Friday, April 27, 2007

Eucharist: The Lifegiving Flesh Of Jesus Christ

"We proclaim the death according to the flesh of the Only begotten Son of God, and confess the return to life from the dead of Jesus Christ, and his ascension into heaven, and thus we perform in the churches an unbloody worship, and in this way approach mystical blessing and are sanctified, becoming participents in the holy flesh and the precious blood of Christ the Savior of us all. We do not receive this as ordinary flesh, God forbid, or as the flesh of a man sanctified and conjoined to the Word in a unity of dignity, or as the flesh of someone who enjoys a divine indwelling. No, we receive it as truly the lifegiving and very-flesh of the Word himself. As God he is by nature life and since he became one with his own flesh he revealed it as life-giving. So even if he should say to us: 'Amen, Amen, I say to you, If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood', we must not consider this as if it were the flesh of any man like us (for how could the flesh of a man be life-giving from its own nature?) but rather that it has truly become the personal flesh of him who for our sakes became, and was called, the Son of Man."

-Cyril of Alexandria

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