Today I’d like to offer a reflection on what is known by various names: the Lord’s Supper, Holy Communion, the Mass, or the Greek word used by the Early Church: Eucharistia, meaning “thanksgiving.”
We begin with the foundational story of the Hebrew people: the Exodus. Moses, the Liberator is raised up by God to deliver his people out of slavery in Egypt to a land promised; a land metaphorically envisioned to be flowing with milk and honey.
But the journey is arduous and long, lasting more than a generation, allowing those with indentured mind sets to die along the way. But the people grumbled in their hunger, so God sent manna from heaven – a dew like substance which could be made into bread, but sufficient only for a day. The petition in the Lord’s Prayer is an echo: “Give us each day our daily bread.” Manna was strength for the journey through an alien and hostile land. So that’s the first image: God providing sustenance to people on the road to freedom.
Second is sacrifice. The Latin word is sacrificum, which means: “to make something holy by offering it to God.” In ancient Jewish ritual, two goats were offered. One was the scapegoat (that’s our expression, not theirs). This goat was laden with the sins of the community and driven into the wilderness to carry away their transgressions. The second was the blood sacrifice in which the goat was offered as a gift to God, roasted in a holocaust (the word 'holocaust' comes from ancient Greek and means 'burnt offering'); a portion was given back to the worshipper to be consumed. In this way, the goat came back to you as a meal with God.
The annual Passover Supper celebrated the Exodus event by the consumption of symbolic foods. Unleavened bread – Matzo – recalls how the people left hurriedly, with no time for the bread to rise. Four cups of wine were consumed to commemorate God’s four acts of liberation in Exodus 6: I will take you out, I will rescue you, I will redeem you, and I will bring you to a new land.
At the Passover Supper with his disciples on the night before he died, Jesus did something unexpected. In passing the bread to his friends, he added to the ancient words, “This is my body.” And then similarly, he took the 3rd cup of wine – the cup which symbolized God’s act of redemption – and said “This is my blood. Whenever you share it, do it for the ‘anamnesis’ of me.” Anamnesis is the opposite of amnesia. In amnesia, you forget who you are, who your people are, and how you understand the world. Anamnesis means to recall, to reclaim – to come to one’s self again. It means to find your way back again to wholeness. To be, in short, set free.
We today use the word “remember.” Do this to remember me. For some of our Protestant brothers and sisters, the Lord’s Supper is but a memorial. It is to literally remember ceremonially the Last Supper. But I would urge us to hyphenate. Re-member. To be made a member again.
A gruesome image this: If you were in a terrible accident and your arm were to be severed from your body and through the miracle of modern medicine, they were able to reattach it; you could say that your arm was re-membered – made a member of your body again. In communion, we are re-membered to the body of Christ.
The stress and strain of daily life with all its microaggressions, distracts us and cumulatively acts to sever our connection to our own selves and to others and the holy communion reconnects us, for which we offer Eucharistia: Thanksgiving. In this sense, communion – the same root word as community, right? – is not a noun but a verb. That community is a mystical one in which you today share this meal, through space and time, with those who have gone before, who have partaken of this sacred meal in their generations: your mother and father, your grandparents, Francis and Clare, Patrick and Bridget, Mary of Magdala and Mary of Nazareth, saints all, and with Jesus the Christ. Sit with that for a moment…
And so all these metaphors obtain. Communion is strength for this journey through a barren and desert land. We are but resident aliens in a world not our own. Pilgrims and strangers do we wander; fed by the bread of heaven we are sacrificed, that is, made sacred.
The bread and wine brought to the altar represents our lives and labors for the Kingdom in this broken world. Each week we build our offering – our occasional fidelity and our pervasive faithlessness – it is blessed and returned to us made whole, renewing us to go forth again into this broken world, and as Samuel Beckett said, to be “ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better!”
Now all this is a mystery, but as is our human nature, the church has tried to nail down the ineffable. The Roman doctrine of transubstantiation – that the bread and wine become in physical reality the flesh and blood of Jesus. Or, as mentioned earlier, the extreme Protestant doctrine of memorial, that the Lord’s Supper is only a symbolic re-creation of Jesus’ last dinner.
And the third option, what we reformed Catholics proclaim, the belief in a “real presence.” That Christ is present in these substances – not as metaphor or symbol – but in a true and substantial way. How? Let mystery suffice.
Matter matters. We humans need things we can see and touch and taste and smell to mediate those things which are invisible. The bread and wine are earthen vessels by which the holy is present to us.
I’ve said a lot but there’s just a bit more. At the breaking of the bread, our prayer book has me say “Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us.” That phrase lifts up one aspect of the Exodus event. Exhausted with Pharoah’s reluctance to free the people after repeated warnings in the form of plagues, God dispatches the destroying angel to strike dead all the first born, both human and animal, of the Egyptians, all the households not marked with the blood of a Lamb. These houses were “passed over.”
The doctrine of sacrificial atonement – that Christ died for our sins to appease a vengeful God who required a blood sacrifice – is thus connected up with the Eucharist. But scholarship suggests that for the first thousand years of Christian history, holy communion was not understood primarily as a sin forgiveness thing. That doctrine did not emerge as the sole understanding of Jesus until the time of St. Anselm (1033-1109) and the development of the Just War theory for the Crusades.
No. For the first thousand years, as reflected in the frescoes in ancient churches, the holy communion was all about practicing the vision of the Kingdom of God on earth. A radical vision of social transformation based on love and justice. A reflection of the primitive church’s baptismal vow to live in Christ - in which there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female – and today we would add: no gay or straight, no liberal or conservative, no immigrant or native born – all are one in Christ Jesus, no exceptions. It is an acting out and a living into God’s dream for human, animal and plant kind; of Eden’s return at last. In other words, it’s not just about you; it’s about us – all of us.
To symbolize this today, in addition to saying or singing “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” I will add “Though we are many, we are one body” and I invite you to respond: “Because we all share in the one bread.” [Let’s try it; (repeat)]
“Though we are many, we are one body”
“Because we all share in the one bread”
Let’s close with John’s vision on the Isle of Patmos. The Book of Revelation is not about an afterlife or about heaven – or God help us, any Rapture. It’s a vision in veiled and symbolic and often bizarre images about coming through the persecutions of that time, into the glorious new world struggling to be born, awaiting Christ’s return. From Revelation 7:
“After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language – standing before the throne and before the Lamb… and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them, nor any scorching heat… and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
So let it be! Amen!