Preview: "Christ, A Quickening Spirit" and The Blessed Sacrament

The Son Rise Morning Show took the Octave of Easter off, but Anna Mitchell and I wanted to continue meditations on St. John Henry Newman's sermons during the Easter Season. So on Monday, April 20, we'll begin with one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, "Christ, A Quickening Spirit", a sermon he preached on "The Feast of of the Resurrection of Our Lord". It is from Volume 2, Sermon 13 and he preached it on April 3, 1831.

In this sermon, Newman sets out a few of he calls "comfortable" or perhaps comforting thoughts about the Resurrection of Jesus. First of all, he points out how well the Resurrection of Jesus "harmonizes the history of His birth":

David had foretold that His "soul should not be left in hell" (that is, the unseen state), neither should "the Holy One of God see corruption." And with a reference to this prophecy, St. Peter says, that it "was not possible that He should be holden of death;" [Ps. xvi. 10. Acts ii. 24, 27] as if there were some hidden inherent vigour in Him, which secured His manhood from dissolution. The greatest infliction of pain and violence could only destroy its powers for a season; but nothing could make it decay. "Thou wilt not suffer Thy Holy One to see corruption;" so says the Scripture, and elsewhere calls him the "Holy child Jesus." [Acts iv. 27] These expressions carry our minds back to the Angels' announcement of His birth, in which His incorruptible and immortal nature is implied. "That Holy Thing" which was born of Mary, was "the Son," not of man, but "of God." Others have all been born in sin, "after Adam's own likeness, in His image," [Gen. v. 3.] and, being born in sin, they are heirs to corruption. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death," and all its consequences, "by sin." Not one human being comes into existence without God's discerning evidences of sin attendant on his birth. But when the Word of Life was manifested in our flesh, the Holy Ghost displayed that creative hand by which, in the beginning, Eve was formed; and the Holy Child, thus conceived by the power of the Highest, was (as the history shows) immortal even in His mortal nature, clear from all infection of the forbidden fruit, so far as to be sinless and incorruptible. Therefore, though He was liable to death, "it was impossible He should be holden" of it. Death might overpower, but it could not keep possession; "it had no dominion over Him." [Rom. vi. 9.] He was, in the words of the text, "the Living among the dead."

In a beautiful passage, Newman describes Jesus's appearance as a man:

Such is the connexion between Christ's birth and resurrection; and more than this might be ventured concerning His incorrupt nature, were it not better to avoid all risk of trespassing upon that reverence with which we are bound to regard it. Something might be said concerning His personal appearance, which seems to have borne the marks of one who was not tainted with birth-sin. Men could scarce keep from worshipping Him. When the Pharisees sent to seize Him, all the officers, on His merely acknowledging Himself to be Him whom they sought, fell backwards from His presence to the ground. They were scared as brutes are said to be by the voice of man. Thus, being created in God's image, He was the second Adam; and much more than Adam in His secret nature, which beamed through His tabernacle of flesh with awful purity and brightness even in the days of His humiliation. "The first man was of the earth, earthy; the second man was the Lord from heaven." [1 Cor. xv. 47.]

Therefore in his second "comfortable" thought, Newman says that after the Resurrection and before the Ascension, Jesus's appearance was even more attractive and beautiful:

So transfigured was His Sacred Body, that He who had deigned to be born of a woman, and to hang upon the cross, had subtle virtue in Him, like a spirit, to pass through the closed doors to His assembled followers; while, by condescending to the trial of their senses, He showed that it was no mere spirit, but He Himself, as before, with wounded hands and pierced side, who spoke to them. He manifested Himself to them, in this His exalted state, that they might be His witnesses to the people; witnesses of those separate truths which man's reason cannot combine, that He had a real human body, that it was partaker in the properties of His Soul, and that it was inhabited by the Eternal Word. . . . Thus manifested as perfect God and perfect man, in the fulness of His sovereignty, and the immortality of His holiness, He ascended up on high to take possession of His kingdom. There He remains till the last day, "Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Ever-lasting Father, The Prince of Peace." [Isa. ix. 6.]

Thirdly, Newman reminded his congregation that Jesus's Ascension was essential to His mission, but did not mean that He left us alone, because He gave us the Eucharist:

He ascended into heaven, that He might plead our cause with the Father; as it is said, "He ever liveth to make intercession for us." [Heb. vii. 25.] Yet we must not suppose, that in leaving us He closed the gracious economy of His Incarnation, and withdrew the ministration of His incorruptible Manhood from His work of loving mercy towards us. "The Holy One of God" was ordained, not only to die for us, but also to be "the beginning" of a new "creation" unto holiness, in our sinful race; to refashion soul and body after His own likeness, that they might be "raised up together, and sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Blessed for ever be His Holy Name! before He went away, He remembered our necessity, and completed His work, bequeathing to us a special mode of approaching Him, a Holy Mystery, in which we receive (we know not how) the virtue of that Heavenly Body, which is the life of all that believe. This is the blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, in which "Christ is evidently set forth crucified among us;" that we, feasting upon the Sacrifice, may be "partakers of the Divine Nature." Let us give heed lest we be in the number of those who "discern not the Lord's Body," and the "exceeding great and precious promises" which are made to those who partake it. And since there is some danger of this, I will here make some brief remarks concerning this great gift; and, pray God that our words and thoughts may accord to its unspeakable sacredness.

We have to remember again that Newman was a High Church Anglican: one of the projects of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement was the revival of the Church of England's liturgy. Newman translated, for example, the devotions of the sixteenth century Anglican bishop, Lancelot Andrewes in Tract 88. When you read Andrewes's Preparation for Holy Communion you can see an almost Catholic view of the Blessed Sacrament and receiving Holy Communion. Not all Anglicans agreed with this view of the Real Presence: the Tractarians wanted to revive the celebration of the Eucharist on every Sunday, which was not that common in the 1830's and 1840's. Newman is certainly encouraging his parishioners at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin to receive Holy Communion and to believe that by doing so they are receiving "the virtue of that Heavenly Body" and are "'partakers of the Divine Nature.'" 

He concludes the description of "this great gift" with reminders of the grace they'll receive in "the Lord's Body":

Let us not doubt, though we do not sensibly approach Him, that He can still give us the virtue of His purity and incorruption, as He has promised, and in a more heavenly and spiritual manner, than "in the days of His flesh;" in a way which does not remove the mere ailments of this temporal state, but sews the seed of eternal life in body and soul. Let us not deny Him the glory of His life-giving holiness, that diffusive grace which is the renovation of our whole race, a spirit quick and powerful and piercing, so as to leaven the whole mass of human corruption, and make it live. He is the first-fruits of the Resurrection: we follow Him each in his own order, as we are hallowed by His inward presence. And in this sense, among others, Christ, in the Scripture phrase, is "formed in us;" that is, the communication is made to us of His new nature, which sanctifies the soul, and makes the body immortal. In like manner we pray in the Service of the Communion that "our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body, and our souls washed through His most precious blood; and that we may evermore dwell in Him and He in us."