Eucharist Lecture #1

The notes that follow in this and the following two posts are for lectures to be delivered in Brockton, Massachusetts this weekend.

HE CAME EATING AND DRINKING
If we want to discuss the Lord?s Supper adequately, we cannot disconnect it from concerns of ecclesiology and eschatology. In the Old Testament, Israel?s meals shared these features.

Food, the ancient Hebrews recognized, is for fellowship. We do not eat alone, nor do we eat merely for biological fuel. Sharing bread and meat brings us into communion, as all partake of a single loaf. At table, food is passed and shared. A meal always establishes an in-group and an out-group, and table manners express certain values. For ancient Israelites, food was as much sociological as biological.

For the Jews, too, food was connected with eschatology. They looked forward to their future restoration to the land, and since the land is a land flowing with milk and honey, they pictured the restoration as a great festival (e.g., Isaiah 25). Israel?s eschatological hope was all bound up with her understanding of the ?church,?Ethe assembly of Yahweh: When the Messiah came, He would regather the people, prepare a feast, and Israel would ?eat, drink and rejoice?Ebefore Yahweh, as they had done in Solomon?s time (1 Kings 4).

Behind all this was the hope for a return to Eden. Adam had been placed in a garden at his creation, and given the freedom to eat the tree of life. But he refused, and instead ate from the tree of knowledge, and was cast out of the garden. Throughout the OT, no one was able to re-enter the garden to eat from the tree of life.

FOOD FIGHT
Jesus came ?eating and drinking,?Eand this was a sign that He was the promised Christ who would restore Israel and feed her; He was showing that He would lead the way back to the garden. In the gospels, Jesus?Emeals have a distinctly evangelistic thrust (Lk 5:29-32; 15:1ff). Meals symbolize the nature of Jesus?Emission, which He explains as preaching good news to the poor and announcing the favorable year of the Lord (Lk 4). In the meals with Jesus, the poor and hungry are being restored to the fat of the land. Jesus?Emeals establish a circle of companions, those who share bread with Him. Jesus celebrates the ?feast of the kingdom?Ewith His disciples, and through that begins to form the ?eschatological Israel,?Ethe Israel of the end times. He celebrates the feast of the eschatological community, the feast that makes the eschatological community what it is.

At the time of Jesus, however, there was a competing ?table fellowship,?Eknown as the Pharisees. The Pharisees were also interested in the future of Israel, but they believed that Israel would be restored if the boundaries between clean and unclean were kept sharp and obvious. They were profoundly offended by Jesus, who ate with all the wrong people. Meals are also centers of confrontation and controversy (Lk 7:34, 36-50). Jesus, his enemies claim, eats with the wrong people and eats and drinks too much. He accepts sinners.

Jesus trains His disciples at the table. Table ministry is a training ground for the disciples. Jesus not only teaches at the table, but also puts His disciples to work at the table (Lk 9:10-17), and this is a central part of the apostles?Etraining. Jesus discusses discipleship in the categories of table manners (Lk 14:1-24). Jesus not only establishes a new circle of table friends, but also tells them that their conduct at the table is supposed to distinguish them from others. And their conduct at table is to model how they are going to live when they are away from the table. The righteousness that surpasses the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is reflected in meal practices that differ from the meal practices of the Pharisees.

AMONG THE GENTILES
All the meals of Jesus during His earthly life were rolled together into the Lord?s Supper, so that Jesus?Edisciples continued to be a table fellowship after Jesus ascended into heaven. And the food fight continued too. Converted Jews continued to press for the Pharisaical standards of food, and Paul saw this as a threat to the gospel (Gal 2).

The church confronted not only the meal practices of the Jews, but the festival order of the Greco-Roman world. As I wrote in Against Christianity , ?When the church entered the Greco-Roman world, then, she encountered a world awash in civic-religious feasts, and one of the first things she did was to set up a new feast, a new sacrifice, a new set of civic-religious rituals governed by different manners and protocols. In this, the church was simply following her Jewish predecessor. Israel was also a nation organized and bounded by festivals. Her calendar was a calendar of feasts and sacrifices (Lev. 23; Num. 28-29), and her identity as the people of the exodus was annually reaffirmed by the Passover celebration. As a ritual and symbol of initiation, circumcision marked the Jew in the flesh as an alien to the Greco-Roman world. An autonomous politeuma within the Greco-Roman polis, the Jews of the diaspora observed their own cycle of feasts and holidays.?E It is no surprise that the Christian?s use of ?meat sacrificed to idols?Ebecame an important issue in pagan strongholds like Corinth.

During the patristic period, the church continued to see the Supper as the meal of the eschatological community. The Didache, one of the earliest post-biblical documents that describes Christian world, included a ?Maranatha?E(?Come?E and the ?Benedictus qui venit?E(?Blessed is He who comes?E in the Eucharistic liturgy. Reflecting the ecclesial emphasis of the early church, Augustine invited the members of his church to ?receive the mystery of yourselves?E?Ethat is, to receive the Eucharistic body that represented and formed them into the ecclesial body. During the early centuries, the church understood its meal as the meal of the end times, the meal that shaped and defined the community of the end times.

But this did not last forever.