I'm taking a class on 'Anglican Eucharistic Theology' and my first assignment was to write a paper on 'the eucharistic theology contained in the Bible.' The new mom thought it might be of general interest. Here it is:
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1. I’d like to launch straightaway into exegesis, but it is necessary first to clear the ground by addressing a few questions of a philosophical and theological nature. It would be tempting to try my hand at an essay entitled, ‘what the Bible really says about the Eucharist,’ to borrow the title of one of Bishop Wright’s books on St Paul. But I’m too skeptical for such an attempt. It assumes, first, that what the Church has held about the Eucharist all along – and what the Church at present authoritatively teaches – at some point became distorted, and doesn’t match the actual doctrine of the Apostles: a ‘critical’ vantage commonplace in a contemporary philosophical culture but, needless to say, no less for that an axiomatic feature of all Protestant accounts of the Eucharist. It assumes, second, that the modern exegete is able, probably by virtue of historical science, to dig past layer upon layer of traditional excrescences to reach the authentic core teaching lying beyond tradition’s interpretations. It assumes, third, the autonomy of the modern exegete, his freedom from ecclesiastically enforced dogma, and fourth, that this autonomy grants him hermeneutical superiority over the ‘pre-critical.’ It assumes, fifth, that once the uninhibited exegete reaches beyond authority and tradition to the 'thing itself,' the text will simply ‘speak’ its meaning perspicuously, without veil, without opacity, without mystery. The meaning is there – all we have to do is find it, uncover it, and the truth will speak for itself.
That I don’t share any of these assumptions does not, however, mean I can’t try my hand at an endeavor that may, on the surface, appear indistinguishable. For it is the teaching of the universal Church that the Holy Spirit speaks in Holy Scripture: speaks not only there and then, but here and now. We don’t have to free ourselves from the Church in order to hear this voice, for the same Spirit who speaks in Scripture leads the whole Church into the fullness of Christ’s truth. Nor do we have to dig beneath tradition. In it we see the vestiges of the Spirit’s work through the ages, the beautiful ruins wrought by saints who wrestled with the truth of God. This doesn’t mean we look at tradition instead of Scripture: it means we look through tradition to the same font of wisdom whence spring its deepest streams.
And so we are free to ask, wholeheartedly, ‘what does the Bible say about the Eucharist?’ even if it is clear that we ask it in this ‘traditional’ and ‘ecclesial’ way. The question is still very much debated, and debatable, on both grounds. Tradition enfolds within itself distinct, at times disparate voices on this question: so much so in fact that the sacrament of unity has become a point of contestation and schism. And the Church, the whole Catholic Church, has never spoken definitively on the question. There is without question a ‘catholic’ doctrine of God, a ‘catholic’ doctrine of Christ’s person: for these have been defined by Ecumenical Councils, and received throughout the whole Church. And when the whole Church speaks only a fool shuts up his ears. The same cannot be said about the Eucharist. To be sure, there is the teaching of this church and that, holding within each communion differing degrees of authority. But the whole Church has not yet spoken, and there is not, therefore, a ‘catholic’ doctrine of the Eucharist.
Hence in what follows I explore the teaching of Holy Scripture with some degree of freedom: bound to the text, to the truth, but free – in the absence of dogmatic decree – to wander amongst the several schools constitutive of the Christian tradition of reflection on the mystery of the Eucharist.
2. There are several classic loci in the New Testament to which I’ll turn in a moment. But the striking factor of each of these texts is that they point away from the Eucharist per se to the reality it somehow represents and participates: “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11.26). The Eucharist is incoherent apart from the sacrifice of Jesus. And this implies, in a strong sense, that the whole Bible is ‘eucharistic’: for Christ is the deep mystery of the Scriptures (Jn 5.39; Lk 24.25-27). Hence whether we think of the oblation of bread and wine offered by Melchizedek (Gen 14.18), the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen 22), the Passover lamb (Ex 12), the whole complex of the sacrificial system of the old covenant, the unique sacrifices of the Day of Atonement (Lev 16); or the prophecy of a universal “pure offering” (Mal 1.11); or the suffering of the whole people of God, literally personified in the sufferings of “the servant of the Lord” (e.g. Is 52.12-53.12, or Ps 22); or the Evangelists’ portraits of the Christ’s passion; or the epistles’ inchoate theological vision of the same, especially in the Epistle to the Hebrews and, no less, the more speculative moments in St Paul’s letters (e.g. 2 Cor 5.14-21, Eph 1.3-23, Phil 2.5-11, Col 1.15-20); or the Apocalypse’s image of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world (Rev 13.8): it is as if the whole Scriptures do nothing but set forth the passion of the Christ. All of this, each passage in the different ways appropriate to its irreducible particularity, can be brought to bear on the mystery of Christ and, therefore, on the mystery of the holy Eucharist. Not that I am by any means suggesting an original thought: the ‘mystical’ exegesis of the fathers rests on nothing else than this; Christ himself declares it (Lk 24.27); and the ‘platonic’ imagery of the Epistle to the Hebrews above all shows the fragmentary, imperfect, symbolic character of the “copies” and “shadows” that went before the decisive enactment of the true cosmic liturgy of the Messiah.
3. It is with this in mind that I suggest we approach St Paul’s densely packed and deeply suggestive use of the language of “participation” in 1 Cor 10.16-17. The cup of blessing we bless is a participation in the blood of Christ; the bread broken likewise a participation in the body of Christ. Paul seems wonderfully innocent at this point of later battles over the mode of Christ’s eucharistic presence. The language is simple and concrete. The bread and cup (by metonymy “wine,” as in 1 Cor 11.25) participate in the body and blood of Christ. The background is unarguably our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross, his body broken and blood outpoured: somehow the bread and cup partake of the suffering body of Jesus. But this isn’t the end of it. Because there is one bread – Paul obviously alludes to established ritual practice – the many who partake of the one bread are one body. It isn’t an accident that this profoundly ecclesial aspect of the sacrament emerges in the letter to the Corinthians. Two chapters later Paul will develop his seminal theology of the church as the body of Christ, composed of its many members united by the one Spirit in submission to the one head, Christ. The many are one in Christ by baptism (12.13); they are one through participation in the eucharist as well, for the eucharist itself is a participation in Christ’s body and blood.
4. This inseparable nexus of sacramental and ecclesial unity appears again in 1 Cor 11.17-34. Paul rebukes the Corinthians because he hears that when they gather together as ekklesia there are divisions in the body (v.18). Hence “when you come together it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat” (v.20). Since this is the context in which Paul reminds them of the tradition he received from the Lord (v.23), our exegesis will be inadequate to the extent that it isolates speculation on eucharistic presence from the inherently ecclesial nature of the Eucharist. Paul’s own pithy explanation of the rite only reinforces this fact. The Eucharist proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes – and through his death, through his blood, the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, are made one: Christ reconciles us to God in one body through the cross (Eph 2.11-22), “making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1.20). Does this not cast light back upon 1 Cor 10.15-16? Christ shed his blood to restore the lost unity of the human race. Those who partake of his blood in the Eucharist partake in the awful means by which divine love would accomplish universal reconciliation. It is because its deepest significance is so exalted that the Corinthians’ divisive pettiness is so destructive. It goes without saying that the same is true of the whole Christian Church to this day. Can we be so sure, in our state of complacent division, that it is the Lord’s Supper we eat?
5. Of course one of the great fault lines separating the churches is the debate over the nature of Christ’s eucharistic presence, and our continued struggle for Christian unity requires us to continue searching the Scriptures together to see whether – and how – these things are so (cf. Acts 17.11). 1 Cor 11.23-32 must occupy a center place in all such discussions. In fact, on historical-critical grounds it should probably outweigh Synoptic accounts of the institution at the Supper: Paul wrote sometime mid first-century, at least fifteen years before the first of the synoptics may have been set to writing. As in 1 Cor 10, what is so impressive is Paul’s apparently incautious interchange of “bread” and “body,” “cup” and “blood” – or indeed, “new covenant in my blood.” In the relaying of the institution we hear the familiar “this is my body” (v.24), then but two verses later “as often as you eat this bread” (v.26). And of the cup not “this is my blood” but, as in Luke 22.20, “this is the new covenant in my blood” (v.25). Nicholas Ridley, martyred in part for his eucharistic beliefs, delighted in wondering whether the cup’s substance changed into the substance of the covenant; and while we disdain triumphalism in these discussions, it must be admitted that he has a point. In any case Paul reverts back to “cup” again in v.26, in parallel to the shift back to “bread.” This imprecision continues in vv.27-29. Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily is guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Each one must therefore examine himself before he eats of the bread or drinks of the cup. “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.” Can anyone make a clear and certain judgment of the nature of Christ’s eucharistic presence on the basis of these texts? Perhaps recognizing its ambiguity is our only clarity? What strikes me as probable is that Paul believed the bread and the cup were the body and blood of Christ, while nevertheless still being bread and wine. Which reminds me of a difficult text from St Ambrose: ut sint quae erant et in aliud commutentur, “that they might be what they were and be changed into something else” (de sacramentis iv.4.15). What strikes me as almost certain is that the last reference to “the body” in v.29 has again to do with the ecclesial nature of the Eucharist, as if Paul had said: ‘anyone who partakes of the Eucharist without discerning the ecclesial body eats and drinks judgment on himself.’ I judge this entirely likely because of what follows in vv.30-34, where Paul’s attention shifts suddenly back to the pastoral issues at hand – an apparently awkward shift if he had merely been discoursing of the eucharistic transformation of the elements!
6. I’m not going to look at the Synoptic accounts separately to avoid tediousness, as they so nearly follow what I’ve already exposited from 1 Cor 11. But we do have to linger for a while with St John’s Gospel, whose sixth chapter obviously assumes of its readers an extant liturgical context. Jesus first “makes eucharist” in v.11, and in the following verse John has him tell the disciples to “gather up the leftover fragments that nothing may be lost.” Nor is this without resonance in the Synoptic miraculous feeding pericopes (e.g. Mt 14.19, 15.36). But the most important material comes in the long discourse spanning vv.22-71. John reminds the reader of the previous “eucharist” (v.23) before commencing a fundamentally christological dialogue between Jesus and the crowd gathered around him. Jesus tells them to labor not for perishable food, but for that which endures to eternal life – the food the Son of Man, on whom the Father has set his seal, will give them (v.27). He claims to be the one sent by God; they ask for a sign, recalling the miraculous provision of manna from old. Jesus’ Father gives “true bread” from heaven: for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (v.33). “I am the bread of life” (v.35, 48), “I am the bread that came down from heaven” (v.41), “I am the living bread that came down from heaven… the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh” (v.51). John uses this distinctive language to hold together christological claims and their redemptive purpose with imagery at once eucharistic and, in an allusive way, ecclesial: just as the fragments had to be gathered that none be lost (v.12) it is the will of him who sent Jesus that he should lose nothing of all that is given him (v.39. Might not this anticipate Caiaphas’ ironic prophesy, “that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (11.51-52)? For John christology, atonement, and ecclesiology are all of a piece – “a seamless tunic” (19.23) – and are likewise inextricable in the overtly eucharistic language that surfaces in the latter part of the dialogue. The bread Jesus gives for the life of the world is his nail-pierced flesh, the grain of wheat that must fall into the earth and die to bear fruit (12.24): this flesh is true food, and his blood pouring out from his side is true drink (v.55, 19.34). “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you” (v.53): but the one who does so eat and drink “has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (v.54), for he abides in Christ, and Christ abides in him (v.56). By his life we receive life, sharing in the gift he himself receives from the Father (v.57): and so we who eat this bread will live forever (v.58). Whatever conclusion a theologian may arrive at regarding the mode of Christ’s eucharistic presence on the basis of these texts, if he misses how John’s poetry has weaved together inseparably Christ and his Church through the Eucharist, he’s simply missed the point.
7. It seems fitting, by way of a conclusion, to look at texts that portray the Eucharist in eschatological perspective. At the Last Supper our Lord himself told his disciples, “I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God comes” (Lk 22.18). We’ve already seen Paul’s own exegetical gloss, “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11.26). Thus intrinsic to Christ’s eucharistic ‘presence’ is, however paradoxically, the implicit recognition of his ‘absence’ until he comes again. For we are now pilgrims, wayfarers, exiles, beggars gathering up the crumbs beneath our Master’s table. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you shall be satisfied” (Lk 6.21). We look for the coming of the city that has foundations (Heb 11.10), the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev 21.2), “Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and innumerable angels in festal gathering” (Heb 12.22): “for on this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food and marrow, of aged wine well refined” (Is 25.6). Is this not the great wedding feast we anticipate with each celebration of the Eucharist? Then the marriage of the Bridegroom and the Bride will be consummated; then a voice like the roar of many waters and mighty peals of thunder will cry out:
Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exalt and give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready: it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and purple.
Blessed indeed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19.9), the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind and, in short, all those who cannot repay their debt (Lk 14.13-14, 21-24)! Theirs is the Kingdom, theirs a portion in the feast of the victory of our God.
