Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi

Understanding of the Eucharist

Deut. 8.2-3, 14-16; 1 Cor. 10. 16-17; Jn. 6.51-59

The feast of Corpus Christi is fairly late. It only goes back to the 13^th century, so a great amount of water had gone over the theological dam by that point. What I mean is that, what we call the Eucharist pretty clearly goes back to Jesus and the supper he ate with his friends the night before he got killed. But this supper has been interpreted again and again. It has had, in other words, a number of meanings attached to the original event. I'd like to suggest that there is a danger in that. The event can easily become, and in the history of the church has become, more and more abstract. For instance, if you look back at the 13^th century, it is then that Thomas Aquinas, who wrote the whole Corpus Christi liturgy, came up with the notion of transubstantiation, using the philosophy of Aristotle in order to do that. And, especially under the weight of later liturgical piety and above all, in response to the reformation, the Eucharist became a kind of holy thing. And this kind of abstraction, whereby Jesus' gesture at the Last Supper is thus abstracted, is even symbolized in the form of the Eucharistic wafers. At least when I made my First Communion, we got these little white things that were about as similar to bread as I knew it as is this carpet. And of course the thing was so holy, you could not touch it and its reception was surrounded by a number of prohibitions. The nuns warned us against chewing the host and we had to absolutely part from food and water from midnight and everyone literally panicked if the fast was broken. And we had to wear our little white suits and dresses so as to provide proper receptacles for this holy thing.

Well, besides creating a really intimidating atmosphere around the whole business which many of us have not quite outgrown, there is a real problem in understanding the Eucharist in that way. And so I would like to undertake a kind of archeological expedition, tracing the Eucharist backwards from time when it is primarily seen as that holy thing, enshrined for example in a monstrance for benediction and 40 hour devotions, to see if we can't make some human sense of it.

There are multiple layers of meaning laid onto the Eucharist as I said. With Thomas Aquinas, we have his clear statement that in the Eucharist, we have the very substance of the physical reality of Jesus, mysteriously present. The notion that the Eucharist is this holy thing is reflected in the sermons of some of the fathers of the church, who referred to the Eucharist as the "medicine of immortality." The Eucharist is like a pill we take. Again there is in these metaphors a real sense of distance, of abstraction.

Even in the New Testament itself, as in this passage from John, which is clearly a creation of the authors of the fourth Gospel. We have the large theological overlay, whereby the Eucharist, which the authors don't even mention in their version of the Last Supper - that the Eucharist is cast entirely in the context of the Exodus. So the Eucharist here, functions like manna did in the Jews' wandering in the desert. So it is the food needed for survival. That's why Jesus is made to speak of the "living bread." This interpretation instances a degree of abstraction, which doesn't directly get us back to the original meaning of the Eucharist. And even in the even earlier text from Corinthians - probably written around 60 CE, we have Paul talking about the Eucharist as the bond uniting the people. You remember the context for this passage: when the early followers of Jesus in their houses to celebrate the Lord's Supper, this was preceded by a regular meal. Paul found out that, in Corinth, the rich members would bring very good food, and they would sin in a corner and eat everything, while the poor people would have to sit there, presumably watching all this, waiting for the rich to finish. Then they all would celebrate the Lord's Supper. Paul makes the extraordinary comment, "you rich people who do that don't even know the Body of Christ." And what he's referring to are the poor members of the group, not primarily to the Eucharist. But for Paul, the Body of Christ (Eucharist) was the means for expressing and creating the Body of Christ (the community). In other words, Paul said that the members don't even recognize themselves as members of each other, as members of Christ. So here too, we see the earliest level of trying to make sense of the Eucharist. But, I'd like to suggest that behind even that understanding is the figure of the historic Jesus and the primordial meaning of the Eucharist. And in looking to that, we come to an understanding of the Eucharist that is more humanly intelligible and which must support, absolutely, these further levels of meaning: the bond of the community, the new manna, this holy object.

So, Jesus at the Last Supper, most likely knew he was in trouble. Shortly before that supper we have Jesus rampaging through the Temple, obviously upsetting all kinds of people. His intention was to purify the Temple, restore it to its original purpose: that it be a place where people encounter God. So here, at his Last Supper, he was with these people, a very motley crew, knowing that he most likely would be killed very soon. He wanted at that moment to do what he had been doing in a variety of ways throughout His life, namely, to extend Himself to them. "My life has been lived with you and for you. And this is essentially what I am about."

Now, how does one express, symbolize that intention? The meal, of course, which for the Jews was the most clear form of social intimacy. You only ate with your close friends, with those with whom you literally shared your life. So how could He extend Himself, at this moment, to them? What words could He say, to express what a man who is soon to die wants to say to His friends?

And that question leads us to the most fundamental reality of what we are dealing with today. "This is Me for you. This is My body, which is Mine because it is altogether given to you." The gesture which expresses this is the breaking of bread and its distribution to these people.

Now we must be really careful not to romanticize all this. There was Judas, there was Peter, yet another betrayer, yet different; there was Philip, who never got anything quite straight, there was Thomas, the skeptic. Yet it was to these people that Jesus wanted to make this gesture, to whom he wanted to express Himself through that gesture; to whom He wanted to donate Himself absolutely in that gesture.

You see, I'm completely convinced that if we don't appropriate that level of the Eucharist then all these other levels of understanding are simply castles in the sky, with no roots in our experience, nothing familiar, nothing recognizably human, and therefore fundamentally insignificant. Abstraction is a danger, of course, in all institutional life. How much of church life has suffered from that kind of danger where everything takes place over our head, in some vague realm that we really can't appropriate, or even understand, often enough. But if we do enter imaginatively into the situation of that man at that point in His life, into His passion and His intensity, His earnestness, probably even His sense of exasperation - anybody who has tried to say "I really do love you" knows the inadequacy of all words and all language and all gestures and all symbols. But the breaking of the bread is a pretty good one. "This is my body for you. This is me, for you." So then we can start talking about the community, because we are all fed by this man, all in our wild diversity, separateness, isolation. Then we can talk about all the theological themes from the Exodus, about the manna. Then we can talk about the holy object out there someplace, exposed in a monstrance with which we can then have Benediction. But until we know that all those things, unless they are rooted in this foundational fact, are basically a waste of time.

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