In the Church of the first few centuries, what was happening in the Eucharist was often referred to as the ‘Great Bargain’ or the ‘Great Trade’. (In the Latin it was the ‘Admirabile Commercium’).
This was a way of speaking about the exchange which occurred between God and believers in the Eucharist. And in the use of the above phrase, the point being made was that we were the utter beneficiaries of this exchange. The giving of God totally outweighed the giving on our part.
We come before the Lord with just ourselves. We are symbolised in the bread and wine which are our everyday life givers as we eat and drink them in the course of our normal lives.
What we receive back as we go to communion is a gift beyond measure. It is the bread which feeds the life of the resurrection into us and it is the cup of unending joy. This is a bread which does not just feed life as we know it now into us, but a life over which death has no power.
This new cup of wine promises us not the passing and sometimes deceptive joy which wine can give us, but it promises us a joy which will penetrate and possess us unendingly.
This bread and wine is given to us. We come to receive it. It is a gift which we do not have to earn but which comes from the overflowing love of God for us. It is that love which shows its extreme nature in Christ’s laying down his life for us in his death. This is his body given for us, his blood shed for us.
He asks us to keep doing ‘in his memory’ what he did at the Last Supper in order that the love-unto-death to which he committed himself at that Supper and which he lived out on the cross, might come to us through all the generations the time of the Last Supper and his death and our present time.
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Kerry Bourke says:
Thanks for this great explanation of the ‘Great Bargain’, Fr Frank.