Retroactive Kairos

 I had a question posed about the Eucharist as follows:

Question: if the Catholic teaching is that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ - the transfiguration into true flesh and blood - then what happened with the bread and wine that he broke with his apostles BEFORE his death? Was it also true flesh and blood? Seems strange that it would be, since he hadn’t been sacrificed yet, but if it wasn’t, then it would mean that the quintessential last supper that set the standard in every other way regarding the Eucharist didn’t share the one most important aspect of it. Just curious, thanks!

My response:

Hmmm, I am not quite following your logic here. It would seem, and correct me if I am wrong, that you are saying it can't be a sacrifice if He has not yet been sacrificed? I am understanding you correctly? Because there is the side issue, which you seem to posit as the primary issue, of whether it is the body and blood of Christ.

It would seem to me that on one level, the two are not same, but in like token, they are the same. There is the issue of the Eucharist as Christ offering His Body and Blood, and there is the issue of the Eucharist as Christ our Sacrifice.

So, let's take the first issue. The fact that he is offering His Body and Blood in the Eucharist on one level can stand alone. He does not have to have died on the Cross to offer us His Body and Blood. God could have used any means to save the human race. It did not necessarily have to have been on the Cross. God could have found or used some other way or means. God is infinite, and the means at His disposal would likewise there be infinite. But, for whatever reason, God chose to use the Passion and Cross. He did not have to, but He did. So, if God did not have to use the method of the Passion and Cross, then logicially, Christ could have offered His Body and Blood as a stand alone sacrament.

You can offer of your self and not totally sacrifice yourself. I am thinking the classic image of the Pelican pecking open her own flesh to feed her young. It's a classic Christian symbol. That is a self offering. It does not mean necessarily that the Pelican had to have died from blood loss to feed her children of her own blood. It was still a self offering that saves lives, albeit a smaller sacrifice on the part of the mother Pelican, but not necessarily the ultimate sacrifice.

That brings me to the second part of the ultimate sacrifice. Yes, at the exact moment of the last supper, Christ had not yet died. That was to come some hours later. But Christ was still of His own free will fully offering Himself at that moment. The fact that the fullness of that act had not come to fruition quite yet does not in any way belittle the full offering of Himself.

Let's look at this by analogy. If I throw myself onto a train track to push a small child off the track of an oncoming train, I have fully offered my life for the child's life even if the train will not hit and kill me for a few nano-seconds more. I have already fully sacrificed myself even if death did not simultaneously occurr in the seconds leading up to the train actually hitting me. My sacrifice is therefore retroactive from the moment I freely chose to throw myself onto the train to save the child.

The Greeks had better verbiage about time than we do now. We have watch we refer to as time, and it's only what the Greeks called chronos, or the time of clocks. Exact minutes and seconds. We, the children of the Scientific revolution, tend to view time as only what science can meter and count.

But the Greeks also had another word for another type of time: Kairos. Kairos was quantitative. They were divine moments in time that were not tied to specific passages of time like minutes or seconds. In fact, it was a Divine time that was quite apart from linear man because the Divine is eternal. Eternal does not mean forever in the sense of not is the 10th hour of the 8th Day of January in the year 2025 but sometime in the distance future, it will be the 9th day of the January in the year 10069489375. Eternal is apart from time. Time has no meaning for the eternal. So when an eternal being chooses a specific moment to manifest themselves, it is on their Kairos time not human linear time.

The Crucifixion of Christ was both a Chronos and Kairos event. It did happen on a specific time on a specific day in the 1st century, like any other historical event on the human timeline. But, it was also a Kairos event, an event that also transcends time, both forwards and backwards, because it involved an eternal being because the Divine Jesus was coeternal with the Father as the 2nd person of the Trinity.

This is why when we go to Mass, we are not re-sacrificing Christ a second or umpteenth time. Kairos time collapses Chronological time in on itself and we find ourselves at the foot of the cross in real time because the Crucifixion (like the Resurrection) is a Kairos event. It is retroactive backwards to the dawn of the time and prospective into the future to the end of the ages.

So, to answer your question, Christ offering Himself in the Last Supper was both a Chronological event but also a Kairos event. The future Sacrifice on the Cross was retroactive to the time of the Last Supper because of Kairos time that supercedes Chronological time. Therefore, Christ could clearly say this is my Body sacrificed for you, because being eternal, the event would occur but was already retroactively manifest because it was a Kairos event apart from time.