THE MASS AND THE EUCHARIST

Part 3: The Eucharist as a sacred meal and memorial

A priest raises the Eucharist in this illustration. (OSV News photo/CNS file, Bob Roller). (Courtesy photo of Bob Roller)

In our Gospel this Sunday (John 6:41-51), we hear the third section of Jesus’ teaching about how he is “the Bread of Life” and “the living bread that came down from heaven.” We also continue our reflections about the Eucharist and the Mass. Perhaps this week we might see what these words of Jesus mean and how they relate to the Mass. To assist us, we can explore the Eucharist and the Mass as a sacred or special meal and also as “memory” or remembering. This is a good starting point, because the Eucharist is founded upon that “Last Supper” Jesus celebrated with His disciples. So, let us reflect a bit more on meals and eating together and how this can help our understanding of the Mass as a sacred meal.

We know that meals and eating are vital (literally!) to our human life. We eat to survive, of course. However, for human beings, eating together is so much more than this: it is rich in meaning and symbolism. Eating together builds up connections and relationships, often we share memories and new ones are made, and we can build up bonds and strengthen ties and identity. Past, present and future somehow come together. This is why key moments or events in our lives such as baptisms, weddings, funerals, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, etc., are often celebrated and completed with some sort of meal.

It should not surprise us then that God has taken this very human action of eating, together with all its deeper significance and associations, and chose it as THE way of being with us and of building up our Church family. In fact, God has often done this over the ages. In Israel there were many types of sacred meals. Many meals involved giving thanks to God for the good things of creation and for all that He had done for His people. God reinforced and sealed the covenant with His people with a meal (Exodus 24:9-18). The annual Passover meal remembered, in a real and living way, that God had rescued His people from slavery; that He had made them His people and that He had led them to the Promised Land.

This is most potently seen in the food (or “manna”) that God provided for His people as they journeyed through the desert (Exodus 16). As Scriptures tell us, God gave His people the “bread of angels.” As the writer Brant Pitre notes, this action of God was so powerful and significant that the Israelites kept what they called “the bread of presence” as one of the three most sacred things in the holy of holies located within the Temple in Jerusalem. Nobody was allowed into this sacred place except for the priests. However, once a year, this bread of presence was shown to all the people, as a reminder of what God has done for them and of their relationship or covenant with Him. This is why Jesus refers to this manna in the Gospel this Sunday: He is the new manna from heaven.

All this is also true for the Eucharist we celebrate, instituted by Jesus Christ. The Eucharist is indeed a sacred meal where so many things are present. We gather, we celebrate, we remember and give thanks for all God has done for us. We deepen our bonds with God and each other and so we have our identity as disciples of the Lord (or, the Church, “the body of Christ”) strengthened and affirmed. The Eucharist is indeed the full “bread of presence” or, as it was also sometimes known, “the bread of the face of God.”

The high point of the meal arrives when we are fed by Jesus Christ himself: “this is my body, this is my blood.” We receive Jesus, the new manna and true bread from heaven.  Incidentally, the ancient Christians often called the Eucharist “viaticum.” This term was used by the Roman army for all the supplies that they would take on a journey or campaign to feed and sustain the troops. It is a great image of the Eucharist: a food that sustains and feeds us on our journey through life and that helps us in all our battles and struggles too; a true “bread of life.”

In this feeding we also become like the one we receive. Writing over 1,600 years ago, St. Augustine commented that the Eucharist differs from ordinary food. When we eat ordinary food and digest it: it becomes, so to speak, part of us. With the Eucharist, the opposite happens: we become part of the one we have received and consumed. Therefore, we really do enter a “holy communion” with the Lord. As we noted in the last reflection, we are not worthy of such a great gift and that is why we echo the words of the centurion in the Gospel: “Lord, I am not worthy …” (Matthew 8:8).

In our busy and hectic lives, we do not always have the opportunity to sit down with family or friends and to eat together and we can also easily forget the rich symbolism of the Eucharist as a sacred meal. There is a further danger. Most of us (though certainly not all) are blessed with plenty of food. We can even complain of too much food and huge portions in restaurants. There are all those TV and media ads for food … and then for all those magic slimming pills or diets. It is so easy to take food and eating for granted. The same can be true for the Eucharist. We can so easily forget what a great gift the Eucharist is; what really happens when we celebrate this sacred meal and, of course, who we are receiving in that sacred meal: Jesus Christ.

The Eucharist is indeed a sacred meal, where Jesus Christ feeds us with himself, but it is also about memory. Remembering or memory is a very human and very precious faculty. We all have photographs of loved ones that we carry around with us and perhaps we have a special box where we keep objects from the past that have a special value and memory. We can also reflect, and so recall, how our lives are shaped by the living and ongoing memory of various people and events and how they continue to influence us. Indeed, sometimes memories are so vivid and real that it is as though they still happen to us every day.

All this gives us important clues as to the power of the Eucharist as a memorial, or as an act of remembering. In fact, the Eucharist is so powerful a memory and such a gift that it is real. Just as we speak about “the real presence” in the Eucharist, so we can speak of it as a “real remembering.” When Jesus said “do this in memory of me,” he meant it! Indeed, he is not just remembered, but he is present and real (cf. Catechism n. 1363). The Eucharist is an abiding and permanent memorial and presence of the Lord (far more powerful than our human memory) and a memory that is permanent … unlike our human memories that can fade or change with time.

This sense of memory is captured well in the famous Eucharistic hymn of St. Thomas Aquinas, “Adoro te devote.” As St. Thomas wrote:

O thou, our reminder of the ­Crucified,

Living bread, the life of us for whom he died

Lend this life to me, then feed and feast my mind,

There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

The psalm at our Mass this Sunday states, “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” Let us rejoice in this sacred meal, in which we receive the Lord himself, the “living bread that came down from heaven.” In this meal, we also remember in a real and vibrant way, all that God has done for us and so celebrate our identity as disciples of the Lord. As we do all this, let us not forget that a great way to keep alive the memory of someone we love, is to imitate them. In this sense, we are sent out from the Mass “to glorify the Lord by our life” and to “announce the Gospel of the Lord.”

Father Barratt, STL, PhD, EV, ChM, is the director of the Office of Prayer and Worship, episcopal vicar for the Hudson Valley Vicariate, a member of the Presbyteral Council & College of Consultors and pastor at Holy Trinity Parish in Hudson-Germantown — all in the Diocese of Albany — and adjunct professor at Siena College and St. Bernard’s Postgraduate School of Theology and Ministry in ­Albany.