LITURGY OF THE EUCHARIST: YOU GIVE THEM SOMETHING TO EAT!

Let me assure you: I take the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist very seriously! This is a little piece of creation, a little piece of matter that has been brought into right relationship with God. There is a prayer from Teilhard de Chardin that I love very much, that I think of as I prepare the elements for eucharist:

I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar–– And on it I will offer you all the labors and sufferings of the world. . . I will place on the paten the harvest to be won by labor. . . Into my chalice I will pour all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from the Earth’s fruits.

I spent 10 years in the monastery happily meditating nightly before the Blessed Sacrament exposed, and still meditate in front of the a tabernacle frequently. I say that because from here on out I am not going to refer to the real presence much, I’m just going to assume it and assume that you do too.

thinking liturgically: holy thursday and cycle C

I was trained to think liturgically, that is, to absorb what is presented to us in the liturgy. Specifically when it comes to feasts and feast days, if I really want to understand what the church is conveying, teaching by this particular feast, how the church is trying to form my faith by a certain feast, the best way is to go the scriptures with which the church has chosen to surround the feast. I like to think of it as the garland of flowers from the scripture that the church has chosen to hang around the neck of the feast. Since we are talking about the Eucharist, I want to look at the Scriptures that surround tow of the liturgical feasts of the Eucharist, Holy Thursday and the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ.

You have probably already noticed this, or noticed without noting it, but on Holy Thursday, the day that many people think of as the event where Jesus instituted the Eucharist, the Church does not read from Matthew, Mark or Luke, each of which tell the story of the words of institution (though we do hear from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, the same which we hear this year in which he tells the story); on Holy Thursday, the church chooses to read from the Gospel of John, which tells the story of the Last Supper, but never mentions the institution of the Eucharist, never mentions the bread and the wine.

Now before the festival of the Passover . . . during supper Jesus, . . . got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord —and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet for I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. (John 13:1–15)

The liturgist John Baldovin writes “the Mass of the Lord’s Supper centers on two acted parables which express the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Both acts, the Eucharist and the foot-washing, ritually and symbolically express the fact that true life is to be found in the sacrifice of service.” Acted parables. True life is found in the life of service, this liturgy teaches us, and this service itself is how we are to share the cross of Christ––by laying our lives down in service, by doing as Jesus did. And this is made real in the symbolic act of foot washing by the president of the assembly: “the greatest among you must be the one who serves”. There’s another practice that is meant to accompany this liturgy: this is the only occasion (besides weddings) in the course of the liturgical year that the Sacramentary states that gifts for the poor be presented along with the gifts of bread and wine. Look at the beautiful parallels that the church is using to teach us: Eucharist––foot washing: same thing. Gifts to the Lord––gifts to the poor: same thing. What is made visible is the connection between the paschal mystery and the self-sacrifice of the church. The recommended song for this time is that ancient text “Where charity and love are found there is God.” This is very important, very profound, very subtle: before we earn the right to process around the church and the neighborhood with the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance and spend the hours til midnight in adoration, we have to wash each others’ feet and feed the poor.

In year C of the lectionary for the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ there is something similar going on. Instead of hearing about the institution of the Eucharist, we get a marvelous story from the Gospel of Luke. It has a parallel in the Gospel of Matthew (14) and Mark (6)

The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place.” But he said to them, “You give them something to eat.” They said, “We have no more than five loaves and two fish —unless we are to go and buy food for all these people.” For there were about five thousand men. And he said to his disciples, “Make them sit down in groups of about fifty each.” They did so and made them all sit down. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And all ate and were filled. What was left over was gathered up, twelve baskets of broken pieces. (Luke 9:12–17)

There are so many interesting features here, alluding to the Eucharistic mystery: the notion of multiplication and abundance, for instance; the use of fish––it's amazing that for all the times that fish gets mentioned in connection to Eucharist that we didn't wind up with holy communion being fish and bread instead of wine! But again, as Holy Thursday, it doesn't specifically talk about the institution of what we know as the sacrament of Eucharist as it might have by telling the story of the Last Supper––as the lectionary does in Year B with the Gospel of Mark; or even about Jesus himself as the Bread of Life as we would hear in the long discourse from the Gospel of John, part of which is read in Year A. Just as Holy Thursday explains to us the meaning of the eucharistic sacrifice––washing feet and feeding the poor Eucharist are not two different things––so does this reading from Year C show us the practical meaning of Eucharist. One little detail is especially in high relief in the Gospel of Matthew, where this same story is told twice, once Jesus feeding five thousand and once feeding four thousand. In the Gospel of Matthew one little line that gets said in the first version of the multiplication but not in the second, and it gets said in this version in Luke as well. ". . . the twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place.” But he said to them, “You give them something to eat.” You give them something to eat! He doesn't say, “Don't worry I will feed them.” He doesn’t say “I am the bread of life,” as he does in the Gospel of John. He says, You give them something to eat!

In the story of the washing of the feet that we hear on Holy Thursday, Jesus gives them an example and then says "Now you go and do this!" Here it's the other way around. He says, “You give them something to eat” but they don't understand. So he says, "Here, let me show you!" Let me show you how gratitude (ie. Eucharist) becomes generosity. Let me show you how if you make people feel comfortable and safe they will let go of the things that they have grasped tightly to themselves. Let me show you that the Father is glad to give you the kingdom, that you have nothing to fear my little flock, that the Universe is benevolent, and God's love is abundant, overflowing, prodigal!

I have a very personal connection with this reading. One day in my own study of scripture I came upon this line, and heard somebody just casually refer to it in a homily and it was like a firestorm going off in my head. It was during that very time when I was despairing over the state of the church, and we were being rocked by these sexual scandals, and I was very upset about the way the hierarchy was handling it. I've always had a kind of a rebellious streak in me myself and I often think we all to easily cut people off when we are trying to shore up our superstructures, or trying to establish our own sense of identity; that we often forsake the subject when we are trying to uphold an objective truth. I was at the time already contemplating the possibility of spending some time out of the monastic community living on my own, thinking somehow that the answer to my own despair about the church was actually to get closer to the people of God, and to try to be the change I wanted to see in the church, to paraphrase Mahatma Ghandi. And sure enough, there was this line from the Gospel saying, You give them something to eat! It was like a conversion experience.

The apostles were going to send them away!! Maybe James is going to remember this exact scene later when he will write to his friends.

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. (James 2:14-17)

four levels of meaning

I mentioned in the last talk how in the monastic tradition we are trained in the four levels of meaning in Scripture that comes to us from the desert fathers and especially from the writing of Guigo the Carthusian. So that every scriptural story has four levels of meaning: the historical meaning; secondly, every scripture has a allegorical meaning––so Jerusalem symbolizes not just Jerusalem itself but the embodiment of peace, the reign of God on earth; then even more subtle, a tropological or a moral meaning, a spur to some kind of personal action; and finally an anagogical or eschatological meaning, some kind of inkling about the final and ultimate things. A brilliant influential liturgist named Cipriano Vagaggini applied this same teaching to the sacraments, that every sacrament has four levels of meaning as well.

First of all, like the historical meaning of Scripture, every sacrament commemorative of Christ's saving action, it recalls and re-lives some actual event in Jesus' life; and so we have the Gospels telling the stories of the institution of the eucharist at the Last Supper. Then every sacrament, he says, also is “demonstrative of the present visible sacred realities,” in other words we are not simply remembering something in the past: in our remembering the saving reality is somehow present. In connection with that, this quote from John Baldovin again, that has been foundational for me:

Christian worship … is not a reaching out for a distant reality but a joyful celebration of a salvation that is just as real and active in the ritual celebration as it was in the historical event. It is ritual perfected by divine realism; ritual in which the symbolic action is not a memorial of the past, but a participation in the eternally present salvific Pasch of Christ.

But third, and this is our connection with today, every sacrament is also moral sign obligating; this corresponds to the moral or tropological meaning of a sacrament. Our reception of the sacraments and our participation in the churches liturgy oblige us toward a way of life. When we say AMEN! we are somehow committing ourselves to a way of life. No one should receive these sacraments loosely!

sacrifice-meal

There's a reason that our liturgical tradition keeps the notion of eucharist-as-meal in tension with the notion of eucharist-as-sacrifice. You know in this day and age we have accented much more the meal aspect of the Eucharist over the sacrificial aspect. Well, that has its advantages and disadvantages. This is from Aidan Kavanaugh:

… to know Christ sacramentally only in terms of bread and wine is to know him only partially, in the dining room as host and guest. It is a valid enough knowledge, but its ultimate weakness . . . is that it is perhaps too civil. … however elegant the knowledge of the dining room may be, it begins in the soil, in the barnyard, in the slaughterhouse; amid the quiet violence of the garden, strangled cries, and fat spitting in the pan. Table manners depend on something’s having been grabbed by the throat.

We are so far removed from our food, from the source of our food. It comes to us in plastic, out of drive through windows, processed and civil and refined. We have no sense generally that ever meal involves a sacrifice. There's another quote by the liturgist and author Nathan Mitchell that I also never tire of reading and quoting. He says that part of the disadvantage of exaggerating the notion of Eucharist as banquet is that

… banquets suggest abundance, lavish excess of food and drink––almost as though the eucharist were a luxury meal for wealthy gourmands. This image is strongly appealing of course in an affluent American culture of conspicuous consumption, where a significant portion of our population is overweight and an equally significant portion drives humungous, gas-guzzling all-terrain SUVs to the mall or supermarket! And yet we know that the planet is populated by millions (often women and children, often people of color) who would give their last scrap of clothing for a single cup of rice. In our world, a human being dies of hunger every 3.6 seconds, and 75 percent of them are kids under the age of five.

We have to face the fact that there is an ethics, an economics of eucharist that we are not free to ignore. If we come away from the table feeling fat, full, content, and satisfied––if we come away purring like cats, licking the last drop of cream from our whiskers––then we've missed the point. Because the point of the eucharistic meal is not to leave the table sleek, sassy, and satisfied; the point is to leave hungry, troubled, dissatisfied. The point is to leave with a burr under the saddle, with a tickle in the throat, with a heart broken by the passion of God."

Our reception of the sacraments and our participation in the church's liturgy oblige us toward a way of life. The sacrament is a moral sign obligating––every sacrament obliges us to a way of life, to some kind of moral action. Eucharist/washing of feet. Eucharist––you give them something to eat: same thing.

broken and poured out

There are so many little moments in the Eucharistic celebration that go by without being noticed, that have come to me so much to me. One of them is the fraction rite, the breaking of the bread. It’s very clear that the priest-presider is supposed to make sure that this little gesture is seen by the assembly as they are singing the Lamb of God. It recalls the lambs being slaughtered for the Passover feast in the Gospel of John as Jesus is being put to death. As this bread is broken we sing, Lamb of God, have mercy on us. But if you remember what I said earlier––before it is the real presence of Jesus this bread and this wine was supposed to have been the real presence of us. We have laid our own lives on the altar, and ask them to be received together with Christ. And they have been received and accepted and transformed (transubstantiatied). Augustine is very clear in stating, "At the altar you receive what you are", and Leo the Great says, "Change us into what we receive!" This is who you are! And we get all our goods back in the form of bread and wine but now they have been brought into right relationship with God. And they––our lives in the form of this bread and wine––get broken and poured out, like Jesus got broken and poured out.

This is a little piece of creation, a little piece of matter that has been brought into right relationship with God. I get it back, and am asked to consume it, and at that moment, I become a tabernacle, because I have the Real Presence of Christ inside of me, if I doubted it before. If we’re going to take the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist seriously, then let’s take it all the way. I now become the very presence of Jesus. At that moment, as Thomas Merton said, if we really understood Eucharistic theology and took it seriously, the problem should be that we spend all our time on our knees, in front of each other who are tabernacles carrying Jesus in side of us. I walk out of these doors a monstrance. I am the presence of Jesus in the world. More importantly, hopefully I too through my sharing in this meal, am starting to be changed permanently into what I have received, the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Eucharist is a sacrificial meal. This Eucharist that we share is not just bread and wine, it becomes body and blood; and not just body and blood but broken body and spilled blood! Before we can reign with Jesus we must die with him, as he did. This fraction, this breaking, is a prophecy, about what will this sign if obligating us to––to be broken and poured out. . When we say AMEN! we are somehow committing ourselves to a way of life, which is the poverty, the spiritual poverty of the Gospel. We die not just on Calvary, but emptying ourselves in sometimes very small ways, service, patience, kindness, emptying ourselves often simply our of self-will, emptying ourselves completely, content with the grace of God. Just as the bread gets broken here at the altar, just as the wine gets poured out, so as we walk out these doors, we who have become the Body of Christ have been given enough food for the journey, to go out there and be broken, and be poured out for the sake of those whom we love and those whom we don't.

Go!

There is a part of the Mass that is commonly practiced that is not an official part of the Mass, you know. It’s called the closing hymn. Believe it or not, it is not even listed in the official texts of the liturgy. The Mass ends very abruptly. What does it say? "The Mass is ended: Go in Peace!" There are different formulas allowed for that: Go in the peace of Christ. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. But the operative word there is––GO! I am not one to change the words of the churches liturgy cavalierly, nor do I get too scrupulous about it––some of the things that people improvise are very much in keeping with my understanding of the theology there: Go in peace to serve the Lord and one another; The Mass never ends in must be lived so go in peace, etc., etc. But I especially squirm when a priest will change that formula to something like, "This Mass is end; have a nice day!" or anything that neglects that most poignant word––GO! The most important word there is GO!

If I were going to improvise a formula to end the liturgy it would be: The Mass is ended––now, you go and give them to eat!