Christ's presence in the Eucharist: rediscovering an ancient paradigm and practice

 

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Author: Ian Wallis Ian Wallis, a former Principal of the Yorkshire Ministry Course, Vicar of St Mark’s Broomhill and Chair of St Mark’s CRC, continues to teach and write in the areas of biblical studies and contemporary theology.

They were saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’ Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread … They put [Jesus] to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.
One of the earliest convictions characterizing followers of Jesus after his crucifixion is that he continued to make his presence felt through shared meals. This is not as surprising as might initially appear for at least two reasons. Firstly, at a time when what you ate, where you ate it and with whom were contentious issues, Jesus had earned a reputation for being a ‘glutton and a drunkard’ (Matthew 11.19/Luke 7.34), refusing to fast (Mark 2.18–19) and practising a form of open-tabled commensality, at least as far as his Israelite compatriots were concerned – that is to say, he would eat with those who were considered by many respectable Jews to constitute bad company and, as a consequence, a potential source of moral contagion and ritual impurity:
In fact, much of Jesus’ ministry can be interpreted as a hosting of God’s presence through enabling those whom he encountered to experience some aspect of the divine life embedded within human experience: if God is present, then no one goes hungry and all are fed; if God is among us, then fasting gives way to feasting and sorrow gives birth to joy. It seems that such radical hospitality embodied much that was central to Jesus’ vision and vocation of inhabiting a world transfigured by divine presence: welcome and acceptance, forgiveness and reconciliation, joy and celebration, sustenance and satisfaction, giving and receiving, generosity and thanksgiving, trust and friendship, sharing and consideration, equality and justice, belonging and responsibility.

The second reason why it’s not so surprising that shared meals proved to be a post-mortem conduit for Jesus’ presence is that he commanded his first followers to continue this practice:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
This is the earliest surviving version of the so-called ‘Institution Narrative’ which Paul had evidently inherited from an even earlier source. Given the apostle’s emphasis here and elsewhere upon the significance of Jesus’ death within the unfolding drama of God’s salvation, it is this, the cross, that supplies the interpretative frame for these words within the developing Christian tradition as the Lord’s Supper became a ritualized remembering of Jesus’ sacrifice or an atoning sacrament through which the salvific benefit of that sacrifice is communicated or, indeed, both.

However, as another title for this meal suggests, the Last Supper, there is alternative interpretative frame for the Institution Narrative, namely, the shared meals and indiscriminate hospitality that characterized Jesus’ ministry throughout – a ministry in which his earliest disciples shared and to whom he entrusted. This needs a little unpacking.

Although there is a direct correspondence between, on the one hand, ‘bread–body’, and, on the other, ‘wine–blood’, in the more familiar version of the Institution Narrative found in Mark and Matthew …
 
… this probably represents a later development, honed by liturgical practice and sacramental interpretation, than the version known to both Paul and Luke. Notice how in this one the ‘bread’ and ‘wine’ words are not symmetrical, for whilst a direct correlation is forged between the bread and Jesus’ body (‘Jesus took a loaf of bread … and said, “This is my body”’), an indirect one is established between the cup – not the wine – and Jesus’ blood (‘Jesus took the cup also … saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood”’). Here the direct association is between the cup of wine and the new covenant – that is to say, the new way of relating to God and one another that characterised Jesus’ ministry and those who shared in it. It is a way of relating that would cost Jesus his life, but it is not one that required his death, because, as that ministry clearly demonstrates, it was one rooted in the offering of hospitality in God’s name rather than in the offering of blood sacrifice on an altar in the Jerusalem Temple or anywhere else for that matter.

Further, if at the Last Supper Jesus associated the cup of wine with their new way of relating to God that characterized his ministry, then how should we understand his words over the bread: ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ Here, it helps to recognise that the Jewish mind-set often interpreted human anatomy symbolically rather than physically. For example, when Jeremiah claims that ‘the heart is devious above all else’ (Jeremiah 17.9), he is not passing judgement upon an organ of the body, any more than the author of Genesis is referring to human tissue when noting ‘all flesh had corrupted its ways upon the earth’ (Genesis 6.12). So when Jesus takes bread and says ‘This is my body’ there is a strong likelihood that he is using the word symbolically to refer to himself as a whole, his entire personhood, if you will.

Viewed from this perspective, Jesus taking bread, blessing it in God’s name, investing it with symbolic significance and then distributing it among his disciples becomes a kind of commissioning as he entrusts his life into their hands and, with that, his vision, vocation and ministry. And when he goes on to say, ‘Do this in remembrance of me,’ the ‘this’ can mean nothing less than to live out that vision and vocation through continuing his life’s work. In effect, what Jesus is doing at the Lord’s Supper, and through the Institution Narrative in particular, is enacting his last will and testament. For this reason, perhaps a more adequate rendering of his meaning would run along the lines of, ‘This is my body – the vision within me, the vocation we share, I entrust it to you … With this cup we celebrate our new relationship with God, forged from forgiveness, sealed with my blood. This is how you will remember me.’

Further, remembrance, especially for Jews at Passover when Jesus’ final meal with his followers purportedly took place, extended well beyond recalling what happened to their forebears during the Exodus centuries previously to embrace personal re-enactment and, through doing so, active participation. It was about making that act of deliverance present within their experience through reliving it in memory, ritual and performance so that its efficacy – its capacity for mediating blessing – could be realised afresh. For this reason, the Passover Seder (Order of Service) includes the following injunction:

In every generation it is one’s duty to regard himself as though he personally had gone out of Egypt. As it is written: You shall tell your son on that day: ‘It was because of this that the Lord did for “me” when I went out of Egypt.’ It was not only our fathers whom the Holy One redeemed from slavery; we, too, were redeemed with them; As it is written: He brought ‘us’ out from there so that he might take us to the land which he had promised to our fathers.

In the light, then, of the centrality of shared meals within Jesus’ vision of God’s kingdom and practice of faith, as well as the prospect that during the Last Supper he entrusted that vision and practice to his closest followers, it is entirely understandable that we find them continuing where he left off. But what is surprising is that Jesus was encountered within these ongoing improvisations of his ministry of hospitality as a dynamic presence. Take, for example, the testimony we related at the outset where it was as Cleopas and his fellow disciple offered hospitality to a stranger following Jesus’ crucifixion that they become aware of Jesus’ presence in their midst – a presence that was mediated through a common practice and, presumably, the faithfulness of those who performed it in his name (Luke 24.13–35).

Interestingly, this is further illustrated by what we can discover of how the Lord’s Supper, that is, ongoing improvisations of Jesus’ ministry of hospitality, was being performed at Corinth – a small community of Christ-followers that came into being following the apostle’s 18-month residency there around 50 CE (cf Acts 18.1–18). From what we can gather, the Lord’s Supper took the form of a meal that was hosted in the homes of wealthier members, presumably because they owned the largest properties and possessed the deepest pockets. The format and contents of the meal are not described in any detail, but what concerns Paul is the spirit in which it is being held:

Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?
Seemingly, there was a gathering in Jesus’ name, but it was not an authentic improvisation of his ministry of hospitality, it was not a Lord’s Supper, because it neither enshrined the principles nor was animated by spirit of that ministry. Put simply, it did not reflect the new relationship with God and one another that Jesus embodied personally and made accessible to his followers. A little later, he reinforces this judgement: ‘Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord’ (11.27). Commenting on this verse, Tony Thiselton, in his exhaustive commentary on 1 Corinthians, concludes, ‘The syntax therefore implies not a sacrilege against the elements of the Lord’s Supper but answerability or being held accountable for the sin against Christ of claiming identification with him while using the celebration of the meal as an occasion for social enjoyment or status enhancement without regard to what sharing in what the Lords Supper proclaims.’ (The First Epistle to the Corinthians, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000, p 890; author’s italics)

According to Paul, consuming bread and wine, even when accompanied by the recitation of the Institution Narrative did not of itself constitute the Lord’s Supper. Rather, an authentic improvisation of Jesus’ ministry of hospitality must be animated by the spirit of its founder as the locus for Christ’s risen presence is identified not with bread and wine, but with those who seek to follow his example and embody his way. The apostle then goes on to expound this at length when he writes about the Christian community at Corinth as constituting the body of Christ, possessing among its members the gifts and capacities that characterized Jesus’ earthly ministry. This, for Paul, is where Christ’s real presence is encountered – in the lives of believers, bound together by love into a communion capable of embodying his risen life.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit … Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it … And I will show you a still more excellent way.
As far as the apostle is concerned, the Lord’s Supper does communicate Christ’s presence, but not through the transformation of bread and wine, but through communities of believers who, inspired by Christ’s spirit and animated by Christ’s love, embrace Christ’s commission to body forth his ministry into the world through practising and improvising Christ’s hospitality. If our earliest records are any guide, this is what at least some communities of Christ-followers attempted to do – and, as they did, they soon encountered challenges. For one thing, sharing hospitality across ethnicities proved particularly problematic with some Jewish Christians unwilling to eat with their Gentile counterparts (cf Acts 10.9-16; 11.1-18; 15.28-29; Galatians 2.11-14). Equally, there were moral sensitivities around food that had been sacrificed on pagan altars (as much was in first century Greco-Roman conurbations) before being used within a Christian context (cf 1 Corinthians 8.1-13; 10.23-33). Further, as we have already noted, shared meals were not always characterised by the spirit of their founder, with hosts using the Lord’s Supper to reinforce social divisions and hierarchies, rather than to subvert them (cf 1 Corinthians 11.17-22). It also appears that some recipients of Christian hospitality took advantage of the generosity of others, seeing it as an opportunity for indolence (2 Thessalonians 3.6-13). As a consequence of these and other factors, by the end of the first century, Jesus’ open-table of inclusive commensality had given way to conditional participation, whether based upon a willingness to work (2 Thessalonians 3.6-13), spiritual discernment (1 Corinthians 11.27-34) or a readiness to embrace the Christian Way through initiation: ‘Let no one eat or drink of your thanksgiving [meal] save those who have been baptized in the name of the Lord, since the Lord has said concerning this. “Do not give what is holy to the dogs.”’ (Didache 9.5; late 1st century).

From then on, the interpretative context for the Lord’s Supper increasingly became what happened after that final meal Jesus shared with his first disciples, namely his death. And as that death increasingly became invested with salvific potential in terms of constituting a perfect sacrifice for human sin capable of securing at-one-ment with God, so the elements of bread and wine increasingly became imbued with salvific potential as they came to be understood as ‘medicine that brings immortality, an antidote that allows us not to die but to live at all times in Jesus Christ’ (Ignatius [died circa 107 CE], Ephesians 20). This interpretative trajectory finds its culmination in the medieval doctrine of Transubstantiation where Christ’s presence is uniquely and essentially identified with the consecrated bread and wine irrespective of the condition of those who partake of them – and understanding that was profoundly challenged during the European Reformation, which gave rise to alternative paradigms (eg consubstantiation [Luther], memorial [Zwingli]), including Thomas Cranmer’s ‘Receptionism’ which relocates Christ’s presence within the spiritual communion partaken of between Christ and believing communicants – ‘Take and eate this, in remembrance that Christ dyed for thee, and feede on him in thy hearte by faythe, with thankesgeuing’ (The Boke of Common Prayer and Administracion of the Sacramentes, 1552).

All this seems a long way from the witness of Cleopas on the Emmaus Road and St Paul at Corinth who discovered Christ’s presence through faithful improvisation of his ministry of radical, inclusive hospitality within communities inspired by Christ’s spirit and animated by Christ’s love – the practice that defined Jesus’ earthly ministry and was his legacy to those willing to embody it after his death. Perhaps, here we can find a more authentic conduit for Christ’s risen life today than consuming a consecrated wafer and a soupçon of wine.
 

Author/copyright permissions Reproduced with permission of the author. Photo Credit: Jude Beck on Unsplash

 

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