Joy In The Eucharist

939 Words4 Pages
From the very beginning Christianity has been the proclamation of joy. Even at the very bottom of the darkness of impossibility, Christianity announced and conveyed a new all-embracing joy and with this joy it transformed the End into a Beginning. Without the proclamation of this joy the Christianity is incomprehensible. It is only as joy that the church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all the accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy. Joy, however is not something one can define or analyze. “…For, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy” thus begins the Gospel and its…show more content…
In the Eucharist, therefore, the church is placed in the very centre of history, sanctifying and transforming the world by being a new creation, creating a new mode of life. At the same time she is placed at the end of history as a sign of the kingdom, judging the world (I Cor 5-6) in the light of the eschatological realities of which the Eucharist is a manifestation. The Church which has this Eucharistic character is not an abstract or speculative idea but a concrete…show more content…
It means an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals. It also means an action or “ministry” of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community. This term was taken over by writers of Greek Septuagint Bible and used them to signify the Temple rituals of ancient Israel. It thus became, for the early Christians, the Chief word to signify the divine “worship and sacrifice” of the church, a term which would distinguish it from the pagan (sic) sacrificial cult around them. The Oxford Dictionary defines liturgy as a fixed form of public worship used in

More about Joy In The Eucharist

Open Document