Annotatio CLXIIII

”Thou hast prepared a table before me.” — Psalm 22:5

Chrysostom, in a certain homily on Psalm 22 (which, however, is not believed to be his), has these words:¹ “The table is the consecration of the altar of the Lord; and because the divine wisdom prepared that table for his men-servants and maid-servants in their sight, so that daily, in the likeness of the body and blood of Christ, he might show us bread and wine according to the order of Melchisedech in the sacrament: therefore he says, ‘Thou hast prepared a table in my sight.’” John Oecolampadius brought forward this passage against the truth of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, so that, under the name of Chrysostom, he might build up the faith of his own heresy. But since the phrase and the character of the explanation openly prove that the homily is not [the work] of him under whose title it is prefixed, there is no need that we answer anything to Oecolampadius for the defense of Chrysostom — whom it is agreed to be the keenest defender of this sacrament. Yet whosesoever these words may be, they do not render the sense which Oecolampadius falsely gathered from them. For nothing prohibits — indeed it is necessary — that, together with the true body and blood of Christ, there be in the sacrament of the altar the accidents of bread and wine,² which here are called “bread and wine.” And these bear the likeness and figure of the mystical body of Christ, which is the Church — Paul saying: “We, being many, are one bread, one body, all we who partake of the one bread and of the one cup.”³