The second of a five-part series reflecting on the future of the Catholic Church in Ireland looks at the Eucharist.JESUS PERSONALLY instituted only one sacrament, Eucharist; for his followers to perpetuate as the liturgy of the community after his death, as it had been during all of his public mission.
So simple a sacrament is Eucharist that any meal can be a eucharistic meal: take any food or drink and bless God for it as part of the free gift of life, its necessities, supports, healings and enhancements God pours out to all equally and forever.
Then taking that food and drink in open hand and open chalice, the symbol of life as pure grace before it can become property; then first break it and pour it out to others as they must do for you; each prepared to sacrifice something, and if necessary in extreme circumstances, life itself for others.
Or as a starving Masai woman, describing the eucharistic rule of life under the “old Gods” before her baptism, put it so elegantly: “If you can’t eat, I can’t eat, until I give you something to eat.’’
That is Eucharist, and nothing else is Eucharist. And, yes, it has a self-sacrificing element and intent at its very heart and essence. And who offers this eucharistic sacrifice? All who sit round the table, sinners and just equally and unconditionally.
The breaking out and pouring out of the food and drink is done by one who presides, usually the paterfamilias who then symbolises the One that Jesus named his Father and ours. But any one of the diners can play that part, acting out as they do so both God’s initiative and our response.
For Eucharist, as Jesus understood and instituted it, cannot tolerate the presence of a priest of the old cultic kind who actually killed something instead of offering something of life to others; and in the most barbaric case killed a human being to satisfy God’s justice for human sin.
Jesus was not such a priest, nor did He ever ordain any. Nor is Calvary such a human sacrifice. Calvary, as Jesus understood it, is the execution of a prophet deemed false for altering the Mosaic law; a fate Jesus accepts in final fidelity to the eucharistic life He preached as the summary rule of the kingdom of God.
And this He signified during His last eucharistic meal with His followers, when He identified the sacrifice symbolised in the broken bread and poured wine with the impending breaking of His body and the shedding of His blood; for disagreeing with Moses, the definitive founder of his faith also, in the official view of Israel.
For three centuries no priests of the cultic sacrificial killing kind appear in the Christian community.
Thereafter as part of the assimilation of Christianity to the ethos and religious culture of the Roman Empire that culminated in Constantine’s edict of toleration, Christian presidents of Eucharist begin to take on the features of the sacrificing priests of Roman religion; until pope aped emperor in their exercise of the twinned absolute power over both secular and sacred realms.
The very term “papa” or “pope” first belonged to the Roman emperor who earned it by his gifts of “bread and circuses”; where the “bread’’ symbolised feeding his people, while the gladiators in the circuses demonstrated simultaneously his arbitrary power of life and death over all.
The corresponding Christian Eucharist accomplished both the feeding of the people and the threat of divinity to have a human being killed for the satisfaction of divine justice.
So this poor Masai said of her newly-acquired Christianity: “Maybe we are praying to the wrong God’’ – and looked back to an older divinity for a truly eucharistic rule of life that would keep all alive in hard times.
SIC: IT