Christ as recapitulation of creation: as new Adam he encompasses everything human, but he also incorporates the animal realm in himself, since he is lamb, scapegoat, sacrificial ox, ram, and lion of Judah. As bread and as vine he incorporates the vegetative. Finally, in the Passion, he became a mere thing and thus reached the very bottom of the world’s structure. This reification is most evidenced in the sacraments and especially in Christ’s quantification in Communion wafers and in his multilocation: Christ as printing matrix, as generic article. Such reification has its cause, not at all in a subsequent desacralization of the holy by the Church, but in an intensely personal decision of the Redeemer and in the strongest possible effects of the redemption itself, whereby the Lord makes himself irrevocably a thing at the disposal of anyone who requests it.
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Christ’s holy humanity as embracing all that is possible in this world, as plaything and universal instrument of love: abraded by rolling in every gutter and every possible hell, shattered in the abyss of all nights, cast up to the heights of bliss, fragmented as food in a billion places and yet located above space, no longer time-bound as we are and yet not outside of time but always sharing in our own temporal condition and history. . . . In Christ is found the experience of all situations, existentially: the sum total of the world’s reality.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms (1953), chapter titled Christ