Tag Archives: Last Supper

A Story Worth Swallowing

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When someone believes a tall tale, we say that person swallowed it hook, line and sinker. A more skeptical person, on hearing what sounds like a tall tale might say: “That’s more than I can swallow.” Sometimes we say that a voracious reader devours books. When one goes to church, one often hopes to be fed by the preacher’s sermon. In The Phantom Tollbooth, the boy Milo wanders through a strange world where, upon being invited to a banquet, he starts to make a shallow speech and is dismayed when he has to eat his meager words. When Moses said that God had taught the Israelites that they don’t “live on bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord,” (Deut. 8: 3) he was witnessing to the power of words, of stories, to sustain us just as surely as food feeds and sustains us.

The Passover is a meal where the table fellowship is imbedded in a story, the story of the Angel of the Lord’s passing over the houses of Israel and the subsequent delivery from Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea. The participants are nourished by the food served and they are also nourished by the story they celebrate. St. Paul reminds the Corinthians of the last meal Jesus had before he died, a meal that Jesus wanted to be repeated in his memory. (1 Cor. 11: 23-26) Like the Passover, with which Jesus’ meal is closely related, it seems to have normally been a meal for feeding the participants as well as celebrating the story of Jesus. Unfortunately, very bad manners on the part of some of the more affluent Corinthians led Paul to recommend separating the meal from the celebration of the story, an impoverishment that persists to this day. John, telescopes the meal and the story into an eternal present, as he does throughout his Gospel. Reliving the violence of Jesus’ passion by gnawing on the bread (such is the force of the Greek verb) and also reliving the Resurrection are made into a tight unity in the climax of Jesus’ discourse after the feeding of the people in the wilderness. (Jn. 6: 51-58)

The Feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the Presence of Jesus in the Sacrament of the Body and Blood inspired by the visions of Juliana of Liège, a 13th century Norbertine canoness, and the thought of her contemporary St. Thomas Aquinas. The Thomistic term of “substantial presence” doesn’t seem to excite many people today, but the hymns Thomas wrote for the feast suggest that such terms did inspire a strong sense of devotion in the great Dominican thinker. For Thomas, the term “substance” was powerfully substantial. The elaborate Corpus Christi processions that evolved from this feast look more than a little triumphant when the Person present in the host is an Eternal Loser in the heavens but this is a loser still trying to make all of us winners for losing.

In any case, we need to remember that this presence in the sacrament is a person and a person lives a story. Is this a story we can swallow? It isn’t too hard to believe that a popular person was accused of many crimes and put to death. This is a story that has been told of many people many times, but this sort of story is a bitter pill to swallow. The Resurrection of Jesus sounds to many like a whopper that nobody can swallow, however nice it might be to swallow a story that gives us life. This is not the time or place to argue the truth of the Resurrection. Let it suffice that the death and Resurrection of Jesus is the story we swallow when we partake of the Eucharist. It is a story that touches on our vulnerability, both physical and moral, one that is sobering but also hopeful. It is a story that challenges us to be as life-affirming in the face of human death-dealing as Jesus was. There’s a lot of substance in all that!

Strange Meal

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On Maundy Thursday, we celebrate two strange events that occurred at what is called the Last Supper. It was indeed the last supper Jesus had in his human lifetime, but in some ways, it is better called the First Supper.

That Jesus washed the feet of his disciples was startling, as Peter’s reaction makes clear. In the Greco-Roman world, a master would be the one to have his feet washed by those under him. For the master to wash the feet of his followers was to turn the world upside down. I wonder, though, if this was actually the first time Jesus did such a thing. In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus said more than once that the one who would be first of all must be the servant of all. If Jesus, as the master, called himself the servant, it seems likely that Jesus had performed many servile actions before the footwashing at the Last Supper. If this hunch should be correct, than it shows that Peter was having a hard time getting used to his master’s topsy-turvy way of doing things. In any case, John made sure that this action was remembered.

But it is what Jesus said and did during the meal that stretched intelligibility to the breaking point. Blessing bread and a cup of wine and passing them around was normal for a Jewish meal. Nothing strange about that. But when Jesus passed the bread, he said “This is my body.” Who knows what the disciples were thinking when they heard that! They could hardly consult any books on Eucharistic theology to help them with the matter. Even worse, when Jesus passed the cup, he said “This is my blood.” For Jews, this was very disturbing since they followed a Law that forbad consumption of blood with the meat of animals. When Jesus was crucified the next day, they surely did not understand the words any better than they did at the meal.

But somehow, the command to do this in memory of Jesus made enough of an impression that not only did the disciples continue to eat together, but they repeated the strange words Jesus had uttered. Eating together and recalling Jesus’ words became a common practice in the earliest Church as Paul’s reference to the ritual meal, stressing the fact that he is passing on a tradition, makes clear.

What did the followers of Jesus come to understand as they continued to eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him? We have no way of knowing, but the Eucharistic overtones of the powerful story of Jesus appearing at an inn on the way to Emmaus suggest that the practice led to discerning the presence of the master at these meals, the master who had washed their feet at his last supper with them. It is this continuity of meals that makes the Last Supper the First Supper in the resurrected life in Jesus. Even today, we don’t really understand this presence, not even with the help of tons of books on Eucharistic theology, although all of the attempts to understand it show a strong devotion to the practice. But we don’t have to understand it. In receiving the bread and the wine, we are living a mystery that sustains us with the Resurrected life of Jesus.

The Work of a Slave

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When Jesus washed the feet of his disciples, he stressed the importance of what he was doing. Likewise, when he passed the bread and the wine, he stressed the importance of what he was doing. Both acts were to be remembered and done in memory of Jesus. And both are to this day, although the footwashing is not anywhere near as common as the eating and drinking of the bread and wine.

What is it about the footwashing that has put it into a very low second place? Logistics may have something to do with it but a look at its meaning, the sign that Jesus is giving us, probably has a lot more to do with our not even talking about it all that much. In the Greco-Roman world, it was slaves who washed the feet of their masters and their masters’ guests. That Jesus would do the work of a slave must have been shocking at the time and still is, if we consider the implication that imitating Jesus’ act is not confined to literally washing the feet of others but entails acting as a slave to others. Fundamentally, being a slave means to be in the hands of another person. If we are supposed to put ourselves into the hands of others like this, what does this say about trying to enslave another human being? Jesus himself was about to put himself into the hands of others with the result that he would be crucified. If the disciples still remembered the anointing of the feet of Jesus by Mary of Bethany six days ago, that too would have added to their discomfort. This discomfort extends to the parallel versions of this story

The woman ( or women) in the Gospel stories poured out her very substance (the expense of the perfume or oil) in devotion to Jesus. Likewise, Jesus poured out his very self to his disciples in washing their feet just as he was about to pour out his life for all people to put an end to the violence that includes the enslaving of other people. In those Gospel stories, the women were commended as examples of discipleship. If Jesus thought these women were such good examples, it makes sense that Jesus was humble enough to learn from them and do for his disciples what the women had done for him. There is no indication in any variant of the story that the disciples were reconciled to what the women had done. Did Peter take umbrage at Jesus for washing his feet because he associated it with the women as much as he associated it with slavery?

With the bread and wine, Jesus again poured himself into the two elements just as he poured out his life on the cross. So it is that the footwashing and the Eucharist both mean the same thing. We have put up with the Eucharist more than the footwashing because we have been able to sidestep this meaning by arguing about the metaphysics of Jesus’ presence. But the real presence of Jesus is his pouring himself into the hands of others and through them, the hands of his heavenly Abba. Paul knew this very well but we also conveniently forget that the context of his recalling the Last Supper is to upbraid the Corinthians for violating its meaning through denigrating the weaker and poorer members of the assembly.

Jesus rebuked Peter for refusing to have his feet washed, warning him that he would have no share in him. (Jn. 13: 8) This warning converts Peter so powerfully that he goes overboard and asks to be washed all over. He has allowed Jesus to be a slave to him so that he could be a slave to Jesus and all people. This conversion did not prevent him from denying Jesus three times but it allowed him to hear the cock crow and then to affirm his love to the Resurrected Jesus three times. This is what both the footwashing and the Eucharist are all about.

Christ’s Dynamically Wild Presence

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corpus christi processionThe Feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharistic host. One of the events that inspired the institution of the feast was a vision granted Fr. Peter of Prague in 1263. He had doubted the presence of Christ in the sacrament until he had a vision of blood dripping from the host as he consecrated it. This vision, along with earlier visions of St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon, led Pope Urban IV to order the institution of this feast. Of other Eucharistic visions I’ve heard of, it is better to be silent rather than ruin today’s celebration.

I happen to have a high devotion to the real presence of Christ in the sacrament and the two great hymns that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote for the feast are edifying. But the problem with focusing on the presence of Christ in the Sacrament is that it circumscribes the consecrated host and seems to imprison Christ in it. This is to take the Eucharistic mystery out of context. After all, the phrase Corpus Christi is used in the New Testament to refer to the Church and not the sacrament by itself. Benediction has the danger of re-creating this isolation and its origins aren’t reassuring. It derives from a devotion to see the elevation of the Host at Mass, which is fine, except that this viewing was in place of receiving the Host or even of worshiping in community. There are stories of people who would rove from Mass to Mass to see as many elevations as possible! My theology professor in seminary, Arthur Vogel, railed against Benediction because it treated the sacrament as an object rather than an integral part of a dynamic celebration.

Corpus Christi processions have the same danger, but they do bring a communal aspect to the feast. Just a few years ago I found the custom alive and well in Innsbruck. I attended Mass at the cathedral where it was standing room only. After the Mass, there was a procession throughout the town with devotions read by the mayor and other dignitaries and the Landwehr fired off salutes with their rifles.

In John 6 Jesus speaks of his presence in the bread from Heaven in a dynamic way where those who eat his flesh and drink his blood abide in him as he abides in us. In isolation, these verses suggest a relationship with individual believers but the broader context is the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, which was a communal event if there ever was one. Jesus, then, does not abide in us on an individual basis but abides in all of us as a sharing community. If we eat the Body of Christ, we are eating the very generosity and self-giving of Jesus. If we don’t give of ourselves, we have missed abiding in the community that abides in Jesus.

St. Paul’s recounting of the Last Supper begins with the solemn words that he is handing on the tradition as it was handed on to him. He then quotes what are called the Words of Institution, the words traditionally believed to change the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. When put this way, we again have the sacrament restricted to a few words and Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic elements. St. Paul, however, provides many more words to the social context of the Eucharist, namely that the Corinthians should be sharing the food they bring to the celebration with the poorer members of the congregation rather than flaunting their feasting in front of those deprived. That is, it is not enough to discern the presence of Christ in the sacrament; it is also necessary to discern the body in all of God’s people.

The leaders of the Liturgical Movement of the last century, Lambert Beauduin in Belgium and Virgil Michel in the United States, grounded their liturgical principles, featuring engaged participation of the laity, with a theology of the Church as the Body of Christ. More importantly, they argued that the Eucharist is a sign and dynamic of social change, especially in ameliorating life for the poor. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement worked very closely with Michel to this end. Far from being trapped in the bread and wine or in a monstrance, Christ is running wild throughout the world, changing not only bread and wine, but people and the whole fabric of society.

A New Passover — A New Life

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AndrewMassThe Passover is the formative event for Jews, the event that constitutes them as a culture. The Last Supper, the Eucharist, is as formative for Christians. Although there is debate as to whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal, the association with that feast is clear enough for Jesus’ supper to have incorporated and redefined Passover. The big question is: What is the culture that these events are intended to form?

The Passover brought freedom for the Israelites as they were lead out (or driven out) of Egypt where they had been slaves. The violence of the plagues, especially the deaths of the first born of Egypt are disturbing, particularly if God directly inflicted the vengeance. The plagues, though, are the types of events that could have happened in Egypt by natural causes. Although pharaoh resists releasing his Hebrew slaves many times, he and his fellow Egyptians don’t seem able to rid of them fast enough after blaming them for the deaths of their first born children. (Ex. 12: 29–34) The drowning in the Red Sea can easily be seen as self-inflicted violence. The Egyptians drowned not only in the water but in their own violence. In any case, Egypt is portrayed as a violent and tyrannous society, a society that the Israelites were well rid of. Their escape was an opportunity for the formation of a new culture anchored in God’s covenant with the people. Because of the covenant, Israel became the first known culture to attempt to live differently from the other nations, most notably by not making human sacrifices and not having a king who would institutionalize violence. In the end, Israel failed on both counts. Among the more telling failures was Solomon’s use of slave labor from the ten northern tribes of Israel to build the temple. (1 Kings 13–18) The prophets constantly denounced the social injustices perpetrated in Israel. The Passover itself fell into oblivion until it was revived by King Josiah. (2 Kings 23: 23)

The context of Passover tells us that the Eucharist, an event Jesus wanted his followers to repeat, is also a transition to a new culture. The greatest difference is that, while the Passover was accompanied by violence inflicted on the persecutors, in the new Passover, it is Jesus who suffers violence at the hands of violent humans. This difference is the foundation of what is perhaps best called the Renewed Covenant, since it renews and redeems the first covenant that failed. As with the first Passover, the second is a movement out of a violent culture into a whole new way of being human. This time, the rejection of violence is clear and decisive. This rejection of violence entails a rejection of the social injustices that had undermined the old covenant.

Paul’s need to remind the Corinthians of the institution of the Eucharist shows us that failure set in very soon after Jesus’ dying breath. Paul is berating the Corinthians for their insensitivity to the poorer and more vulnerable members of the congregation at the celebration of the Eucharist itself. The social inclusiveness of the renewed covenant, including economic inclusiveness, has already been forgotten. The many failures of the Church are too innumerable to name but it is important to note that countless Christians have followed Solomon’s example and enslaved other people, a practice that is still rampant today under the name of “trafficking.”

The Passover and Eucharist are calls to renounce these social vices, but they are not easily renounced by those in power, although William Wilberforce’s crusade is a rare example to the contrary. More often, it is those who are enslaved who have to reject it. This is difficult since those in power try to render their victims helpless, but it happened in the Exodus and it happened when King Rehoboam threatened to intensify the enslavement of the northern Israelites beyond what Solomon had done. (1 Kings 12: 16) Speaking of slavery, Jesus himself acted the part of a slave by washing the feet of his disciples. In the present moment, there is a peaceful rebellion against the enslavement of this country by a gun culture where the prodigal availability of powerful weapons costs many human lives, most tragically in the school shootings that have become routine. It is when we reject slavery in all its forms that we pass over from the old lives we have lived as social beings into the kingship of God.

These thoughts are explored in much more detail in my book Moving and Resting in God’s Desire

Eating the Being of Jesus

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AndrewWashingFeet - CopyThe Holy Eucharist has been accused of being a cannibalistic rite. René Girard would accept the accusation. In a snippet from an unpublished interview, he suggests that the Eucharist recapitulates the entire history of sacrifice and its violence and that history includes cannibalism. When I took a college course on African and Oceanic religions, one of the essay questions I was confronted with on the final exam was to discuss a few anthropological eyewitness accounts of cannibalistic practice. This was the first time I had encountered anything like it. What struck me about the accounts was how these people were intentionally absorbing, through ingestion, the being of the person, sometimes in mockery but more often in respect. (My take on these documents was affirmed by my professor with a top grade.) This is also Girard’s take. He ties this data into his analysis of the dynamics of mimetic rivalry where a rival moves beyond envying the possessions of another to envying the very being of the other. Interestingly, Jesus himself seems to agree with Girard and the anthropologists on this matter. In John 6, he uses strong language when he tells us that we must eat his body and drink his blood, words that suggest cannibalism and seem to have been interpreted as such by his grossed out hearers who, for the most part, went away so as not to hear anything more about it.

Cannibalistic language is often used figuratively in human speech and that is true of Holy Scripture as well. The psalmist affirms God’s deliverance from people who assail and devour his or her flesh (Psalm 27:2). St. Paul warns the Galatians that if they “bite and devour another,” they should take care that they “are not consumed by one another” (Gal. 5: 15). These examples refer to situations of serious mimetic rivalry and even if the psalmist’s enemies and the people of Galatia are “civilized” enough to rescind from literal cannibalism, they are indulging in the essence of that practice.

In what I have called the First Supper, Jesus reverses the cannibalism of devouring another person by freely offering himself, body and blood, in the bread and wine so that we may receive the being of Jesus as a free gift rather than as the spoils of a violent victory. This implies that his death on the cross is a Gift he gives to humanity and is not booty taken away from him against his will as is the booty taken by a conqueror.

What kind of personal being are we receiving when we receive the being of Jesus? In the early human centuries, people were absorbing the bravery and fighting skills of a worthy enemy who was defeated. With Jesus, what we get is something very different. This something very different is demonstrated in Jesus’ act of washing the feet of his disciples as a sign that we should serve one another in all ways. The personal being we receive in the Eucharist is one who, far from wishing to devour another person figuratively, would wish to build up another person in actuality. When we receive the being of Jesus, we receive personal courage beyond imagining, but it is not the courage of one who fights and wins battles against violent foes, but the courage of one brave enough to serve others, even to death on the cross.

Liturgical Animals (2)

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eucharist1In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul brings us to the heart of Christian worship that Jesus inspired at what we call his Last Supper. His followers were doing what he told them to do: Do this in memory of me. While both the myths and rituals obscured the sacrificial stories on which they were based, the Eucharist clearly tells the story on which it is based:  the betrayal of Jesus, his subsequent crucifixion, and his rising from the dead.  This earliest account of the Eucharist, predating all of the Gospels, enshrines the Words of Institution that are repeated in celebrations of the Eucharist two thousand years later. The Eucharist teaches us through its story but it also teaches us at a deeper, more substantial level through actually feeding us with the Word of God so tangibly that we chew on it and swallow it. Celebrating the Eucharist places our desires into Jesus’ Desire for us to gather with him and the other Persons of the Trinity.

The meal is probably the oldest of rituals performed by liturgical animals. Eating is the first activity that immerses us into mimetic desire as we imitate the desires of our caregivers to desire food and, by the time we are old enough to be conscious of what we are eating, to desire certain foods because those around us desire them. However, as much as meals have to do with providing necessary bodily nourishment, they are always more than that. An intrinsic part of learning to eat is learning how to eat in the company of others. It may be culturally arbitrary whether we use eating utensils and plates or large leaves and fingers, but in every culture I have ever heard of, there is always a way of eating that is learned. The shared desire for food extends to a shared desire for the way of eating it. By rooting liturgy in a meal, the Eucharist roots worship in the sensuous act of eating; of tasting food and drink on our tongues.

In this same letter, Paul brings up the manner of table manners in regards to the Eucharist. He berates the richer members of the congregation for their insensitive treatment of those who are more economically challenged. To flaunt their superior food in front of those who cannot afford it without offering them anything was a serious violation of everything the Eucharist stands for. This desire shared by one group in the congregation to demonstrate their superiority over others, to put them in their places, breaks the unity the feast is supposed to create and strengthen. Paul makes it clear that there is much more to worship than saying or singing words together while celebrating a sacrifice. If people are not treated well, worship is diminished if not rendered nonexistent.

John’s version of the feeding in the wilderness brings all of these themes together. The event is explicitly brought into the context of Yahweh’s feeding the Jews in the wilderness after their escape from Egypt. Raymond Brown pointed out that rabbinic teaching interpreted the manna as symbolizing the Torah, thus uniting food and teaching, something the Eucharist also does. While Matthew and Mark recount two feedings in the wilderness, one for the Jews and one for the Gentiles, John has one story of feeding for all people. Jesus’ blessing of the bread and fishes has ritual overtones although the feeding is taking place in the open air, away from temples, synagogues and churches. The social unity that Paul enjoins is embodied in John’s vision where it gains a deep universality. Unfortunately, the people then unite in trying to make Jesus king, which destroys the social vision as surely as the Corinthians did.

The Eucharist teaches us that we don’t outgrow our earliest lessons: table manners. Without them, we don’t grow up.