THE WORLD'S GREATEST SECRET
John Mathias Haffert
table of contents
CHAPTER SIX
THE SECRET GOSPEL TRUTH
It is little wonder that the
fish (meaning Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior) was frescoed into the catacomb
walls surmounted by loaves and wine. When we turn from the discoveries and
archeology to reread the Gospels, we rind something we may never really have
seen before: that it was the Eucharist which Christ Himself emphasized. Not
only did He make It the test of faith at Capernaum, but at the eleventh hour,
on the very eve of His death, He held It up to His followers as His legacy and
His pledge of His ever-abiding Presence. At this time, when He knew that
these, His last acts, and words, would be cherished and remembered more
vividly than any which had gone before, what did He do and say? Though He
spoke of love, He did not try to summarize His sermons and His parables. He
did not remind His apostles of past miracles or favors. He did not exhort His
followers to live up to His precepts nor extract any promises of fidelity from
them. Instead, He gave them the Eucharist. What is more, even though He would
die a terrible death in less than twenty-four hours, He identified the
institution of the Eucharist with the Passover and with the purpose of His
coming.
2 And never before had He
said that He ardently desired "this moment," the moment when the
secret of the miracle of the loaves and fishes was finally revealed.
Immediately after Christ died, in the short interval before Peter went to
Rome, in the interval during which he and all the Apostles remained in
Jerusalem, we see that the Eucharist was already considered a sort of
trademark for Christ and His followers. It appears in the twenty fourth
chapter of St. Luke's Gospel: Two disciples of the Lord, Cleophas and his
companion, were traveling about seven or eight miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus.
Christ had been dead but a scant three days and as they walked along the dusty
road, they could talk of nothing else. The terrible, crushing grief which
filled their minds and hearts overflowed into words which eddied round and
round in repetition as they asked one another time and again: "Were we
fooled about this Jesus? Was he really the Christ? Or was the fellow no more
than a rabble-rouser seeking to stir up a to-do for his own selfish ends? Or
at best was he a good man who was deluded, and so deluded others?"' They
shook their heads wearily and the one named Cleophas remarked: "It's
beyond all understanding. I know only that all the light has gone out of my
life. I feel that a part of me has died with Him. " His companion, whom
the Gospel does not name, sighed, "Yes, what have we to hope for
now?
3 I wish."
He broke off abruptly. "Here comes another traveler along the road."
The newcomer had scarcely greeted them when he noticed their downcast faces
and their dejected air. "What are you talking about? What makes you so
sad?" he asked. "Man, you ask that?" Cleophas exploded.
"Are you a stranger in Jerusalem that you don't know what has happened
there these past few days?" "What has happened?" the newcomer
asked. With one voice the two travelers answered: "Jesus of Nazareth is
dead... crucified as a common criminal." But the unnamed one went on:
"This Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet, mighty in work and word before
God, and before all the people. Our high priests and the princes of the realm
delivered him to be condemned to death, and they nailed him to the tree."
"But we hoped that it would be he who would redeem Israel. We hoped that
he was the Christ, the Messiah," Cleophas explained. "And besides
all this," Cleophas' companion took up, "this is the third day since
his death, and certain women of our company have been saying many strange
things. Before the light came out of the east, early in the morning, they went
to his tomb and they did not find his body. They said that they saw an angel
who told them that he is alive. What are we to think?" "And others
besides the women went to the sepulcher and found it just as the women said.
His body was gone," Cleophas added quickly. As their words tumbled out,
the newcomer-traveler listened intently. It was only when they came to pause
at last that He answered them: "You are really slow to see and to believe
what the prophets have written.
4 Shouldn't Christ have
suffered these things and entered into his glory?" With that as a
prelude, the "stranger" began to talk of the prophecies in the
Scriptures. Tracing them all the way back to Moses, He showed how the texts
foretold for the Savior of the world just such a rejection by His people and
death at their hands. Cleophas and his companion were silent. Their dark eyes
were riveted on the speaker as they drank in His every word. It was all so
logical and so convincing, and the stranger was so eloquent and so compelling.
They paid no attention to the passing of time as He talked until they suddenly
spied from the crest of the hill the squat building of the inn lying in the
valley below. It was there that they had planned to stop for the last meal of
the day and to rest. When they mentioned this to the stranger, He murmured
something about going on farther Himself. "Oh, no!" the other two
protested. "It is late now. Stop with us." Obviously they were
extremely reluctant to part company and their persuasion soon won over their
chance fellow traveler. He entered the inn with them. A little later the three
men sat at a table and the stranger picked up the bread set before them, held
it for a moment in His strong, sun-tanned hands, blessed it, broke it, and
gave it to them. Scarcely had the two disciples of Christ swallowed the morsel
when they both sprang to their feet as though propelled by some outside force.
This man was no longer a stranger! He was... "Oh, Lord," they cried,
and thrust out their arms as though to clutch Him, but He vanished from their
sight.
5 "Ah, it was He!"
breathed Cleophas. "Wasn't your heart burning within you when He spoke
... when He explained the Scriptures?" "Yes, it was He!"
"But we can't sit here," Cleophas said, wrapping his cloak about him
and turning toward the door. "We must go back to Jerusalem. We must tell
Peter and the others. " Forthwith, leaving their frugal meal upon the
table, they rushed out into the gathering dusk and retraced their steps to
Jerusalem, back to the place where the eleven Apostles were hiding. Bursting
in upon the little gathering, they all but shouted: "We have seen the
Lord! It was He and no mistake about it. We knew Him in the breaking of the
bread." After the story of the travelers on their way to Emmaus, other
references to the Eucharist appear in the Bible although almost with an air of
secrecy. Saint Paul, in chapter eleven of his First Epistle to the
Corinthians, writes of the Last Supper saying: "...on the night in which
he was betrayed took bread, and after he had given thanks, broke it and said,
'This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same
way, after the supper, he took the cup, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant
in my blood. Do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.' Every
time, then, you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of
the Lord until he comes! This means that whoever eats the bread or drinks the
cup of the Lord unworthily sins against the body and blood of the Lord. A man
should examine himself first; only then should he eat of the bread and drink
of the cup. He who eats and drinks without recognizing the body eats and
drinks a judgment on himself. "(11:23-29) .
6 Saint Luke writes in the
second chapter of the Acts o the Apostles: "And they devoted themselves
to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking o bread and the
prayers " (v. 42). Then in the same chapter, Luke speaks of the
Christians ". .. breaking bread in their homes" (v. 46), indicating
that this was the usual procedure when they gathered together. Also in the
Acts of the Apostles, we read: "On the first day of the week when we
gathered for the breaking of _bread..." (20:7). For years after early
apostolic days, fear tied the hands of the Christian scribes and scholars, so
that little was written about the Eucharist, or I or that matter about any
aspect of the Faith. However, knowledge of Eucharistic doctrine and practice
of the Eucharistic Liturgy were passed along from generation to generation by
what we call -tradition." Happily, tradition is reliable. It is akin to
Gospel truth. It would have to be. No ordinary mortal would come equipped with
the inventiveness necessary to make up a story like the Eucharistic one. Or,
if some strange being did invent it, no ordinary meal would perpetuate it. For
such an idea to have originated and to have endured, it would have to be more
certain than surmise in the minds of Christians. They were willing to die for
it. Moreover, it was not a tenet calculated to recruit new members to the
struggling, infant Church. On the contrary! It was a tenet which would repel
most people; they would consider i t too fantastic I or belief and an insult
to their common sense. Nevertheless the little band of Christians stuck to it
and passed it on to their children, and their children to their children,
through the years. And they did die for it.
7 It was tradition* alone
which held together the chain of teaching in unbroken sequence through the
years of persecution and secrecy. As a matter of fact comparatively few people
in pagan Rome could read. The Gospels and the whole collection of sacred
writings that we now call the Bible were not assembled and compiled into one
book until after the periods of the persecution. The deposit of Faith then was
handed down orally from one Christian to another for almost four centuries
until the Bible was compiled and until other manuscripts and books of all
sorts could publicly record it. Today, thanks to the ever-advancing science of
archeology we are beginning to find evidence which corroborates the writings
as well as the tradition. But we may never find corroboration of all details.
Nor have the writings themselves recorded every detail. We still must look to
tradition to flesh out the skeleton of the written word which wasn't filled
out until after the time of secrecy - At a luncheon meeting of some prominent
men, somebody asked: "How did Lincoln pronounce those I words of his
address of the people, by the people, for the people'?" All answered: ...
of the people, by the people, for the people." But one person added:
"Actually I suppose we can never know for sure. It has never been
recorded." "Anything about the address is important," remarked
another man who happened to be Naval Attaché to the United States Embassy in
Rome, "for it is the epitome of the American doctrine, and certainly one
o the most significant documents of all time." Then the writer of this
book, who had first broached the subject, said:
8 "Lincoln stressed
'... a government the People, by the People, and for the people., N English
teacher was corrected on this point by his teach who heard Lincoln say it. I I
Perhaps no one ever thought to record Lincoln's election in these past one
hundred years. Our grandparents or great grandparents knew many, many persons
who were contemporaries of Lincoln. They had not appreciated the importance of
the address at Gettysburg when it was delivered. It was but a small fragment
fro a war which marked a black and baneful passage in the lives. Yet any one
of hundreds could have written a note t correct the countless school children
who emphasize the wrong words. Apparently nobody ever bothered t write it ...
until now, a hundred years later, in this book So it must have been with early
Christianity. Only tradition saves some small facts. Because of secrecy
caused by persecution, only tradition saved even important facts until
the day when, comparatively free of persecution the so-called "Fathers
and Doctors of the church''* could record
them in writing. In the fourth century these hardy souls began to defend
Christ's teaching against the objections of the non-Christian world and to put
Christian teaching down in legible black and white ,, Though one
:'Father" wrote in Africa, another in ./Athens, another in what is now
Istanbul, another in Rome, they were all found to agree in their teachings and
writings. This is another proof (if we need it) for the validity of the
tradition they recorded. What these first writers (now called Fathers of the
Church)* taught about the Eucharist is just as amazing and just as
"unbelievable" as what Christ Himself (according to the Gospel
account) told the crowd which turned away from Him in Capernaum. It was an
explanation after three hundred years of experience.
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