SECULAR BASES OF THE EUCHARIST

THE SECULAR BASES OF THE EUCHARIST

BREAD AND WINE

                        Jesus lived in Palestine. Palestine enjoys a great variation in climate and rainfall. Therefore it was blessed with a great variety of vegetation and foliage. This was especially true in the time of Jesus, when the countryside was free of the scourge of pollution produced by technology; the river Jordan and the lake of Genazareth were limpid clear of industrial effluents. Jacob’s well knew no arsenic! Humidity was almost down to zero, and even though it was hot by day there was no sticky feeling. (The only sticky entities were the scribes and Pharisees!)  Trees and fruits were abundant, with juniper and oak the most common, and olive and fig trees the most valuable because of the fruit and oil they produced. And of course the people had the wonderful “fruit of the vine”, the grapes from which they produced their deep, full-bodied red wines, so thick and rich that they had to be diluted with water before being served. Jesus referred to himself as the true vine (John 15, 1-17), and the Gospels refer many times to the vineyards and those who tended them. When the grapes were ripe and ready for pressing, you could imagine the young Jesus in his shorts treading sing-song the thick carpet of grapes with the other guys and gals, and being paid the denarius at the end of the day.

                       

                        The common grain in Jesus’ time included wheat – the most valuable – along with oats and barley. Barley was basically the poor man’s grain, and Bible commentators opine that Jesus used barley bread at the Last Supper.

                        Bread was the essential food of Jesus’ day, so much so that bread alone could sometimes be a full meal, especially that it was heavy and substantial, pure unrefined whole wheat. Downed with a few cups of full-bodied wine, there were no complaints. As the staff of life bread was treated with great respect, and many Jewish laws governed its preparation, use and preservation. So when Jesus identified himself with bread and wine at the Last Supper, those around him knew what he was talking about: he was revealing himself as the one who gives them complete sustenance and fulfilment. This “bread of life” could satisfy completely the deepest hungers of people (see John 6, 22-5).

                        For Catholics the celebration of the Eucharist is the “breaking and eating together” of the bread that is Christ, Son of God and son of Mary. Breaking stands for sacrifice, and eating stands for sustenance. (Incidentally, bread on our tables today should not be sliced with a knife but broken with the hands and shared). So the Eucharist has its secular origins in the central place that bread and wine occupied in the lives of the people of Jesus’ day.

EATING TOGETHER

            The Parable of the Wedding feast (Mt 22, 1 – 14) makes use of a secular image to convey the riches of the eternal banquet. Here the secular is assumed into the divine, the temporal to the eternal. The picture of the earthly banquet evokes our appreciation of common meals in relation to the Eucharist. Apart from how Christ is present to the Church, the Eucharist tells us what God offers to people who eat together and make conversation.

Bad Meals

            Eating together can be a redemptive happening, if people want it to be so, since, like any human activity, it can be ambiguous, and needs redeeming. It is never totally free from self-seeking and self-destructiveness. A man may devour his food to feed his isolation and as an escape from more important duties. Over-eating is often interpreted as a symptom of inner insecurity and infantilism. Eating together can sadly be an enforced convergence of people who have been trying to avoid the others the whole day, or it can be an excuse for exclusive groupism. Eating together can be accompanied by a carefully screened conversation by which each tries to keep the other out of his life, a nervous juggling of words, occasionally interrupted by jokes that jolt and by remarks by which one triumphs over another, until the moment of relief, when everybody rises from table, each to their own pain and isolation.

            Such meals are devastating: they feed the sickness in us, with its scepticism and mistrust, fear and anger, and the vague alienation from human life. Whoever hurts his brother/sister while breaking bread with them, betrays the Lord anew and will sleep in death. He must know that night has descended upon his heart, the light has gone out of the land, and God has left his people. Woe to the community where the whole game is all about hurting someone and gaining advantage for oneself, about getting power and showing it. The Bread of Life must be broken again to restore once more the Body of Christ.

Good Meals

            The secular print in the Eucharist is that God offers men and women redemption through common meals. Just as “great things happen when God mixes with man,” so the marvellous may happen when people eat together. In the act of eating, for instance, a man acknowledges his need of enjoyable sustenance, and, hence, of other people. Eating implies opening oneself to others. Meals link several countries, industries and cultures on the same spread. This includes the furniture, linen, crockery and cutlery (if used). How many people are involved in producing the food, harvesting it, packing, selling and buying it, in the whole organisation through which these transactions become possible. Thus, a meal may celebrate the unity offered to the human race, though it may also indict us for acquiescing in the sad fact that millions still go hungry.

            Apart from the savouries and spices, eating together is normally laced with conversation: the trusting exchange of words and ideas that further the fellowship among the eaters, offering reconciliation and inner rebuilding. The Divine Word is present at the table, offering them the Eucharist in an implicit and generic form, since the Spirit is present in any benevolent assembly.

            Let every common meal we share be a prolongation of the Eucharist and our preparation for it.

                                          THE BODY

            Paul of Tarsus was once a persecutor of the followers of Jesus. But on the road to Damascus the risen Christ confronted him. Paul asked, “Who are you, Lord?” And the answer shocked Paul: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts of the Apostles 9, 5). Over time, Paul came to realise the stupendous application of that revelation, namely, that Jesus is present and alive not only in his very body but also in the community of believers, the church, also known as the body of Christ. Thus, Jesus’ body is the bread of the Eucharist; and the communion of Christians, the church, makes up the body of Christ. The definition of the Eucharist can never leave out the presence of Christ as head of the assembly of the faithful. There is, consequently, a mysterious link between the body of Christ as Eucharist and the body of Christ as church. This has prompted the felicitous expression: “The Eucharist makes the church, and the church makes the Eucharist.” They condition one another, like the love of God and the love of neighbour.

Body as Eucharist-Church

            Yet there is a distinction between the body as church and the body as Eucharist. Consider St. Paul’s admonition to the Christians of Corinth: “Therefore, anyone who eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily is answerable for the body and blood of the Lord (1 Corinthians 18, 27). Here St. Paul is distinctly referring to the presence of Christ as Eucharist. Earlier, in chapter 12, he states, “…all the parts of the body, though many, still making up one single body - so it is with Christ. We were baptised into one body in a single Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12, 12).

            Paul uses the classical analogy of society as a single body with many parts, but his concept of the body of Christ goes back to his own conversion, to the faith in Jesus whose body, raised from the dead and given life by the Spirit (Romans 1,4) became the “first-fruits” of a new creation. Christians are united with Christ’s risen body by baptism and the Eucharist, united in such a way that Christ and they form one body of Christ. Finally, in the widest sense, Paul includes in his concept of the body the entire cosmos as unified under the Lord Jesus Christ. (Cfr. Ephesians 1,23ff)

Body Perfect

            Two leading interpretations of Paul's notion of the church as the body of Christ have caught the popular imagination, namely, the “perfect” and “broken” body of Jesus. Quite commonly, the church was understood as “the perfect body”: an idyllic society whose members understand and carry out their respective roles according to God’s will, resulting in peace and harmony. In this construct the church is no more no less the reflected body of Christ, cleansed of all human imperfections, and projected on the world’s canvas. Hence, if the church suffers at any time, it is because the world beyond it has been corrupted by sin and evil. But the church within is immaculate.

            This image of the church as the “body perfect” was in part the product of the classical Greek culture. The Greeks idealised and extolled the human body. Consider the Olympics, Greek art and sculpture. Not surprisingly, therefore, the Greek Christians applied the ideal of the Olympian body to the church as the body of Christ. This image of the perfect body has a strong appeal today as it did in the early community. We still tend to idealise that which is strong and healthy and reject the weak, sickly and misshapen. An extreme evolute of this was the “genotypes”, promoted by Hitler’s Third Reich.

Body Broken

            Contemporary scholars are more realistic, and suggest that the image of the “body perfect” is misleading, preferring to liken the church to the broken body of Jesus, an experience at once personal and universal. The members of the community are subject to human weakness, indicating that the church itself is made up of sinners on pilgrimage to the Father’s house (Blessed Pope John XXIII), reflecting a humanity struggling for survival and writhing in the horrifying pains of war, disease, racism, poverty, exploitation, and starvation. Today, Jesus would be recognised in the brokenness of his sisters and brothers. How true the “fraction of the bread” at holy Mass!

            Thus the church is more properly understood as the broken body of Christ than as the perfect one, its power lying in acknowledging its weakness in order that God might act in and through it; a power beyond worldly comprehension which understands only arrogance and invincibility. St. Paul put it thus: “So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weakness, so that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities, for the sake of Christ, for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12, 8 – 10).

            In fine, a mature perspective of the body of Christ as Eucharist and as church would visualise the Eucharist as providing the immaculate purity of doctrine and grace poured into frangible vessels of clay symbolising the human composition of the church’s pilgrimage.