The way this is worded I think already turns us around in the wrong direction. It suggests that sacraments and liturgy are disciplines “of Communion” (koinonia) – that they are outgrowths or entailments “of communion” – that when you have communion, then you have sacraments and liturgy. I want to say that this is exactly backward. Communion rather belongs to the sacraments and the liturgy. Communion flows from sacraments and the liturgy. Indeed, the teaching of our faith is that the Church is born of the water and the blood flowing from the side of our crucified Lord. I want to suggest that ecclesiaility – the Church itself – is born of liturgy / sacramentality. And only after this birth does communion with God – what the sacraments efficaciously figure and inaugurate – become the goal toward which we are oriented as a pilgrim people “in communion” with God and with one another. Therefore the sacramental life, the life of the Church, situates us squarely in the borderlands between time and eternity: the much-touted “already and not yet” of the Gospel. Because we are inhabiting what has already been given: the divine life of Jesus Christ; but we inhabit it yet, this side of the apocalypse, provisionally: as through a glass darkly. We are journeying toward the place from which we set out in the beginning. The Christian life is therefore properly conceived of as a “return” – as Isaiah said: “In returning and rest you shall be saved” (Is. 30.15).



And by the way: nothing I am going to say is original. I think “original” theology is very suspicious. What I am going to be saying comes mostly from the Fathers, via three great 20th century theologians: Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, and John Zizioulas. So if you want to have these same points expounded in a more sound and more eloquent way, I highly recommend the work of Danielou, de Lubac, and Zizioulas.



To be what was once called “a churchman” – to be a Christian – is to inhabit a form of life, or to be appropriated by a form of life. And that form of life is nothing more, and nothing less, than Jesus Christ himself. St. Paul calls this form of life, given to us once for all on the cross, “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4.13). And while Christ’s life was indeed offered “once for all” (1 Pet. 3.18), yet our “attaining to it” is something toward which we are striving by degrees, as Paul says. So, as always seems to be the case when we are dealing with the orthodox faith, there is a paradox. The “unity of the faith”, the “body of Christ” (cf. Eph. 4.12-13), are indeed gifts given once and for all, yet they are in essence nothing short of the place where God’s will is carried out totally and completely. And that place IS Jesus Christ, who “does the will of the Father” (cf. John 6.38), and who will be manifest for all eyes univocally to see (Rev. 1.7) at his “Parousia” at the end of time.



Jesus came to earth to solve a fundamental problem with the human form of life: that it had become alienated from God, and therefore was languishing, because God is the source of all life. When life becomes alienated from the source of all life, it languishes. There is nowhere for it to go but to the grave – to slide inexorably into ruin. And the Old Testament is full of pleas to God for deliverance from the grave, from the pit, from the abyss. These pleas are really appeals for deliverance from sin – because sin is most fundamentally this turning away from God, and so an inhabitation of the serpent’s primordial lie: that we don’t need God in order to live, that we will never become who we were meant to be until we take our destiny by the horns and “self-actualize”. But the truth is – as St. Augustine famously put it – we were made for God, and our restlessness comes from our alienation from his presence. The Kingdom of God is our home.



So Jesus Christ undoes what our first ancestor did. Whereas Adam – the universal man – became estranged from God, and we too through and in Adam; so Jesus, the new Adam, the “one new man”, as Paul calls him (Eph. 2.15), comes to seek out the old Adam – human nature, and to restore it to the dignity and life which was God’s original gift. In other words, “the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost” (Lk. 19.10). There is an ancient sermon for Holy Saturday, the liturgical commemoration of Christ’s resting in death. The anonymous author writes beautifully and compellingly of Jesus going down to the domain of the dead to look for Adam, to raise him up:

Today a great silence reigns on earth, a great silence and a great stillness. A great silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began…. He has gone to search for Adam, our first father, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow Adam in his bonds and Eve, captive with him – He who is both their God and the son of Eve…. I am your God, who for your sake have become your son…. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. (CCC 635 quoting an ancient sermon from PG 43, 440A, 452C: LH, Holy Saturday, OR).

Jesus comes to fix that problem: our separation from our home in God – and therefore he comes to cure the restless anxiety, the guilt, the shame, the existential ennui, the sense of displacement at the center of human consciousness. As St. Athanasius of Alexandria put it: “He was made man that we might be made God” (De Inc. 54.3). Jesus came to earth to take to himself a Bride; to become one flesh with our human nature, and so to unite us to God (who is our home) forever.



There are very few passages in the Gospels where Jesus talks explicitly about marriage. In fact, there is arguably only one; and it is when the Pharisees come to ask the Lord about divorce. This is from St. Mark’s Gospel:

Pharisees came up and in order to test [Jesus] asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?" He answered them, "What did Moses command you?" They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away." But Jesus said to them, "For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, `God made them male and female.' `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." (Mark 10.2-9),

Here lurks one of the most important lessons of the Gospel. And, as is often the case with what the Lord says, the profundity of the passage lies beneath the surface, beneath the “plain, grammatical sense” (if there even is such a thing) of the text. Jesus Christ, the only and eternal Son, is the man who leaves his Father in heaven, and his Mother on earth, and is joined to his wife – our nature – and the two become one flesh; so they are no longer two, but one flesh. The different but mysteriously complimentary natures of God and man become one divine person: Jesus Christ.



In the old marriage vows, the Bridegroom said to the Bride: “with this ring, I thee wed; with my body, I thee worship; and with all my worldly goods, I thee endow; in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” And that is what happens on the cross – indeed the cross is the REALITY of marriage, of which the sacrament of Christian marriage is but a shadow: the Son of God worships his Bride: he proclaims her supreme WORTH with his body, and he endows her with all that he has and all that he is. And on the cross, he announces “It is finished!” – in Latin, consummatum est – this marriage is consummated, forever… “till death do us part” – this is a lifelong union, and because we are talking about the only Son of God, it is a union for eternal life.



So the incarnation of the Word – the form of life of the eternal Son within the sphere of createdness, which reaches a climax on Golgotha – this form of life is GIVEN, to us, and to the Father FOR us, and it is given so that we might receive what God is and has. Himself. As Jesus put it: “my blood is drink indeed” (Jn. 6.55). And, as Leviticus says, “the life… is in the blood” (Lev. 17.11). This is how we are “reconciled to God” (Rom. 5.10) – through the blood of Jesus. And this is the ONLY way we are reconciled with God, because only in the “one man” (cf. Rom. 5.15), Jesus Christ, are divine nature and human nature wedded to one another indissolubly, forever.



This is supposed to be a discussion of sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, and the discipline of communion. I began by suggesting that ecclesiality – the life of the Church, and so “the gift of Communion” – as its foundation in liturgy and sacramentality, rather than the other way around. Now we are in a position to see why: because man is reconciled to God through the self-offering of the only and eternal Son of God – the liturgy of the Son of man, the “public work” (in Greek the “leitos ergos”) of Jesus Christ, and preeminently his self-offering on Calvary: the breaking of his Body, and the spilling of his Blood. As the late, great Archbishop Michael Ramsey put it: the Church's fellowship "springs from and bears witness to the events of Jesus in the flesh. The events created the fellowship and the fellowship mysteriously shares in the events" (The Gospel and the Catholic Church, 48).



But what about the “dominical” sacraments (though, in truth, all the sacraments are “dominical” – given by the Lord)? What about baptism and Eucharist? We must bear in mind that salvation, our common incorporation into the life of God through the Blood of Christ, and so the bond of love we all share in him – this event is not merely a spiritual thing. It is God’s will that the whole of man should be saved. And the story of our wholeness as creatures is a story of materiality. We were formed of matter – of stuff – as Genesis put it, “the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2.7). We cannot exist as disembodied spirits or souls, because that is not God’s will: he did not make us that way. We are made of matter, and so our salvation must be material.



And so Jesus gave us material means to effect or appropriate the material salvation he wrought by means of the material breaking of his body and spilling of his blood. He gave us baptism with the command: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28.19); and he gave us Eucharist with the command: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22.19).



[For the sake of brevity, I will just consider baptism.]



Jesus himself established the continuity of baptism with his death when he referred to his death as his “baptism” (cf. Mark 10.38). The ancient Fathers, as well as the ancient baptismal liturgies of the Church, drawing out these evangelical contiguities, saw in the baptismal waters, and preeminently in the waters of the Lord’s own Baptism in the Jordan, the primordial waters of chaos, which were in the ancient cosmologies the dwelling place of monsters who menace and seek to devour mankind. Job sings of God stilling the sea by his power, and with his understanding smiting the dragon Rahab (cf. Job 26.12). So too Isaiah foresees the victory of Jesus as God’s victory over the dragon of the deep: “In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27.1).



It is Jesus who, according to the Fathers, fulfills these prophecies. In his Baptism, the Lord descends into the primordial waters and crushes the head of the serpent dwelling there (e.g. Psalm 74.14). St. Cyril of Jerusalem (4th century) takes up this theme (XXXIII 441 A [??] – The Bible and the Liturgy, p. 41):



The dragon Behemoth, according to Job, was in the waters, and was taking the Jordan into his gullet. But as the heads of the dragon had to be crushed, Jesus, having descended into the waters, chained fast the strong one, so that we might gain the power to tread on scorpions and serpents. Life came so that henceforth a curb might be put on death, and so that all who have received salvation might say: O Death, where is your victory? For it is by baptism that the sting of death is drawn. You go down into the waters, bearing your sins; but the invocation of grace, having marked your soul with its seal, will prevent your being devoured by the terrible dragon. Having gone down into the waters dead in sin, you come out brought to life in justice.



We can see in the Lord’s own Baptism, in effect, the baptism of the waters of the earth. After the death and resurrection of Jesus – after “his baptism” – the waters are no longer the domain of chaos and destruction, but the Lord restores to them their original, vivifying power. It is as though God repeats what he had spoken in Genesis: “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures” (Gen. 1.20); only now, rather than squids and eels, through the power of Christ, the waters bring forth sons and daughters of God. And because all this is accomplished through the agency of Jesus, the “one new man”, his victory belongs to all humanity, if we only ascent to it; if we believe in him and are baptized in his name.



The gift of communion thus springs from this public work, this liturgy of Jesus Christ, into his form of life; because in baptism we are incorporated into his liturgy, as St. Paul says: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6.3-4). In the pneumatic space of salvation, as we approach Christ, as we answer his call to “come to me” (cf. Jn. 6.37), we encounter every other person who has likewise obeyed the Lord’s summons. As we move closer to the Lord, and are appropriated by his victory, we move closer to one another. So we find that the gift of communion with God is the same thing as communion with one another.