The holy eucharist is the ritual foretaste of that heavenly banquet wherein all God’s children shall be gathered around one table. As baptism ritually creates the community, the eucharist nourishes and maintains it. It is called the sacrament of unity, and yet it is the sacrament that has caused the greatest disunity and discord.
Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem took bread and wine and made a thank offering for Abraham, our father in faith. The priests of Yahweh regularly took bread and wine and offered them to the Lord. The head of the household, in the keeping of the sabbath and other feasts, pronounced a berakah or blessing over the bread at the beginning of the meal, and over the wine at the end of the meal. Jesus, as the head of a chaburoth (an informal religious group of friends or of master and disciples), presided over the shared meals and pronounced the blessings over the bread and wine. On the night before his betrayal, Jesus changed the ancient formula and a new age began.
In the early church there was little controversy over the eucharist. That the eucharist truly conveyed the body and blood of Christ to the believer was universally accepted. Sometimes the bread and wine were spoken of as the body and blood, sometimes they were spoken of as signs or symbols or archetypes or ante-types. But the reality of Christ present for the sake of the world was never doubted or debated.
In the fourth century some theologians began to question how bread and wine could at once be bread and wine and Christ. The question remained largely confined to academics, and still no one doubted or questioned the reality, only the How. In the thirteenth century the metaphysics of Aristotle was rediscovered. In his analysis of reality, Aristotle divided everything into two parts: “Accidents” or the sensible and changing aspects of things (such as the colour, taste, smell, size), and “Substance” or the unchanging, abiding, and underlying identity of a thing in which the “accidents” are anchored. Some theologians took this view of things and divided the bread and wine accordingly. They claimed that in the eucharist the changeable aspects of bread and wine did not change, so that the bread and wine looked, smelled and tasted like bread and wine, but the underlying realities, the “substances”, the bread-ness and the wine-ness, were changed into the “substances” of the body and the blood of Christ. This theory is called Transubstantiation, and it has transformed Christianity.
In an effort to affirm the reality and the presence of Christ in the sacrament, some of these theologians fell prey to talking about the physical presence and reality of Christ under the cloak of bread and wine. This opened the doors to the worshipping and adoration of the elements, and to countless abuses against countless simple minds and hearts. The eucharist became something to gaze upon rather than a sacrament to feed upon, an object of religious curiosity rather than a ritual means to community building through mutual contact with the Holy.
The great reformers sought to re-establish the sacrament as the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion of the Children of God. The reformers rejected the theory of transubstantiation, but they did not agree on a theory to replace it. Luther spoke of con-substantiation, wherein bread and wine and Christ were all truly present. Zwingli claimed that there was no transformation whatsoever, that the bread and wine were merely symbolic of the body and blood of Christ. Calvin attempted to hold a position in between those of Luther and Zwingli. Calvin claimed that there was no change in the bread and wine, but that by faith the communicant entered into a union with and was sustained by the whole Christ, heart and soul, body and blood. The teachings of the Anglican Communion are diverse, and happily so, for no one theory shall ever touch the reality of Christ, risen, glorified, present.
Today some theologians speak of the eucharist as giving the bread and wine new significance or new meaning. Perhaps, they are still caught up in a debate that started off with the wrong approach. Sacraments are not about How but What. The soul touched by the love of God, indeed, any soul touched by love, knows How love can transform, trans-signify, transubstantiate reality, and such a soul knows also that neither Aristotelian metaphysics nor Heisenbergian quantum mechanics can capture or describe the simplicity or the power that effects the change. What happens in the eucharist is the correct question. Scripture tells us that at Emmaus Christ took bread, blessed it, broke it, and that the eyes of the disciples were opened. They recognized Jesus Christ, they saw who Christ is, Christ who fills the universe, Christ Crucified, Christ Risen, Christ Hidden in the glory of God. That is what the eucharist does; it opens the eyes and hands and hearts, it gathers all humanity to one table, it feeds all humanity in one food and one drink, it proclaims this medium of human commonality to be the very fabric of the Creator, the very body and blood of God’s Christ, it tears away the ego and reveals all to be equal before God, all brothers and sisters, all joint-heirs, all fellow partakers in Christ who from before time began was turned toward creation as its redeemer, its healer, its centre, its life. Thus, there is no eucharist, no holy communion without the question: whose need, whose pain, whose cares, whose sin, whose joy, whose love, whose life is not also mine? There is no union with Christ without communion with every one and every thing. Eucharist is about communion, and com-union is always about sacrifice, self-sacrifice.
In the early church there was no controversy concerning the sacrificial nature of the eucharist. In the temple at Jerusalem the offerings of bread and wine were termed sacrifices. In the gospel accounts of the institution of the sacrament three sacrificial terms (covenant, poured out, and memorial) are consistently used. In other early writings of the church, the crucifixion is spoken of in sacrificial terms, and the eucharist is spoken of as the memorial of that sacrifice.
The sacrificial nature was accepted, but not until the thirteenth century was there a forceful attempt to define How the eucharist was a sacrifice. Some said the eucharist re-presented (made present again) the merits obtained by Christ in the self-sacrifice of his life. Some said the eucharist made the very sacrifice of Calvary present again, although in an unbloody manner. Some claimed the eucharist could not be a sacrifice in the technical sense because there was no essential destruction of the victim, Christ. Some replied that the words of institution transformed (transubstantiated) the bread and wine into the body and blood, and that since the bread was made into the body before the wine was made into the blood, this separated transformation of the two elements caused Christ to be made present in immolated form, that is, sacrificed, with body and blood separated. Once again the sacramental reality was lost to a preoccupation with the idea of a physical presence. This preoccupation added to the eucharistic abuses of the day and led the reformers to focus on the one all-sufficient sacrifice of Calvary remembered in the eucharistic act, and on the need for the self-sacrifice demanded by the holiness of the communion and community celebrated.
Sacrifice is always about the purposeful giving-up of something in order to secure something deemed to be of greater value. We regularly give up part of our earnings to secure our national security and well-being; taxes are the sacrifice we make as a nation to be a nation. We sacrifice of our time, resources and energies in countless ways to uphold the existence of that which we value, from relationships to roofs over our head. In the context of religion, there are various types of sacrifices, sacrifices to praise, to give thanks, and sacrifices to repent for sin. These latter usually involve the offering up of a living creature designated to be a substitute for the sinner whose rightful fate before the Holy is considered death. The substitutionary death opens the way to new life, a renewed life, a renewed relationship with the Holy; it is the ritual act of buying back (redeeming) self, a ritual attempt to satisfy (propitiate) the proper order of life, the just relationship with the Holy.
According to our sacred vision, Christ is the offering whose immolation redeems everything, propitiates for everything for all time. Christ is the sacrifice whose shed blood is our life-force, whose broken body is most true integration and communicity. One shares in that life, one enters into that body only through the sacrifice of self, body and soul. And when one enters that life and that body, one is destroyed, for “here there cannot be Gentile and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free, but only Christ”. And when one enters that life and that body, one is re-deemed and re-created, for in the words of Augustine as he held out the holy bread to the communicant: “Body of Christ, behold thyself”!
In our church there are two distinct but similar orders of service for the Holy Eucharist: the order of The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) and the order of The Book of Alternative Services (BAS).
The principal variations in the two orders stem from the distinct ways in which they approach the repentance of the assembly. The BCP makes the assembly ritually enter three progressively deeper stages of repentance or turning to God. The first stage occurs in the entry rites. The assembly acknowledges all things are open to God, no thing hidden from God. Then the assembly hears the Law of God and begs it be written upon the heart. The turning to God is concluded in the cry “Lord, have mercy”. The congregation has turned itself toward God and listens to God’s Word. The congregation responds with an act of faith (the Creed), with the offering of gifts, and with the raising up of the concerns and cares of all the earth (the Intercession). The second stage follows immediately. The BCP again forces the assembly upon its knees, for repentance must reach deeper into the soul. The congregation now begs pardon for all misdoings, for all that is past. The congregation prays for the newness of life which can come only from the Creator. This time the repentance ends not in hearing God but in thanking God, for it is in the lifting up of hearts and the giving of thanks that the true dignity of humanity is reached and the bounden duty of humanity fulfilled. When the great prayer of thanksgiving has been said, the BCP moves the assembly into the third stage, a state beyond being open to God, and beyond human fulfillment. The BCP moves the assembly into unity with God in Christ, a unity acknowledged to be a free gift for “we do not presume”. The unity in God is celebrated in the reception of the most holy sacrament, and in the total surrender of self, body and soul, as “a living sacrifice”.
In the BCP the momentum of the liturgy is a dialogue between ever more profound repentance and grace. In the BAS the movement is very different. In the BAS, the focus is on a community that gathers together as the body of God’s people. The body gathers to praise and hear God, to affirm faith and action, to offer prayer for the world and to give thanks for the mercy and goodness of the Lord and Creator. This gathering is more a celebration of grace than a dialogue between repentance and grace. The gathering culminates in the sacramental act of incorporation into the body and blood of the Lord, and in the preparation to carry the power of that holy state out into the world. There is, as in the BCP, the progression of acts from hearing God to surrendering to God, but in the BAS, these acts are a fairly straightforward ascent, a movement wherein each act gains its momentum from its predecessors. There is provision for a penitential rite either before the gathering of the community or before the offering of the gifts, but because the eucharistic rites as a whole have their own momentum, these penitential rites do not carry either the same ritual or moral force as their counterparts in the BCP.