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The Catholic Telegraph
June 15, 2001Last Sunday we celebrated not an event but a reality, the central fact of the Holy Trinity, a foundational truth that underlies the whole of the story of salvation. This Sunday we celebrate another reality, another fact, another truth: the Holy Eucharist. We celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ given to us, given for us sacramentally. Just as the Holy Trinity underlies everything that happens in salvation history, so the Eucharist underlies and expresses Jesus’ ongoing, saving communication of Himself to His believers throughout that portion of human history that stretches from the cross to the second coming.
In this third year of the Lectionary’s cycle of readings we are given an account of the institution of the Eucharist from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. This letter is one of the earliest books of the New Testament, written some fifteen or twenty years before the gospels, and so this account of what Jesus did at the last supper is the oldest narrative of it that we have.
Paul has been dealing with problems of church order among the Corinthians. Apparently they celebrated the Eucharist in the context of a dinner party. The more affluent members of the community seem to have provided themselves with elaborate foods and lots to drink while the poorer members went hungry. Paul found this kind of selfishness hard to reconcile with the fundamental significance of the Eucharist.
Our passage begins with Paul reminding the Corinthians about what he had taught them about the institution of the Eucharist, a teaching that has its roots not in Paul’s imagination but in Jesus Himself. Jesus was about to be "handed over," i.e., given up to His enemies. With that in mind, He had taken bread and given it to them telling them that this was His body, the body that would be offered for them. Similarly, at the end of the meal, Jesus had had them drink out of a cup. This sharing constituted a new sacrificial covenant, a new agreement between God and humanity that replaced the covenant that had been in force until then. In both contexts, Jesus told them to continue doing this - sharing food and drink - "in remembrance" of Him. Paul says that to "eat this bread and drink the cup" would "proclaim," i.e., announce and make present the death of the Lord until the end of time.
The selfishness and the pursuit of comfort that the Corinthians expressed in their manner of celebrating the Eucharist were simply not in accord with the generosity and self-giving that Jesus intended the Eucharist to declare. Here was an anticipation (and then a re-presentation) of His own gift of Himself on the cross, an event to which the only appropriate response is generosity and self-giving on our part.
When we participate in the celebration of the Eucharist, we, here and now, are taking part in a re-presentation of the gift of Himself that lasted throughout Christ’s whole earthly life, but which reached its climax in His death on the cross. Christ’s saving life and death were not to be one time events that took place a long time ago and that we would be invited to remember from a great distance of time. No, Christ’s gift of salvation would continue to be made present and active in the Eucharist.
In the Eucharist the body and blood of Christ, ritually separated in the separate consecrations of bread and wine, are offered once more to the heavenly Father as they were offered the first time on Calvary. That offering expressed in definitive form the faithfulness and obedience of Christ. Christ continues to make that same offering to His Father in heaven now, but it is also made present for present-day Christian believers on earth through the Eucharistic offering.
But this sacrificial offering is not just a renewal of the action of Christ. It also involves the Christian community at large as well as the individual members who are present at a particular Eucharistic celebration. The Church, through the priest who represents the people as well as Christ, unites itself with the offering of Christ, so that the sacrifice is no longer merely the self-gift of Christ, but of His people as well.
When we participate in the celebration of the Eucharist, we offer Christ to the Father, but we also offer ourselves, our needs, our gifts, our problems. We "plug into" the sacrifice of Christ, as it were, so that it is ours as well as His. The celebration of the Eucharist links our life with the peak point of the life of Jesus.
This peak point of salvation, in which we associate ourselves with Christ’s gift of Himself to the heavenly Father, is what we will continue to celebrate and to savor in heaven. Being definitively in touch with the generosity of Christ will constitute our eternal happiness.
The Eucharist connects us with the past and the future and gives meaning to our present. It constitutes the spiritual fabric of our lives, the reality that is so close to us that we could take it for granted if we are not careful. That’s why it’s good to have the feast of Corpus Christi each year!
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Conversation Questions
How would my life be different without the Eucharist?
How do the following elements contribute to my concept of the Eucharist: event, presence, thanksgiving, promise, challenge, sacrifice, remembrance?
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