Christian Art | A Boy At Prayer With Jesus In The Eucharist
Office Of Readings | Eastertide Week 3, Thursday | A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Irenaeus Against The Heresies | The Eucharist Is The Guarantee Of Salvation
‘The eucharist is the guarantee of salvation.’
The Eucharist And Resurrection Of The Flesh | Saint Irenaeus, Sacramental Realism, And The Glory Of The Body’
The text from Saint Irenaeus, read on Thursday of the third week of Eastertide in the Office of Readings, is a profound theological meditation on the relationship between the Eucharist and the resurrection of the body. It stands not merely as an apologetic against heresy, but as a luminous witness to the Church’s sacramental and eschatological faith—rooted in the Incarnation, expressed through liturgy, and fulfilled in the resurrection.
Combating Gnosticism | Defence Of The Flesh
Saint Irenaeus of Lyons wrote Against the Heresies in the second century to confront the growing influence of Gnostic teachings, especially among groups like the Valentinians. These movements claimed that the material world was the result of a lesser, ignorant deity and that salvation meant escape from the physical realm. According to them, the body was a temporary prison and had no part in eternal life.
Irenaeus’s argument is a direct and systematic refutation of this worldview. If Christ truly redeemed us, then He must have assumed and sanctified the full reality of human nature—including the body. He asks pointedly: if the flesh is not saved, then what did Christ die for? What is the meaning of the blood He shed?
This insistence on the redemption of the body is not simply about defending Christian doctrine—it’s about affirming the goodness of creation and the reality of God’s love manifest in history. For Irenaeus, salvation is not the rejection of creation but its restoration.
Eucharistic Realism | More Than Symbol
Central to Irenaeus’s theology is the Eucharist, not merely as a memorial meal or symbolic act, but as the real presence of Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity. Irenaeus asserts that the bread and wine, fruits of creation, become truly the Body and Blood of Christ when they receive the Word of God. This echoes what we find in Justin Martyr and in the Didache: early Christian sources that describe the Eucharist as a sacrifice and as the ‘medicine of immortality,’ a term also found in Ignatius of Antioch.
Irenaeus’s language is strikingly realistic. The Eucharist, he says, is what nourishes our actual bodies—our flesh and blood—thereby preparing them for resurrection. There is no hint of abstraction. The bread is not like His body; it is His body. The chalice is not a symbol of His blood; it is His blood. This is no mere rhetorical device, but a deeply sacramental vision rooted in the Incarnation itself: if God became flesh, then matter can become a bearer of divine life.
Scriptural Grounding | Flesh, Blood, And Life
Saint Irenaeus anchors his argument in Scripture, particularly Ephesians 5:30 (‘we are members of his body, of his flesh and bones’) and 1 Corinthians 15, where Saint Paul elaborates on the resurrection. Irenaeus resists any spiritualizing of these passages. When Paul says we are members of Christ’s flesh, Irenaeus insists we take this literally—not as spirits or metaphors, but as people who are bodily united to Christ through the Eucharist.
This connection is not accidental. Jesus Himself taught in John 6: ‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.’ Irenaeus takes this at full weight. The Eucharist is not a mere fellowship meal—it is divine sustenance, the life-giving flesh and blood of the risen Christ.
Sacrament As Seed | Agricultural Imagery And Resurrection
Irenaeus’s final section evokes agricultural imagery that links the Eucharist to the resurrection of the body. He describes a vine cutting planted in soil, grain that falls and decays only to rise in abundance—symbols rooted in both nature and the Gospel (cf. John 12:24). These metaphors speak of continuity: what dies is what will rise. There is no disembodied salvation here. The very body nourished by Christ’s Eucharist is the one that will rise.
This idea of the Eucharist as ‘seed’ of the resurrection foreshadows later sacramental theology, including that of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who refers to the Eucharist as viaticum—food for the journey to eternal life—and who emphasizes that it ‘contains in itself spiritually all the effects of the Passion.’
In this sense, the Eucharist is not just a sign of what is to come; it is the instrument of that future. The body, having received the living Christ, becomes capable—by grace—of sharing in His resurrected glory.
Liturgy And Immortality | The Easter Context
The Church places this reading in the heart of Eastertide for good reason. The resurrection of Christ is not just an event of the past; it is the inauguration of a new creation. In the liturgy, especially in the Easter Eucharist, we taste that new life now. The ancient Easter preface proclaims: ‘In Him a new age has dawned, the long reign of sin is ended, a broken world has been renewed.’
What Irenaeus teaches us is that this renewal is not confined to the soul—it extends to the body, the material world, and all of creation. His theology also provides a kind of mystagogical catechesis: newly baptized Christians, nourished by the Eucharist, are being formed not just for moral living, but for immortal life.
A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Irenaeus Against The Heresies | The Eucharist Is The Guarantee Of Salvation
If our flesh is not saved, then the Lord has not redeemed us with his blood, the eucharistic chalice does not make us sharers in his blood, and the bread we break does not make us sharers in his body. There can be no blood without veins, flesh and the rest of the human substance, and this the Word of God actually became: it was with his own blood that he redeemed us. As the Apostle says: In him, through his blood, we have been redeemed, our sins have been forgiven.
We are his members and we are nourished by creatures, which is his gift to us, for it is he who causes the sun to rise and the rain to fall. He declared that the chalice, which comes from his creation, was his blood, and he makes it the nourishment of our blood. He affirmed that the bread, which comes from his creation, was his body, and he makes it the nourishment of our body. When the chalice we mix and the bread we bake receive the word of God, the eucharistic elements become the body and blood of Christ, by which our bodies live and grow. How then can it be said that flesh belonging to the Lord’s own body and nourished by his body and blood is incapable of receiving God’s gift of eternal life? Saint Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians that we are members of his body, of his flesh and bones. He is not speaking of some spiritual and incorporeal kind of man, for spirits do not have flesh and bones. He is speaking of a real human body composed of flesh, sinews and bones, nourished by the chalice of Christ’s blood and receiving growth from the bread which is his body.
The slip of a vine planted in the ground bears fruit at the proper time. The grain of wheat falls into the ground and decays only to be raised up again and multiplied by the Spirit of God who sustains all things. The Wisdom of God places these things at the service of man and when they receive God’s word they become the eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ. In the same way our bodies, which have been nourished by the eucharist, will be buried in the earth and will decay, but they will rise again at the appointed time, for the Word of God will raise them up to the glory of God the Father. Then the Father will clothe our mortal nature in immortality and freely endow our corruptible nature with incorruptibility, for God’s power is shown most perfectly in weakness.
Saint Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–c. 202 AD)
Saint Irenaeus was a second-century bishop, theologian, and martyr, best known for his powerful defense of orthodox Christian faith against Gnosticism. Born in Smyrna (modern-day Izmir, Turkey), he was likely a student of Saint Polycarp, who himself had been a disciple of the Apostle John, giving Irenaeus a vital link to the apostolic tradition.
He later moved to Gaul (modern-day France) and became the bishop of Lyons around 177 AD. His most famous work, Adversus Haereses (Against the Heresies), systematically refuted Gnostic teachings and laid out a robust theology of the Incarnation, the sacraments, Scripture, and apostolic succession.
Irenaeus emphasized the unity of body and soul, the goodness of creation, and the salvific role of Christ’s real humanity. He was among the first to clearly articulate the concept of recapitulation—that Christ ‘sums up’ all things in Himself to redeem humanity.
He died around 202 AD, likely as a martyr during the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus. In 2022, Pope Francis declared him a Doctor of the Church, calling him the ‘Doctor of Unity’ for his role in defending the true faith and promoting Church harmony.
We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]
Most of the signs Christ describes to his listeners in the eschatological discourse had already been realized by the time Luke’s first audience would have heard his Gospel. There had been, and were, wars, persecutions, family conflict, and Jerusalem with the Temple had been destroyed. The Christians of Luke’s time listening to these Gospel verses, of today and since Tuesday, could then have been encouraged to know that they were very close to Christ’s full revelation, his apocalypse, and so have courage to bear persecutions and other great challenges of the early Church [ … ]
Saint Hilary of Poitiers, a central figure in the development of Trinitarian theology during the fourth century, writes with clarity and conviction about the inner life of God and the role of the Holy Spirit. In this reflection, he meditates on the unity and diversity within the Trinity and on the Spirit’s role as the gift that allows us to participate in divine truth [ … ]
