Longing for "Eternal Easter"
Introduction
The faithful need look no further than to the Pauline epistles if they wished to find some of the earliest examples and uses of analogy or metaphor within the Christian tradition. St. Paul often wrote, and encouraged in faith, the congregants of the various churches he established by the use of athletic metaphors. Elsewhere, I have described athletic metaphors as “phrases and expressions used… to relate the concepts of the spiritual life to either physical training or various athletic feats that would have made the spiritual concepts more widely understood to differing audiences” (Maranise, 116). While linguists or literature scholars might grapple more extensively with the differences between “metaphor” and “analogy,” the Oxford English Dictionary actually lists “analogy” as a synonym for “metaphor”, and vice versa, such that the two terms are practically interchangeable. However, due to the preference in language of the early Church Fathers, the term “analogy” will be used throughout the remainder of this essay. In fact, since the Olympic Games were a well-known practice in ancient Greece and “a tradition still in practice in the first few centuries of the Church,” (Millegan, 2014)
St. John Chrysostom, the “golden-mouthed preacher” himself often engaged in “mining the great sporting event for analogies to teach the faith” (ibid). One such example comes from his seventeenth homily on the letter to the Hebrews wherein he wrote: “Contests for prizes are not of the soul nor yet of good morals, but of strength and the body. If then, where there is exercise of bodies, much examination is made about character, how much rather here, where the soul is alone the combatant” (paragraph 8). As their most basic function, analogies serve to make concepts, particularly abstract ones, more concrete and understandable. Theology itself, with its many branches of study, concerns itself with perhaps the most infinite of all subject matter – that of God Himself. Finite human beings, then, at best can begin to grasp in part the infiniteness of the Truths revealed through theological inquiry by means of analogical comparisons. Ecclesiology, a subset within Theology and also the study of the Church, remains, to a large degree, shrouded in the “mystery of the infinite.” However, I propose that an analogy which compares sports and the Church can help the faithful begin to comprehend the complexities of this mystery while ever maintaining its veil of sacredness. In this essay, I will explore and develop the following analogy: As the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church, the Eucharist, so does a team make the game and the game, the team.
The Eucharist Makes the Church
To ever fully begin to understand the Church itself, one must understand that the Church is not simply a building or a place, but a body of persons – indeed, a community of believers. This community of believers is brought together time and again not simply to admire the beautiful interior of any building or to merely enjoy one another’s presence, but instead, they are brought together and held together by Christ, truly present in the Eucharist, and in each person who makes up the Church universal. From the wisdom of the Fathers of Vatican II, the faithful learn that “taking part in the Eucharistic sacrifice… is the fount and apex of the whole Christian life” (Lumen Gentium, paragraph 11). Translated more contemporarily, the words “fount” and “apex” in this key phrase are often given as “source” and “summit,” but I digress. When Christians gather together for worship, we are already aware, because of Jesus’ own reminder in the Scriptures, that He is present among them. “For wherever two or more gather in my name, there I am in their midst” (Matthew 18:20). However, for Catholic-Christians, this reminder takes on an entirely new significance because of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as well as in one another. Before delving further into Christ’s presence in each human person that makes up the Church, we must first examine further this “source and summit of Christian life.”
Catholics believe, both in faith and in reality, that when ordinary bread and wine are consecrated in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, these seemingly ordinary substances actually change in substance by means of transubstantiation into Jesus’ glorified body such that it can be said, “The whole Christ is truly present, body, blood, soul, and divinity, under the appearances of bread and wine – the glorified Christ who rose from the dead after dying for our sins” (USCCB, The Real Presence, paragraph 2). In consideration of the ways in which “the Eucharist makes the Church,” this is significant because the faithful actually receive, that is, consume the Body of Christ into themselves. Having partaken of the Eucharistic species, the human congregants who make up the Church then carry both in physical body and in spiritual corpus, the Risen Body of Christ. In this way, the Eucharist gives strength to both the physical bodies of His recipients as well their spiritual corpus. Moreover, the act of receiving the Eucharist in community with one another “asks God to come and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: create community” (Rolheiser, 40).
From the Body of Christ that is the real presence, there is an overflow and thus an offspring of Love known as the mystical Body of Christ which is the Church itself in its believers. In his encyclical by the same title, Pope Pius XII further explains what is meant by this mystical Body, making it different from the real presence. He writes, “This naming of the Body of Christ is not to be explained solely by the fact that Christ must be called the Head of His Mystical Body, but also by the fact that He so sustains the Church, and so in a sense lives in the Church, that it is, as it were, another Christ” (Mystici Corporis, paragraph 24). At this point, among a number of the faithful, a question enters into thought which asks: So, there are two “bodies of Christ?” While much ink can be (and probably has been) spilt over which “body” of Christ is supreme in holiness or “in totality,” Pope Paul VI offers this reassurance: “This presence is called ‘real' not to exclude the idea that the others are ‘real' too, but rather to indicate presence par excellence, because it is substantial and through it Christ becomes present whole and entire, God and man” (Mysterium Fidei, paragraph 39). That said, the faithful are to understand that while it is not presence par excellence, Christ is, nevertheless, truly present in His mystical body that is the Church. It is in this way that we can affirm that portion of our analogy which reads, “The Eucharist makes the Church.” It is worth noting before departing this section, however, that we might not properly say that the Eucharist makes up the Church because in so doing then, we may inadvertently trivialize the Eucharist to merely being part of what first brought the Church together and also what holds it together. To be clear, there cannot be a Church without the Eucharist. However, as we will discuss next, there also cannot be Eucharist without the Church. The two are indissolubly bound together.
The Church Makes the Eucharist
Prior to Vatican II, attendance at Mass generally failed to fully engage the congregants. The presiding priest, with his back facing the communicants, would often recite the liturgy in low-voice wherein those gathered could not even hear or engage in liturgical responses. Furthermore, prior to Vatican II, the Mass was offered entirely in Latin with exception of the homily, if there was one given. Because of this, the faithful began to see the presider less as one who engages with the community, and more as simply one necessary to “make the Eucharist” so that the faithful could then receive Jesus in the Sacrament. However, Vatican II and the issuance of a sacred constitution from its proceedings soon changed these unfortunate results, and also radically reshaped the ways in which the Church was viewed from both the inside and those outside of its folds. Among many of its sweeping reforms, liturgical changes were the most obviously noticeable by members of the faithful. No longer would Mass attendees have to sit in occupied, devotional silence, awaiting their brief interactions with the presiding priest and one another. The theme that immediately emerged from Vatican II was one of full, conscious, and active participation in the liturgy. The Council Fathers collectively expressed this wish of the Church thusly: “Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, paragraph 14). Apart from being a means of reverencing the sacredness of the liturgy itself (read: “demanded by the very nature of the liturgy”) as a sacrifice, it also made the reality of the Eucharist as a communal meal more readily relatable and perceptible.
The significance of “full, conscious, and active” participation in the Eucharistic liturgy not only made the Mass more engaging and interactive, it also helped to solidify the continuity of the Eucharist with Jesus’ own Last Supper as well as His Passion, Death, and Resurrection. All four of these pivotal events in the life of Christ were interactive ones; that is, they occurred in the presence and the witness of His Apostles, believers, and friends, the forerunners of the modern Church. It was at The Last Supper wherein Jesus instituted the Eucharist, giving to the Church not only the very words of institution used in the liturgy to affect the change of substance, but also shared a meal with those closest to Him and ultimately began the very sacrifice of His own life. Today, the Church when celebrating the Easter Triduum opens the liturgy on Holy Thursday, but does not close it until the conclusion of Mass on Easter Sunday precisely because the events of His Last Supper, Agony in the Garden, arrest, torture, Crucifixion, death, and Resurrection are inextricably connected events. When Mass is celebrated, particularly in the Eucharistic liturgy, the faithful are encouraged to realize that they are fully, consciously, and actively present at all of these events in the life of Christ, not by a re-sacrificing of sorts, or some sort of cosmic-replay, but rather because the faithful there gathered (the Church) are part of the very Body of Christ that is sacrificed and so are themselves caught up in the offering. The great Dominican Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas, offers the following as a means to clarifying the importance of the interaction that takes place in the Liturgy: “Christ has not left us without his bodily presence in this our earthly pilgrimage, but he joins us to himself in this sacrament in the reality of his body and blood” (Summa Theo., III, q.75 a.1).
In this continuity that occurs in the Eucharistic liturgy is also revealed the mysterious, mystical, and paradoxical two-part reality of sacrifice and communion. In the first consideration of sacrifice, it is not the priest who affects the sacrifice. The priest is a vessel through which Jesus manifests Himself by the power of the Holy Spirit in each liturgy. For this reason, the Church teaches that the priest acts in personae Christi, that is, “in the Person of Christ.” To that end, then, it is Christ who offers now, at each liturgy, Himself, just as He did once and for all for the salvation of all humankind. Taking this further into the depths of sacred mystery, the Eucharist (the real presence) does not simply “spring into existence” in a vacuum. Persons were present at the institution of the Eucharist, in the Garden of Gethsemane, at the foot of the Cross, and at the empty tomb. All this serves as evidence to the vital role the faithful play in being not simply passively-present, but actively present in the Eucharistic liturgy. At The Last Supper, Jesus passes the bread and the chalice; in the garden, He asks the Apostles if they could not stay awake with Him for only an hour; on the way to Golgotha, He meets the weeping women of Jerusalem, Veronica, His own mother, and St. Simon; from the Cross, He speaks to His mother and St. John, to St. Dismas, the repentant thief, and He even prays for His accusers; and in His Resurrection, He speaks to His Apostles, His mother, the strangers on the Emmaus road, and countless others. While I am certain Christ does not need human persons to interact with, He freely chooses to interact with them, not for His own benefit, but for the benefit of the faithful so reliant on Him. It is through the Eucharist that the reliant faithful receive Him such that what St. Augustine said to first communicants becomes true, “Receive what you are,” indeed: the Body of Christ. The occurs through the Church, which like the Sacraments it provides to the faithful “is also a Sacrament in the sense declared by Vatican II, for it is a symbolic structure that mediates the reality of God to His people” (Martos, 157).
The Team Makes the Game
Similar to the ways in which we have previously noted that the Church is a symbolic structure that mediates the reality of God to His people, we can also note that sports itself (regardless of which form) is also heavily symbolic and steeped in ritual. Like the ritual and symbolic realities within the Church, sports also mediates a reality to its participants and spectators unlike what is actually present at “face value.” Consider the whistle that blows amidst the heat of competition. Though the participants or spectators only see a referee blow the whistle, or perhaps, hear the buzzer echo from the scoreboard, they become instantly aware that something else beyond that noise is occurring. The whistle or buzzer calls the sportspersons and spectators to attention in recognition of another reality that has occurred – a penalty, or a change, or time having expired in a period. The initial meaning of the bells of consecration at the Eucharistic liturgy function akin to that of the referee’s whistle in that they, too, draw the attention of the faithful to action that has taken place beyond what is perceptibly visible. When the bells ring out at the consecration, the faithful acknowledge that a change of substance has taken place; that what lays on the altar before them has ceased to be bread and wine, but is now Christ’s own Body and Blood. In both circumstances, the bells of consecration calling the faithful to the reality of Christ’s real presence or the whistle calling sportspersons and spectators to yield to a referee’s judgment, one facet is similar. Both of these ritualistic and symbolic gestures function in the witness of people. It is no surprise “that without human beings who participate in the various sporting competitions, the activity we know as ‘sport’ ceases to be” (Maranise, 2013, p.20), but then again, so also would the Church, and in this way do we enter into the first major analogical comparison between sports and the Church.
Sports, for the most part, are played as part as part of a team, but even in the cases wherein they are participated in on one’s own, there remains a community of participants that can be likened to a team. Runners generally experience this unity in major races wherein their sport, usually individualistic, is now done around and with others at their sides. While they may all be in competition against one another, there is a general feeling of mutual respect among athletes of similar sporting persuasions. For example, in races I have personally competed in or been present for, it is not uncommon for runners nearing the end of a long race, and seeing in sight, yet another hill, to groan out or comment to one another, “Here comes another one.” These very actions themselves reveal a mutuality and respect for one another’s God-given abilities. Because of the teams or individual athlete participants who make up sport and animate it into being, it can quite literally be said that “the team makes the game.” That said, the argument can be made that as sports are only made animate by human participation, so also the Sacraments must consist in a sort of participatory character, both in the performance of the actions themselves and in individuals to whom the effects of the Sacraments, whether spiritually, physically, emotionally, or intellectually perceived, can be encountered. While the “Sacraments co-inhere with mysterious realities” (Appel, 2016, p.2), they also demonstrate how “sports”, if perceived sacramentally – not as Sacraments themselves, however – “can transcend… to provide an experience of God to both spectators and participants alike” (Rosengren, 2004, paragraph 1). In these means – those of the human dimensions of perceptibility and interaction – the sporting analogy gestures towards the ways in which the “Eucharist makes the Church.” As a team provides any life to the game, so then “God is analogous to the effortlessness of that way of being” (ibid, paragraph 29) in the sense that simply by being who He is – Omniscient, Omnipotent, and Omni-Benevolent – He, who affects the realities present in the Sacraments, also draws the faithful, who receive the effects of participation in those Sacraments to Himself in His mystical body.
The Game Makes the Team
As small children, we learn that games have rules. These rules must be followed by all participants within the game so that the game is played fairly and so that there can be a proper outcome. In a vacuum, this makes perfect sense, but again, without human persons, there can be no game. This is, decidedly, as human history itself has well evidenced, a double-edged sword. True, on the one hand, human beings provide animation to such games and sports, but on the other, our emotions, particularly stubbornness, egoism, or various infidelities complicate the rule and order of the games and sports we play. In these encounters with “the uglier face” of the human condition amidst sports, a focus on the positivity of character development and holistic human growth becomes the panacea.
Because “sports are inherently competitive” (Maranise, 2013, p.86), moments of adversity will likely affect all participants, however, the sometimes ‘unfair’ and ‘improper’ exercise of the sport itself often build-up and further solidify bonds of team-chemistry or human friendship experienced by the human-animators – the athletes – who make up the team itself. The ‘nature of the game,’ regardless of what specific game or sport it may be is most surely an experiential one. The self-assurance sportspersons receive from the support of their teammates or for those who compete individually, the thrill of surpassing one’s perceived limits by an interior appeal for a sort of ‘divine infusion of strength’ from God evidences how “we learn to receive ourselves from others and thus realize ourselves as subjects” (Chauvet, 123) completely reliant on those around us. Within the Church, the faithful also may experience the adversity of sin. Fortunately, the graces which Christ Himself affects within the Sacraments provide a means of being built-back-up and having our relationships to God and one another solidified once more. Take this as an example: When the opponent (sin) defeats us, we have the support of our team (the mystical Body of Christ and the Communion of Saints) to help ready us to once again face the opponent by providing extra strength training (the effects of the Sacraments) to our bodies (soul). Elsewhere, I have argued that an effective means of viewing an athletic team is “as operating in reflection of the Blessed Trinity such that just as the Father, Son, and Spirit are all individual Persons yet One, triune God, so also individual persons make up the team, yet in functions as a single unit” (cf. Maranise, 2009). The Church itself obviously reflects this similitude in that though it is comprised of many individual members, it remains One Body with Christ as its head.
Conclusion
The ways in which the game provides opportunities for growth and the character building of teammates together with one another and on an individual basis reflects the exchange relationship between the Church and the Eucharist itself. Just as the Eucharist gives life to the Church by providing its origin and being the source by which its believers unite, the Church sustains, by anamnetic reality, the Eucharist itself. In this way, “Each has been entrusted to the other… by Christ” (McPartlan, p. 393). Finally, though I hold that the analogy between the team and the game as explored in this essay provides some clarity between the relationship of the Eucharist and the Church, I also believe that the sacredness of God remains fully veiled within the numinous. Though sports requires experience to fully understand its dynamics, of the relationship between the Eucharist and the Church, I feel Chauvet best expressed the true beauty of sacred and holy mystery when he wrote that “it is irreducible to a simple “experience” from which, by analogy, one could approach the mystery of communication between God and humanity” (The Sacraments, p. 126). Perhaps, some things are, indeed, better left unsaid… at least on this side of eternity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Anthony Maranise is a Christian spiritual theologian, author, and board-certified chaplain specializing in the intersections of sport, spirituality, religion, cancer, and mental health. An Oblate of St. Benedict, he explores how prayer and worship deepen faith, providing spiritual care to those facing life’s challenges. He holds degrees in Religion & Philosophy, Behavioral Science, and Catholic Studies from Christian Brothers University and in Interdisciplinary Leadership from Creighton University. Founder of “Sport & the Spiritual Life” and “The Eternal Insight Group,” he authored best-sellers Sport & the Spiritual Life (2013) and Cross of a Different Kind (2018), with three projects forthcoming (2026-2027). Recognized in Who’s Who in American Education (2025) and the recipient of the Associated Press's Distinguished Humanitarian Award (2025), he inspires through writing, teaching, and compassionate ministry. You may learn more about or connect with Anthony by visiting his website: anthonymaranise.com or his LinkedIn page: www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-maranise.
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