Understanding the Eucharist

THOSE OF us who have seen Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, would understand this. During the crucifixion scene, there is a relatively quick flashback of Jesus at the Last Supper. We know the words Jesus said. Hearing them in the midst of the Passion opens our eyes to see two realities in new light: the inexorable pain of the crucifixion and the bread and the wine as they become the body and blood of Christ.

Jesus said: “This is my body that will be given up for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” It is as though the Lord tells us: “Do it. Lead my life. Watch and listen as it unfolds even to the end. Receive my life and my death into your own body. Do what I do.” We remember this each time we celebrate the Holy Eucharist.

But the Eucharist is a sacrament of His suffering and death as well. The intensity of His suffering begins to swell to an unbearable level: the events of the night – with His sharing of His Body and Blood, with the agony He underwent as He prayed to the Father in Gethsemane, with the betrayal by Judas, with His arrest, with the desertion of His apostles, and with the cruel persecution He endured through the night – but it continues the next day with the mockery of justice as He was tried before men, culminating in His walk to Calvary and death on the Cross. Probably, he should have reminded them again, “Let him who is without sin be the first to condemn me!” But even as we share in His Body and Blood through the Holy Eucharist, we participate in His suffering, death and resurrection. May the Passion of Christ strengthen us!

Have you ever questioned yourself as to why you receive the Eucharist? Why do we go to the Eucharist?

We go to the Eucharist to stay alive. The Eucharist is meant to be God’s regular nourishment for us, daily manna to keep us alive within the desert of our lives. We get this theology from John’s gospel. The gospels, as we know, do not have just one theology of the Eucharist. The various communities in the early church each emphasised different things about the Eucharist. John, unlike the other evangelists, does not set the Eucharist only in the context of the last supper. He does set it there, but places it in another important context as well.

THE LAST SUPPER

In John’s gospel, where the other gospels have the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, he has Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. John does this because by the time his gospel was written, perhaps 60 to 70 years after Jesus died, Christians, not unlike today, were already arguing with each other about the Eucharist: How often should it be celebrated? Who should preside? What is its precise meaning? John, in placing the washing of the feet where the other evangelists put the words of institution, is reminding us that washing each other’s feet, service to each other in humility, is what the Eucharist is really all about. But John also emphasises another aspect of the Eucharist.

While highlighting the Eucharist to mean service and humility, John also places it into Jesus’ discourse on the bread of life. In chapter six of his gospel, Jesus says: “Unless you eat the bread of life, you will not have life within you.” In speaking of the bread of life, he links it to the manna, the daily feeding that Israel received from God during her years in the desert. For all those years, manna was Israel’s daily food, and, often, her only food. It had, too, a curious quality. When she ate it alongside other foods she had procured for herself or food she had brought out of Egypt, it tasted bitter, but if she took manna as her only food, it tasted sweet. In either case, it was her daily sustenance.

In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that the Eucharist is the new manna, the new bread from Heaven, the new way that God gives us daily sustenance. The Roman Catholic practice of daily Eucharist takes its root here. That is why, too, in Roman Catholic spirituality, unlike much of Protestantism, the Eucharist has not been called “the Lord’s Supper”, since it was understood not as an extraordinary ritual to commemorate the Last Supper, but as a ordinary, ideally daily, ritual to give us sustenance from God.

How does the Eucharist give us daily sustenance? The Eucharist nurtures us by giving us God’s physical embrace (“the real presence”), and it gives us a oneness with each other that we cannot give to ourselves. However, it nurtures us in yet a further way. It provides us with a life-sustaining ritual, a regular meeting around the word and person of Christ that can become the daily bread of our lives and our communities. In other words, the Eucharist makes us the manna of daily presence to each other. In the Eucharist, God sustains us in just this way: He becomes the manna of our daily sustenance, and in turn, makes us the manna of His daily presence to the people. Partaking in the Holy Eucharist should make us Eucharistic people. Are you ready to become the foods to nourish others, the Eucharist that adds joy to those around us?