To reveal the conditions under which participation in the Eucharist will bring benefit, health, and not death, let’s consider the second aspect of the Church as the sacrament of the Kingdom.
We approach a fundamental truth revealed by God to humanity, the mystery of the person, personality in the Gospel. The mystery of the Most Holy Trinity and the Theanthropy of our Lord Jesus Christ (the mystery of personal being) – this is the basis of all Christianity, the key to understanding all truths of the Holy Scripture and all that exists.
God is Love, and this is identical to the fact that God is a Person in three hypostases, which are not immanent (do not coincide) with the Divine nature. This mystery reveals and explains the Theanthropy of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose hypostasis two natures (Divine and human) exist unmingled, unchanged, inseparable, and indivisible. This Divine Revelation to us (in guesses, through a glass darkly: cf. 1Cor.13:12) opens the mystery of Divine life (to which we are all called, and which is the likeness of man to God: to be like Him; cf. 1Jn.3:2). “No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has revealed” (Jn.1:18). The Lord revealed to us Divine life in human nature, healed, cured it, corrected its existence from the state of egoism to the state of love, self-sacrifice, self-denial, and made it capable of ascending (at the right hand of God: Acts 1:11, 7:55) to Divine existence, to be an indicator, a characteristic of eternal life. By His sacrificial, cruciform feat, the Lord healed human nature, granting it another status of existence (in the second hypostasis of the Holy Trinity), founding the Church. Therefore, in the second aspect, the Church can be defined as follows:
it is the unity of human nature in the hypostasis of Jesus Christ and the multiplicity of human hypostases in the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Before moving on to the answer to the question posed at the beginning about unworthy communion, we must say what happens to us in the Eucharist, what we partake of, or what we become partakers of. Since in baptism we received Christ’s nature, then, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, we recognize what has already been given in fullness, in baptism – sonship by grace. In the Eucharist we (in repentance and confession having distanced ourselves from sin, which is not I and having become, as persons) merge into the stream of Divine life, the fullness of humble love (which is God), which is impossible without a catholic consciousness, in which the “I” (egoistic, self-sufficient) dies, and “We” is born (where it is no longer I who live, but Another lives in me, and I live by Him: cf. Gal.2:20). In the Eucharist, we receive an impulse, a push to a new ascent, we receive a new vision of reality and ourselves. We enter the realm of absolute freedom, where nothing unclean, bound by passions, i.e., immersed (sunken) in egoism, selfishness, can enter. We merge into the stream of Eternal Life, and in this dynamic, we receive the integrity, health of the whole being, we receive sonship with all the inheritance – divinity by grace (cf. 2Pet.1:4). Since God is Love and only Love, and does not punish anyone, then what happens to the communicant who partakes unworthily, what laws of existence does he violate, if some communicants become ill, and some die (it all depends on the degree of mismatch with the reality they enter)? We enter the Eucharist into the sphere of Divine Life, the sphere of kenotic,sacrificial, humble love. Therefore, to partake uncondemningly of this whole life, which is Christ, we must coincide with the reality we enter. First of all, we must approach the Eucharist with a humble and contrite (sorrowful) heart (which God accepts: Ps. 50:19). With love, i.e., with a sacrificial setting of the spirit, caring not only about ourselves but also about others (ideally only about them: love seeks not its own: 1Cor.13), where it is not I who partake, but We, where I recedes into the background. Of course, love and humility are understood in an ascetic sense, because essentially – these are gifts that we receive in the Eucharist, but we must, as the Holy Fathers say, show the desire to receive them. Since we enter an environment of absolute freedom, the realm of personal existence, we must also become a person – not coincide with our sinful nature, renounce everything that ties us to the earth, and turn our face to God (because nothing unclean, double-minded will enter the Kingdom of God: Rev.21:27). There is only one sin – egoism, a state in which nature exists autonomously, and all the forces of being are directed at itself, everything serves me, everything exists for me, I – at the center of everything, and the root of this state is pride. This state is the antipode, diametrically opposed to the state of self-sacrifice, self-denial, self-giving for the sake of the Other, and the source of this state of nature, the mode of its existence is Love, Divine Life. Therefore, the task of the one who enters the reality of hypostatic being – to demarcate, separate oneself from one’s sinful, egoistically directed at oneself nature (because nothing unclean, mixed with nature, will enter the sphere of Life), not to coincide with one’s nature, which pulls towards sin, and only in such an act of repentance (only then we can see sin, the wounds that bind me, my freedom, become an obstacle on the way to God) and in the sacrament of confession to demarcate oneself from sinful nature, from sin, which is not “I”, to create conditions under which sin can be healed and nature cured. This is necessary so that I can define, give my nature (and not nature defines me, defining in the realm of death!) the mode of hypostatic existence, existence as a Sacrifice, so that uncondemningly, worthily, not in judgment and not in condemnation, for the healing of soul and body, to partake of the Holy Mysteries. Because in spiritual life there is constantly a law that everyone needs to know: like attracts like. Therefore, we need to coincide with the reality we enter, the partakers of which we become, so as not to destroy ourselves through mismatch (inconsistency). Therefore, we must reason (think, ask questions, to consciously participate in the Eucharist, which is not magic that works by itself!) about the Body and Blood of the Lord, as the apostle writes, to eat worthily (1 Cor. 11).