In Union With Christ's Offering for Us

And so, in remembrance of these your mighty acts in Jesus Christ, we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving as a holy and living sacrifice, in union with Christ's offering for us. United Methodist Communion Ritual

United Methodists don't pay enough attention to this line in our communion ritual. Holy Communion is not only a gift that God gives to us, but an offering (or oblation) that the church makes to the Father. In the Eucharist, the church offers its praise and thanksgiving to God and perpetually unites itself with Christ in his once-for-all sacrifice on the cross.

The prescribed sacrifices of the temple and tabernacle have not been laid aside because they were irrelevant or barbaric or represent outdated, primitive religious impulses. They were subsumed, rather, in Christ's self-offering on a hill outside Jerusalem.

Jesus made the one full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice required to establish and maintain God's new covenant with his people. Christ's sacrifice, however, is not merely an an event of past history. In every celebration of the Eucharist, the church both recalls that gift to its memory and joins itself to that gift in eternity.

Communion is a sharing or participation in the body and blood of Christ. That sharing works in two directions. We share in God's gift to us in Christ's atoning death, and we share in Christ's offering himself to the Father as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

This has historically been a Catholic point of emphasis. The mass is not only God's gift of Jesus' body and blood to us; it is the church's sacrificial offering of that same body and blood to God. The church doesn't re-sacrifice Jesus or reenact his crucifixion, but it does re-present the tokens of his sacrifice to the Father.

The early church Fathers called the mass an "unbloody sacrifice," which is especially appropriate given the fact Jesus gives us his crucified, risen, and glorified self, not dead meat. The lamb that was slain is risen and sits on the throne. On him we feed and through him we offer ourselves to the Father.

I think Rome is wrong at certain points, especially with regard to transubstantiation and the narrow focus on the Eucharistic elements. However, I think there is an important point here. When we come to the table, we don't just come to receive. We come to offer ourselves, knowing that we are holy in God's sight only through Christ who gave himself up for us. Only through our union with Christ are our prayers a sweet smelling offering to the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to the cross I cling.

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