The Eucharist is not just ‘a vague memory’ of Jesus’ sacrifice

Body and Blood of Christ, Year B
First Reading: Ex 24:3-8
Second Reading: Heb 9:11-15
Gospel Reading: Mk 14:12-16, 22-26

This Sunday we celebrate the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.

At his last supper, Jesus gave bread to his apostles, saying, “this is my body.” He gave them wine, saying, “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.”

Jesus is God the Son. What he says is truth. The Eucharist, then, is not bread and wine, but truly Christ’s body and blood, given for our spiritual nourishment.

However, in the Eucharist, Christ’s body and blood are separated from each other as in a Jewish sacrifice. This Sunday, therefore, we celebrate not only a Sacrament—the real presence of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine—but also a sacrifice.

Jesus instituted the Eucharist during his commemoration of the Jewish Passover, explicitly commanded by God at Mount Sinai, which included sacrificing and eating a lamb. He and his apostles began the celebration after sundown on Thursday, but the Gospel accounts make no mention of their eating a sacrificed lamb, and they certainly did not drink the final prescribed cup of wine. In fact, their Passover celebration was not completed until Jesus had himself become the sacrificed lamb and cried out from the cross, after drinking the final cup, “now it is finished!”

It is noteworthy that Christ’s Passover was accomplished within one day—for Jews, the day began at sundown, not midnight. The meal and the sacrifice were one event. Each shed light on the other.

“If we had not had the Last Supper—that is to say, if we had not had the ritual anticipation of his death—we would have never been able to grasp how the carrying out of his being condemned to death could have been in fact the act of perfect worship,” said Pope Francis. “Only a few hours after the supper, the apostles could have seen in the cross of Jesus, if they could have borne the weight of it, what it had meant for Jesus to say, ‘body offered,’ ‘blood poured out.’”

Indeed, Jesus’ body was being given for us and his blood shed for us from the moment he spoke those words at supper. (In the Greek Gospels, the words for “given” and “shed” are in the present tense, and so are the words of consecration in the Church’s official Latin text.)

Then Jesus, like his Father at Mount Sinai, commanded his apostles to do what he had done as a “memorial” of him (in Hebrew, zikaron, in Greek, anamnesis). Practically untranslatable into English, these words mean more than remembering or commemorating, which suggest recollecting the past; they mean re-presenting, re-actualizing, or renewing it, making it present to us and us present at it, so that we re-live it, participate in it, and celebrate it.

“Do this as a zikaron of me,” Jesus said, and the apostles must have recognized the very word his Father had used. The Mass is the anamnesis of Christ’s saving actions, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church; in their “liturgical celebration,” they “become in a certain way present and real.”

“From the very beginning the Church was aware that this was not a question of a representation, however sacred, of the supper of the Lord,” said Pope Francis. “It would have made no sense, and no one would have been able to think of ‘staging’—especially before the eyes of Mary, the mother of the Lord—that highest moment in the life of the master.”

“Christian faith is either an encounter with him alive, or it does not exist,” the Pope said. “The liturgy guarantees for us the possibility of such an encounter. For us a vague memory of the Last Supper would do no good. We need to be present at that supper, to be able to hear his voice, to eat his body, and to drink his blood. We need him.”

Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, however the course remains available in both print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Starting Sept. 22, he will again teach the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary. 

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