- an accomplished one, to be sure, but not yet completed or consummated for us.

We have the suffering and death as an accomplished fact but the resurrection is promise and pledge.  The sign of our resurrection is Jesus' resurrection.  He is raised never to die again but not yet has it been fulfilled in us.  So it is the death we proclaim.  The sign of the promise and our communion on the fruits of that death are in the same meal, the Holy Eucharist.  This is not what we want.  We want the victory and a victory which will make us escape and never to think of suffering and death again.  It is our weakness and our temptation -- no less than the very temptation Jesus suffered at the hand of the devil.  Bow down and you can have it all without suffering or death.  Our Lord refused such an empty promise and so must we.

We live in an age of suffering.  Our world pours money into the hands of those who can postpone it as long as possible and worships the promise of a painless end.  This is not a world, however, in which the postponement is anymore than a moment or the promise of an easy death any more than a mask worn by the angel of death.  In our world where justice is rendered seldom and in which Christians have a target on them simply by virtue of their Christianity, death and suffering are our lot.  The world tempts us with temporary distractions but only the Gospel of the Crucified One has any real hope or a future to offer those whose mortal lives end in ashes and dust.  Until then, our path is not the pursuit of victory but the path of endurance.  He who endures to the end, shall be saved.

We think we need victories.  That is the great temptation of the political church trying to establish the kingdom of God by vote or law but such a church is no church.  The Church is built upon the foundation of the Innocent who suffered for the guilty and the Lord of life who surrenders to death to rescue those who live in its shadow.  We need the cross where suffering is fully and finally redeemed and where sin is fully and finally answered.  This is why we proclaim His death until He comes.

It would seem that but a few Christians have remembered this.  Instead of a cross and a death and suffering for sin, these Christians live in glorified pleasure palaces in which the distraction is entertainment and the sacramental goal is happiness.  The true Christian gathers not around the whims of want and desire but where the sacrament born of suffering offers true consolation and hope to the sufferer.  There in the bread and wine that is His flesh and blood, we are fed with healing for this body of sin in which we live through forgiveness and it is here that we taste the fulfillment of the hope of those who went before and the promise of heaven and eternity.  So, yes, it is His death we proclaim until He comes.  Only in His death do we have an answer for our sufferings, for our sin, and for the death that waits for all who wear this flesh and blood.  The One whose death could hold Him has hope for those whom death still claims.  We experience this every day but we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.