From the Archives: "Memory, Eschatology, Eucharist"

Each month, our blog features articles from the archives of Liturgy. Our goal is to share the wisdom from decades past so that we might celebrate the work and insights of these excellent ministers and scholars.

Miroslav Volf

In 2007, Liturgy published an article by Miroslav Volf, entitled “Memory, Eschatology, Eucharist” In this essay, Volf explores how our memory of Jesus’ passion relates to the memories we hold of suffering in our own time. He dives into opposing issues of oppression and liberation, enmity and reconciliation, to ask what the passion means to both those who do wrong and those who suffer from what wrongdoers have done. He finds three outcomes of remembering Jesus’ death and resurrection: 1. Perpetrators receive God’s freeing from guilt and evil desires. They are forgiven and freed. 2. Victims are not forgotten but are offered Christ’s saving presence. 3. Complete healing comes for those who are wronged when the wrongdoer repents and the two are reconciled. Memory of Jesus’ Passion calls us to unconditional grace for all people, justice enacted, and embracing the wrongdoer in love. A key aspect of the freedom and reconciliation available through the memory of Jesus’ Passion is remembering that holy communion is about Jesus’ Passion.

Selected Quotes from

“Memory, exchatology, Eucharist”

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“Just as liberation seen through the lens of Christ's death and resurrection is not only a political event but also, and most profoundly, an eschatological event, so also is reconciliation. If it were not, there would be no hope for those who have died in the grip of enmity. Dead victims would never find the full healing made possible by the repentance and transformation of their victimizers. Dead wrongdoers would never be freed from the burden of guilt. And the two parties would be marked by unaddressed enmity for eternity. The Passion culminates in that grand reconciliation at the threshold of the world to come in which former enemies will embrace each other as belonging to the same community of love—a reconciliation without which no truly new world would be possible. That is what we remember when we remember Christ's death and resurrection.”

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“Through the death of Christ God aims to liberate us from exclusive concern for ourselves and to empower us through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to reach out in grace toward others, even those who have wronged us. Because the God who justifies the ungodly is present in our lives, when we imitate God we do not do it as those who simply observe and do likewise, but as those whose lives have been made by God to reverberate with God's life.” 

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“The memory of the Passion indicates that the ultimate goal of divine judgment and vindication is God's formation of the community of love, which includes both me and the person who wronged me. My healing is no longer simply my own affair taking place in my interiority without reference to the wrongdoer or to the larger community of which I am part. I heal, but I heal, in community and with the wrongdoer, rather than at their expense.”

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Miroslav Volf is Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut. Originally from Croatia, he studied theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and in Tübingen, Germany, under Jürgen Moltmann. A member of The Episcopal Church, he has been involved in international ecumenical and interfaith dialogues.

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Miroslav Volf, “Memory, Eschatology, Eucharist,” Liturgy 22, no. 1 (2007): 27–38, https://doi.org/10.1080/04580630600993194.