What is your experience of Eucharist?
What happens when we come together for Eucharist? In his Letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives the first known account of the Last Supper, during which Jesus took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me, then repeated this with a cup of wine. To offer bread and wine is a common practice in Jewish celebration: in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus includes bread in his feeding of the five thousand, while in the Book of Genesis, Melchizedek, king of Salem, a priest of God Most High, makes the standard offering of bread and wine to Abram on the occasion of Abram’s great military victory. Melchizedek’s is the paradigm of the new priesthood that Jesus will come to establish. But there is a crucial difference: unlike Melchizedek, Jesus offers himself, the perfect offering, for our sins, once and for all. Jesus is a priest forever, in the line of Melchizedek, echoing Psalm 110, but Jesus’s is the ultimate sacrifice. But if Jesus’s is indeed the final and only sacrifice necessary, why do we come together to experience the sacrifice of the Mass?
In fact, at the Last Supper, Jesus takes elements common to the Passover feast – the bread and the cup – and invests them with new meaning. Jesus is about to offer himself as a sacrifice for all: This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Our repetition of this moment is our ongoing participation in his death and rising; the sacrifice of the Mass is timeless -- it stands outside of time. This is the key point: every time we come together to celebrate Eucharist, we are participating in his death and rising, forever, giving witness to the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and thus proclaiming the death of the Lord. It is this participation in Jesus Christ’s death and rising, and our concomitant proclamation, that we celebrate on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.
The abundance of God’s grace as seen in the feeding of the five thousand is a foreshadowing of the abundance of Eucharist and its power in our lives. At the sacrifice of the Mass, the essence of the bread and wine changes, becoming Christ’s essence; when we take Communion, we take Christ into our body, and Christ’s essence becomes a part of us. This is a stunning truth of our faith, an experience unlike any other, in any faith tradition. Do this in remembrance of me, Jesus told his disciples. When we open ourselves to his presence, to his essence, we are one with him – we are the Body of Christ. And that is what Eucharist is all about.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
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