Source and Summit and Everything in Between: Why the Eucharist

As I walked my nephew through his prayers last night, we enjoyed the following exchange:

Me: Can you tell God how great he is?  What did Jesus do that was great?

John Paul: He took bwead and wine and tuwned it into his body and bwood!

I swear I’m not making this up.  Completely unaware of tomorrow’s feast (or my epic series of Eucharist posts), the one event from the life of Christ that struck my 2-year-old nephew as awesome was the institution of the Eucharist.

Yes, I’m taking notes for the hagiography.

Just so everybody knows that his theology’s sound, John Paul has also been known to stop playing, look up, and say, “Thank you fow Jesus fow dying fow me!”  He’s a little preposition happy at the moment.

But he’s on the right track.  Somehow, his little child’s mind gets that the Eucharist is just as essential as the Passion.  In fact, it’s an extension of the Passion.

I’m sure everyone reading this knows that the Passover is a type (a foreshadowing) of the Passion.  But bear with me here (And turn to Exodus 12 if this is news).  In order to save his people from slavery to Egypt (sin), God ordered them to take an unblemished lamb (sinless Lamb of God) and slaughter it (crucify him) at twilight (during an eclipse).  He ordered that not a bone of it be broken (Jn 19:36) and that the Israelites anoint their doorposts with its blood (be baptized and saved by the blood of the Lamb).*

People usually finish drawing the eery parallels there (although can I point out that John the Baptist called Jesus the Lamb of God–sacrificial victim–just before Jesus was baptized, symbolizing his union with sinners and his death?  Sweet.) but that’s only the first part of the ritual.  Any Jew will tell you that the meat (hehe) of the Passover ritual is the Seder meal.  In fact, Exodus spends more time commanding that than it does commanding the sacrifice, going so far as to say that all Israelites must eat the lamb (Ex 12:47–I guess Jewish vegetarians just have to suck it up one day a year).

The Old Testament is engineered intentionally by God to reveal the New in the light of Christ.  We start to understand the purpose of the Ark of the Covenant when we look at Mary.  We get a sense of worship when we look at the temple (incense, anyone?) and we can’t understand Baptism without the flood and the Red Sea.  So what’s with all the sacrifice stuff all over the Pentateuch?  And why is it always telling them who was supposed to eat of the sacrifice?

That’s right.  Many kinds of sacrifices had to be consumed entirely, others eaten by priests, and some eaten by the one who offered it.  The idea was that you offered your best to God, who made it sacred.  Some of it went to the priests, some was burned up, but some was given back to you.  You then feasted with your family, thanking God for the opportunity to make a sacrifice (now there’s some good theology) and being sanctified by consuming what was holy.  The ancient understanding of holiness was that it was contagious.  If you touched something unclean, you became unclean; if you touched something holy, you became holy (or got struck dead–2 Sam 6).  God called the Israelites to consume their sacrifices so that they might become holy as their heavenly Father is holy.  For Ancient Jews, a sacrifice without a meal was incomplete.  A Passover without a Seder was sacrilege.

Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is clearly a Paschal (Passover/Easter) sacrifice; so where’s the meal?  Well, he had to go a little out of order, but the Apostles consumed the Lamb of God at the Last Supper, when he offered his body and blood to them under the form of bread and wine.  You cannot have the Passion without the Last Supper–you cannot have Christianity without the Eucharist.**

Because for the Israelites, sacrifice was necessary, yes.  But the feast was how they shared in that sacrifice.  The meal was the source of sanctity for them just as the Eucharist is for us.  It’s the source of our faith as well.  In John, Peter makes his profession of faith after the bread of life discourse.  In Luke, the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize the risen Christ until after he broke open the Scriptures for them (Liturgy of the Word) and then took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them (Lk 24:30).  It’s through consuming the Passover Lamb that we are drawn to faith.

And here’s the thing of it: this isn’t just some accident of allegory where we felt as though we had to get all the details right.  “Okay, well, there’s something in here about eating it standing up, so let’s nix the altar rails….”  No–God created the Passover for the purpose of showing us what the Passion meant–and showing us that it didn’t end on the cross or in the empty tomb or even on Ascension Thursday.

My friends, Jesus loved you too much to spend only 33 years on earth.  It wasn’t enough for him to live for you, nor to die, nor even to rise again.  He needed to be with you, here for you, every moment of every day.

At the Last Supper, he made this promise: I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you (Jn 14:18).  This wasn’t a promise made only to his Apostles, merely a promise of the Resurrection.  He’d told them about that a half dozen times.  They weren’t suddenly going to get it now.  No, this was a promise to you that he would offer himself for you not once but eternally.

“I refuse,” he said, as he stared death in the face, “I refuse to leave her.  I will come back for her.  I will wait for her, weaker than I was on the Cross, poorer than I was in the manger.  I will suffer abuse and ridicule, be ignored and profaned, every day for the rest of time rather than leave her.  And most days she won’t bother to come see me.  And she’ll receive me without a thought about me.  And some days–Father, forgive her–she’ll come to me mired in sin.  But I will never leave her nor forsake her.  I will wait for her in the tabernacle.  I will stare at her from the monstrance.  I will kiss her as she receives.  I will dwell in her heart.  I will be borne in her life.  I will not leave her.”

The act of receiving is so intimate, this moment at which we accept the love of another person given entirely for us.  We the Church walk up the aisle to our groom.  When a groom takes his bride to their marriage bed, when they consummate their marriage, they say to one another, “I give myself completely to you forever.”  And each time they make love, they renew the covenant of their marriage, making again with their bodies the vows they spoke on their wedding day: I give myself completely to you forever.

As he stretched out his arms on the cross, Jesus said to his bride the Church, “I give myself completely to you forever.”  In the person of the priest, he says at each Mass, “This is my body, which will be given up for you”–I give myself completely to you forever.  That is the promise of the Eucharist, the sign by which Christ renews his covenant with the Church.  It’s an act of marital love, and act of intimacy so profound that it’s called the summit of the Christian life.  Jesus, the lover of your soul, is drawing you to himself, giving himself completely to you–not just spiritually but physically–begging that you be captivated by him as he is by you.  Begging that you give yourself in return.

Sure, he could do this by sending his Spirit into our heart or stirring up a desire for union with him.  But God made us physical and spiritual–he knows that we’re not purely spiritual creatures and we can’t survive on the spirit alone.  He gave us the Eucharist as a physical expression of the all-encompassing, life-giving love we were made for.  The reality of his presence allows us to give ourselves completely to him as he offers himself completely to us.

This physical reality of the Sacrament touches our hearts in a way that spiritual certainty just can’t.  Because it’s real.  It’s tangible, it’s physical, and it’s beautiful.  A perfect love for Christ would desire to possess him completely–which we do when we receive.  A perfect love for Christ would desire to be transformed into him–which we are when we receive.  A perfect love for Christ would desire to give ourselves completely to him–which we can when we receive.

Praise God for the gift, the incredible gift of the Eucharist.  Here is the one place where you are fully known, loved exactly as you are, and called to be greater.  Here is the one place where you are completely accepted by the one person whose acceptance matters.  My friends, if you are blessed to be Catholic, please, oh, please learn to love Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  You won’t always feel it (Lord knows I don’t) but when you choose to see him with eyes of faith, your life will be transformed.  The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian faith.  It is our strength to endure and the reason we sing.  It is the promise of his love and a foretaste of heaven.  It is, quite literally, the meaning of life.

Jesus longs to love you in the Eucharist.  Let him.

 

*Can I just tell you that when this was first explained to me it absolutely blew my mind?  I was in high school and I seriously freaked out.  I knew Jesus and all, but I had no idea that this Christian thing could be intellectually stimulating.  Little did I know….

**Incidentally, this seems to have been Tolkien’s biggest problem with The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe; Lewis set up a whole Passion narrative with no Last Supper, a whole Passover with no Seder.