CHAPTER 12:
PERSON IN LOVE: THE LAST SUPPER AND THE LORD'S SUPPER
By Kevin O'Shea
Discussion of the Eucharist has been deliberately left until now. There are two dimensions of it : the last supper of Jesus, on the night of his betrayal to the death of the cross; and the Lord's supper, celebrated after the resurrection among his own. Each of them is much more than a meal, even much more than a Kingdom meal of Jesus. They, and the Kingdom meals, are none the less profoundly integrated. It is through the meals that Jesus emerged as a person able to partake of the last supper, and it is through that last supper and his consequent death that he is able, in resurrection, to be the celebrating Lord of the supper of the church. This chapter will focus primarily on that transition, or better, on the unity of meaning in Jesus as a person that emerges through it. There we shall also see how love itself has again to be redefined. It is possible to consider these mysteries prior to a discussion of Gethsemane, or of the passion narratives proper, or after the whole picture of the process of death and resurrection has been pondered. This last option has been taken, to enable to emphasis to be placed on the final meaning of love and personhood. 'Having loved his own who were his in the world, he now demonstrated the consummate paradigm of love itself'. As John of the Cross would put it, in the evening of his life, he was examined in love.
This chapter will look in turn at the last supper, the Lord's supper, and the integration of the two.
The last supper.
The existence of the last supper is a topic of much discussion among biblical historians at present. It is a highly sensitive matter to those formed in the faith tradition of the church. John Meier has written :
No one doubts that in fact there was a final meal of Jesus with his followers. The question that is raised concerns rather a special final meal, 'known beforehand, designated specifically, or ritually programmed' (Crossan: 1991). John Dominic Crossan has put forward the view that there was not. John Meier defends the real historicity of the last supper, as it has been known to us through the new testament accounts. No one doubts that in the early christian churches, the ritual we call eucharist (Lord's supper) was practised. The discussion concerns only the founding of this practice in an event in the life of Jesus, just prior to his passion (the 'last supper'). Are the stories of that supper factual, so that the practice of the Lord's supper in the church is founded on that historical fact, as Meier would have it, or are those stories of the 'last supper' creations of the church itself, like 'cult legends', to justify what the Church was already doing in its own 'Lord's supper', as Crossan would have it ?
The argument is not about what might be called the accessories of the last supper in the various gospel accounts. Among these could be mentioned the manner of preparation of the meal, the exact date of it, the location, the subplots concerning the denials of Peter and the reactions of others in the group present. In all of these matters, there is much room for seeing creative redactional activity in the work of those who put the story together. We shall not discuss these items here. Let us note, however, that the situation of the last supper in the immediate context of the betrayal of Jesus is more than accessory in the accounts. It has a central place there, that leads to a basic interpretation of the meaning of what Jesus is said to have done at the supper.
When we look at the essentials of the narratives, we focus on the offering of bread and wine as the body of Jesus, given for those present, and the blood of Jesus, poured out for them. They are invited to eat the given body, and drink the poured out blood. They are then exhorted to keep on performing this ritual in continuing remembrance of Jesus. That such a ritual ever emerged (either at the hands of Jesus, historically, or at the initiative of the early churches, aetiologically) is something of a wonder itself. Both Gentile and Jewish sensitivities would have found it unintelligible and offensive. Hellenistic religion knew anniversary celebrations of various deities, but not of unknown and insignificant peasants, especially if they were Jews from Galilee. Various gentile cults offered participation in the 'mysteries', in which those present could drink what was symbolically taken to be a deity's blood, thus identifying with that deity's life. Early christianity surely did not want to be confused with these mystery cults. The vocabulary used in the Lord's or last supper is totally unusual for Jews, and the idea of drinking blood is repugnant for them. For a Jew, blood is alive and belongs to God, especially if it is human blood. To drink it is blasphemy. Early christianity surely did not want to offend its Jewish neighbours or members, in this fundamental cultural regard.
Those, like Meier, who defend the historicity of this strange and scandalous ritual, as performed by Jesus himself just before his death, do not claim very much in terms of detail. But they do claim historicity for the essentials. Meier says,
Meier claims that these words 'may well go back to Jesus himself'. He puts them in Aramaic as : dena bisri (this is my body), and kasa dena qeyama' bidmi (this cup is the covenant in my blood). Note that Meier is speaking here of the earliest attainable form of the narrative : there may be further questions about moving from the narrative to the actual facts.
The two statements of Jesus are separated by the supper itself, and are not in strict parallelism. There is no command to anyone to use this ritual as a memorial of Jesus. A good deal of development will have to take place before the stem of what has been presented as coming from Jesus, can flower into a 'eucharist' recognisable in the early christian communities.
Crossan is not persuaded about the historicity even of the small kernel that Meier claims to be historical. He sees that as the creation of the early churches to found and legitimate their existing rituals. But he is prepared to see Jesus moving in fact to his death, and doing so with commitment to the positions he had taken, that is, with self-giving to his own (poor) people in Galilee. Crossan sees Jesus, in that sense, as giving his whole and real historical existence (body and blood) for them, come what may, in some real knowledge that he is in proximate danger of assassination. Perhaps the difference between his image of Jesus, and Meier's picture of Jesus at the last supper, is not so great. Both authors see Jesus as a man of commitment and dedication, in love for his own, and ready to accept inevitable death on that account. Their argument is rather about one alleged particular occasion, on which Jesus may have used one particular set of words and deeds to express that commitment. The difference between them concerns the interpretation of the character of the literary texts that describe what Jesus did. Crossan sees them as constructs, Meier sees them as records of fact. For some, the difference is important, while for others, the agreement about the character of Jesus is even more important.
There is a further difficulty about the interpretation of the dominical words when they are used in the Lord's supper rather than in the last supper. There they are used by the risen Christ, in reference to his own actual risen body and life. We shall leave this matter until later when we look directly at the church's eucharist.
It is important to try to survey the sources that convey the story of the last supper to us, in some kind of historical sequence. Universal consensus does not exist concerning the dating of all these sources.
In the Q gospel, the gospel of Thomas, the Didache and the gospel of Peter, (that is, the Cross Gospel perhaps implicitly contained in it), there is no mention at all of a meal consciously and formally partaken as the 'last' by Jesus with his disciples. Bruce Chilton has attempted to reconstruct, from the few straws in the wind that are available, what he thinks happened historically after Calvary. His schema is highly debatable, but it provides a grid around which to look at the central questions being debated. He looks at what he thinks Peter did in Galilee, and what he thinks James did in Jerusalem.
According to Chilton, Peter (Kephas) and many of those who had believed in Jesus, and still did, returned to Galilee after Calvary was over. There they had meals, and remembered Jesus. The meals they had were domestic meals, with their own families as well as followers of Jesus who had become their friends, and the emphasis was on bread rather than on wine. A prayer of blessing would have been said over the food, and the Mosaic covenant would have been renewed, as it always was, in the family setting. Something of the freshness of all Jesus' meals would have been sensed as missing, until, at times they were conscious of Jesus in their midst, and 'knew him in the breaking of the bread'. Normal life still went on.
Again, according to Chilton, in Jerusalem there was a group of more educated and biblically sophisticated believers in Jesus, who still believed in him, and who searched the scriptures for an understanding of what had happened to him. Symbolically at least, there leader was James. Under their direction, there was an integration of what they considered Jesus to have done, into the mainstream of public Jewish liturgy. They recalled or reconstructed Jesus' final meal, and turned it into a liturgical act. They did so around the theme and ritual of passover. They used the passover seder, or order of the meal, to give it ritual shape. In this light, they interpreted the chronology of the end of Jesus' life, and located the 'last supper' at what for them was the right liturgical moment, the evening of 14-15 Nisan. They located it at a place not far from the Jerusalem temple. Thus the theology of the 'paschal mystery' was linked to the celebration of Jesus' last meal. Only pure (kosher) Jews could take part in his memorial, just as only they could take part in their own paschal meal. Jesus was seen as having consciously and deliberately convened and celebrated his own last paschal supper. He thus presented himself as the principal actor in his own paschal myth. Perhaps the intention was that the re-enactment of the meal would take place once a year, at Passover time.
These reconstructions are highly conjectural, and other scholars have pointed out the lack of clear textual foundation behind them. (O'Toole:1995 ) But the direction of the thought is interesting, and it may be true to type and mood of the early days, if not to historical fact. It can serve to orientate us to questions about the ultimate significance of the ritual.
Chilton thinks that the two traditions he has discerned, that of Galileeans with Peter and that of Jerusalemites with James, coalesced in Antioch. It is usually said that the community of christians was established in Antioch in the very late thirties, or in the very early forties. Luke says, in Acts, that it was here that believers were first called 'christians'. Burton Mack makes much of this, and suggests that they inaugurated what he calls the 'Christ-cult', with its own myth, meal, and hymnody. This means that they, for the first time in the developing era of christianity, focussed on Jesus as a martyr, who lived, and died, 'for' others, and for that reason was the true anointed of God, his 'Christ'. (Others, like John Collins, would tend to see these titles, and these meanings, attached to Jesus even earlier, perhaps during Jesus' own mortal lifetime). Chilton sees the emergence of a unified ritual, using elements of the Petrine and Jacobite traditions, consonant with this Christ-martyr theology. But, in simple terms, the 'James' traditions won over the 'Peter' traditions. The ritual celebrated at Antioch was displaced from its real meal context, and performed after the real meal was over. It became something like a 'symposium', and more and more a rite in its own right. As a covenant renewal ritual it was envisaged more in line with the prophetic traditions of a new covenant than with the Exodus traditions of the Mosaic covenant. It is feasible to think that charismatic prophets in the Antiochene community had visions and uttered prophecy during prayer within such a 'rite'. They may then have been inspired to invoke Jesus as 'Messiah', or Christ, in this context.
The first written evidence of a christian rite of this kind is acknowledged to occur in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, in the early fifties. He appeals, and implicitly quotes, a more ancient tradition. Meier would see this tradition as going back to the early thirties, and not necessarily just in Antioch a decade later. Chilton would see it as the Antiochene tradition he has sketched. But Chilton also recognises in Paul, while at Corinth and writing later to Corinth, a real missionary freedom in inculturating the Antiochene tradition of the 'eucharist' to new local conditions. More in the vein of Peter than of James, he developed a rite that was very sober, and quite distinct from a meal, a rite to be performed correctly and frequently, and linked not to Passover but to the betrayal of the Lord. The meal was little more than the occasion for the gathering of those who took part in the rite, and, of course the Jewish and Jacobite insistence on kosher purity did not apply. It was done in memory of Jesus, but in Chilton's view, this 'memory had already been quite innovative, and included both practices and meanings Jesus would not have known in an original 'last supper'.
In the post-Corinthian Pauline tradition, the bread-word is: this is my body, which is for you. The cup word is: this cup is the new covenant in my blood. The memorial-word tells them to keep doing this as the 'zikkaron' of memorial-presence of Jesus. This word in fact usually refers to the presence of the dead, and would not be used by anyone, in self-reference, prior to their own death. Meier regards the oral tradition on which Paul relies here, for these essentials, as the oldest available to us. Note that the cup-word does not explicitly and in so many words say that the wine is the blood of Jesus. One reason for this may well have been the repugnance alluded to above, in Jewish culture, to the whole idea of drinking blood. This point could be use, in ways that Chilton does not go, to corroborate an otherwise established case for the historicity of Jesus' use of such an expression : perhaps it was too strong even for the earliest oral tradition to retain in its original form ? The more likely interpretation is that in Jewish idiom, and Jewish covenant thinking, the cup and the blood are synonyms.
All of this has occurred prior to the period of the canonical gospels. They inherit what has happened, in these disparate rites, and in the different interpretations of those rites that were already present in various communities. They do not develop the rite much further as a rite. They do develop its interpretation. The dominant paradigm of interpretation in the gospels is that of Jesus as martyr-king, who as such is deserving of cultus. The ritual of the supper is thus a memorial, which effects a solidarity of the participants with Jesus himself in the act of his going to his martyrdom, and through it, to his kingship. The synoptics incline, with some confusion, to accept the paschal chronology of the end of Jesus' life that comes from James. They link the meaning of the last supper with the miraculous feeding of the thousands by the Galileean lakeside.
Mark, who is dependent upon, and reflects a pre-Markan tradition of the supper (which in Meier's view could possibly come from the Roman community, but which others would suggest comes from Syria or even Galilee), initiates a trend in the gospel accounts to construct a parallelism between the rite and word concerning the bread, and the rite and word concerning the cup. Thus, in Mark, the bread-word is : this is my body. The cup-word is : this is my blood of the covenant (which is) being shed for the many. The memorial word is entirely missing, and indeed there is a saying of Jesus to the effect that he will not drink any more wine until the final coming of the Kingdom. The phrases found, in the Markan formulas, here reflect Mark's key summary of the ministry and life of Jesus : he came to give his very psyche as down-payment (or security) for the hoi polloi - the nameless masses of nobodies.
It would appear that in Mark's tradition, they all drank from the one cup, the one used by Jesus, contrary to what might have been taken as prevailing Jewish custom on such occasions, when individual cups were used. There is also a curious difficulty. The cup seems to have been already drunk prior to the pronouncement of the cup-word. It is not absolutely clear whether the bread has already been eaten prior to the pronouncement of the bread-word, although in that instance, it is the natural interpretation.
Matthew (writing in Syria or northern Galilee) is dependent on Mark, and continues the trend set up by Mark to establish as close a parallelism as possible between the two ritual actions, concerning the bread and the cup. Matthew parallels 'take it and eat' with 'drink all of you from this'. In Matthew the bread-word is : this is my body (as in Mark). The cup-word is : this is my blood of the covenant, being poured out for the many, for the forgiveness of sins. The last phrase is Matthew's most significant addition to the formula : the blood is being poured out for the forgiveness of sins. Perhaps the Matthean community (after the fall of the temple) knew no other ritual for that forgiveness. In Matthew there is no memorial word, but only a reflection of the Markan logion concerning the absence of all ritual until the final dawn of the Kingdom.
Luke, writing later somewhere in the Aegean, has caused a lot of difficulty for interpreters. Some well-considered manuscripts of Luke do not include any ritual concerning the cup, and have led commentators to ponder, with perplexity, whether Luke may have known a eucharist with bread alone. However, in recent times a newly discovered papyrus (named papyrus 75) has cleared up the matter, and shown that in the authentic text of Luke, both bread and cup are included. As Matthew is the continuator of the tradition from Mark, so Luke is the continuator of the tradition from Paul. In Luke the bread-word is : this is my body, being given for you. The cup-word is : this cup is the new covenant in my blood, being poured out for you. The memorial word lies between the two (due to the above mentioned textual difficulty), and reads : do this as my memorial.
John's gospel, which has roots in Samaria, has inherited traditions that seemingly do not come directly from either the Paul-Luke line or the Mark-Matthew line. John does not give us an account of the last supper which includes the ritual of the eucharist. In his sixth chapter, among many themes of interpretation, he conveys what may have been the customary (and earliest ?) formula in his community. It is a bread-word : the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world. It is noteworthy that the key word here is flesh, not body, and some, including Meier, think this may possibly retain the exact usage of Jesus himself. Flesh, in the Johannine sense, means the body in its fragility and vulnerability, and does not carry the sense of negativity implied in a Pauline use of the same word. John's interpretation of the supper is resolutely paschal, and Jesus, in the rite, is personally the paschal lamb, manna, and bread of life. He personally is the bread : it is his body. Chilton attempts to make a case that not until this Johannine text (which he does not regard as coming from the historical Jesus) do we have an instance of Jesus speaking the bread-word (or the cup-word) with clear personal reference to himself. Others would see his position to be forced, even if they are prepared to concede some or all of the historical development which Chilton has sketched. Others still would see the roots of the Johannine tradition as very early indeed.
In Revelation (Apocalypse of John), coming from Asia Minor, we find a tradition of realism similar to that found in the fourth gospel. If the fourth gospel sublimates the meal, the book of Revelation divinises it. Jesus is what is eaten, and is the slain lamb that is divine and worthy of worship, in this, the new tamid sacrifice of his covenanted people.
This survey of the scriptural evidence is of great interest to those who research the beginnings of eucharist in the christian churches. The point to which attention is given here, is rather the portrayal of the last supper contained in its evidence. As Meier rightly puts it, there is multiple attestation and great inner coherence in the presentation of the fact of the last supper. Crossan and others would agree on both scores, but then wonder to what the attestation is really referring, and whether the coherence comes from fact or creative fiction. They ask, in effect, if it is larger than life. The issue is usually judged along confessional lines.
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But the main point is not the historicity of the last supper. It is its meaning. There is consensus within all the texts, that, on the occasion of his betrayal, Jesus did and said something that meant commitment to what he believed in, and to those whom he loved, in the knowledge of what was about to happen to him. It is instructive to look at that commitment as a 'consecration'.
Consecration by vow was not unfamiliar to Jews. Their tradition, for example, presented Samson and Samuel as vowed men, as nazirites, with their holy commitment to the divine will and plan expressed symbolically in the way they lived. Nazirites typically let their hair grow (as a sign of the unimpeded action of God in their lives); they abstained from wine ( as a sign that God's presence was more than sufficient stimulant for them); and they never touched anything dead (as a sign of their recognition of the vitality of God that had entered into their entire existence). All of these signs are manifestly culturally conditioned, but they show that in Jewish practice, the expression of consecration by various vows was well known.
There were such consecrated people in Palestine (and even in Galilee) in the time of Jesus. These holy men often adopted cultural practices to signify their closenes to their God (for example, they would use no perfume, would not go into the streets alone at night, would never initiate a conversation with a woman). Jesus, on gospel evidence, was not considered to be a consecrated man of this kind, nor of the kind to be found at Qumran, or in various specialised elite groups.
A much more normal (non-elite) form of consecration took place at Jewish meals. In the fellowship of the same table, Jews could express their dedication to the Lord in the presence of others, and ask and receive the support of the entire group at table. All present would then signify their consent and involvement in the expressed act of dedication. One of the most frequent formulas of expressing such dedication was the taking of a cup. 'I will take the cup of salvation, I will render my vows to the Lord'. (Ps 116) In the ritual of a Jewish marriage, the event was hallowed by the common drinking from a consecratory cup. The cup was then broken, and not used for anything else.
It is possible to interpret the meaning of the last supper of Jesus (in historical fact, or in literary construction) as an act of similar consecration, made by Jesus, and including the involvement of the group of his followers. But the issue is not the ritual, it is its real meaning. To what can Jesus be understood as making a commitment in such a consecratory way ?
The simple, and real, answer is to death, to the death of the cross. It is more than reasonable to make an assumption that Jesus was aware of the strength of the opposition mounting against him, and that, in a normal reading of the signs of the times, he knew that his arrest and eventual removal from life were humanly inevitable. The gospel accounts of his prophecies of the passion may carry the signs of later redactional work, but they do suggest that Jesus was quite aware of what was in store for him, in substance if not in detail. There is a subtheme in the gospel narratives that indicates that he was taken by surprise, but the surprise appears to be linked with the circumstances, not the basic reality of his being taken. We can only assume that he had pondered and integrated what he knew was going on : his Gethsemane experiences indicate that. He had done everything humanly possible to avoid it, including a journey from the territory of Antipas to Jerusalem, for the sake of his own imagined better security. He saw himself as one of the suffering just ones of Israel, as a 'suffering servant' on the model of Isaiah's song, as a rejected prophet who must go to his death, indeed in Jerusalem. The synoptics place the prayer of the garden of Gethsemane immediately after the conclusion of the last supper, but it is reasonable to assume that 'Gethsemane type' experiences were already happening for him, reasonably often, as he matured in the face of the unavoidable situation. In many ways the real, or interior mystery of the passion lies here, and not in the physical execution. It is to the reality of this death that he commits himself, in a rite of consecration familiar to ordinary Jews, when he shares his last meal. He knows he is doing so. The first 'eucharist' has taken place in the shadow of the betrayal and of the cross.
The precise dimensions of the mystery of the cross to which he commits himself can be articulated. They are three. First of all, he commits and consecrates himself to the immediacy of it all. From this moment forward, there will be no further attempt to express anything in any kind of ritual, and there will be feast or celebration, indeed no further 'supper' : this is the 'last'. Nothing external can now be done to stand between him and the reality of the execution. It is all over. The Kingdom itself, as irrupting positively and with manifest and tangible consequences, is finished : it cannot show itself like that any more. The springtime of Galilee has become the winter of disaster in Jerusalem. Jesus accepts the nothingness of it all, and commits himself to facing that nothingness without mediation of any kind. There is no supper after this supper, and this one is not a supper in the ordinary sense of the word.
Secondly, Jesus commits and consecrates himself to the unmitigatedness of this experience. From now on, he will not drink wine again. He will use no anaesthetic, he will rely upon no interior medicine to dull the fullness of the death experience. Dramatically, he will drink only the cup of his own poured out life. He will accept the undiluted fact that his blood will be shed. There is something horrible about the very concept, something which Jews, with their respect for life, found especially negative. This is very similar to the experience of 'baptism' we have investigated in chapter 5. There Jesus effectively went down into hell, and was immersed in the hellishness of it all. There will be no final coming of the Kingdom like a second spring. It has come, and there is only the unmitigated realness. That is the kingdom..
Thirdly, Jesus commits and consecrates himself to being rendered into all of this by others, that is, into the paradosis that we euphemistically call his betrayal. He is totally in the hands of others, not just of Judas, nor even of the Jewish authorities, or the Roman military, all of whom were, as it were, 'accidentally' and 'ignorantly' involved. He is in the hands of the God of the Kingdom who is no longer that kind of God of that kind of Kingdom, and who will allow him to be done to death and not stand in the way of the human processes going on. There can be no escape, human or divine. It is to this powerlessness, in which he is led rather than going of his own strength, that he commits and consecrates himself when he takes in his hand the cup of the last supper.
The psychological effect of such an act of consecration is one of division and exhaustion. He is not in a state of numbness. He responds. He is divided : divided between an intensified desire that it be not like this, and a deep disappointment that it has to be so. This is the cutting edge of the Gethsemane prayer. In psychoanalytic terms, it is the most profound example of the conflict between desire and interdict. To remain there, continuingly, with commitment and without alleviation, leads to a psychic exhaustion, a kind of psychasthenia (reflected perhaps in the language of the epistle to the Hebrews when it describes the prayer of Jesus, with a loud cry and silent tears). It is hard to imagine this mentality of Jesus, and harder still to link it to our own ecclesiastical impressions of the 'last supper'. But it is the implication of seeing that supper as the consecration of Jesus to his real death.
Consecration implies something holy. Death itself is not holy. Crucifixion is not a sacred act. It is horrible, and evil. But there is a new definition of holiness and of the sacred being born here at the last supper. It is a new kind of facing up to the immediate, unmitigated renderedness into such horrible evil when nothing else can be done and when even the most positive God ever known does not stand in its way. This is the real 'consecration'. The fourth gospel uses the word 'hagiazomai' to convey it : it suggests a being rendered into a new kind of victimhood and offering. The fourth gospel again insists that what is happening here for Jesus is an access to truth, to 'aletheia', to un-darkness, as if only the entry into unlit darkness can show us something that is transcendent in relation to what we call 'light' and what we call 'darkness' (or what we call 'life' and what we call 'death'). It is precisely here that there is a new definition of love, of agape. Something has happened to eros, to the desiringness of love, and a new kind of love is emerging. It is the doing of a new kind of truth, exactly when you can do nothing at all but be led into deeper dimensions of suffering and nothingness.
A real phenomenology is needed here, to spell out the breaking open of the self that takes place as death is approached. Once again, the real issue is a division that does on the very heart of the psyche itself, a wounding of the very being of the man. It shows itself in the mixture, or conflict, between gentle or passive attitudes of surrender to death, and aggressive or active attitudes of confrontation with it. Gospel accounts portray Jesus has having had both, and they are not entirely due to the personal projection of the bias of the evangelists. They are evidence of the profound rift that is going on within Jesus, a rift that could even be called his real death. It is in effect to this rift that Jesus made his consecratory commitment in taking the cup of the last supper.
In the bipolarity of the experience of death, there is a gentle element, and there is a strong element. There is a gentle nostalgic desire to return to a mother and to 'love'; and there is a strong aggressive separation from one's entire lifeworld and a resolute entry into the nothingness of the 'beyond'.
The 'sleep' of death suggests eternal rest, like that of a child, asleep in gentle arms, floating in an ocean of peaceful love and care. It is a return to the proximity of someone who has always cared for us. It is a touching at last of what has too long been longed for. It is a retrieval, with gratitude. It is a point at which, what was felt as anterior to us is now sensed as interior, at which the positive past enters definitively into a new presentness. This is not pleasure, not 'self'-preservation, not eros, not synthesis. It is not the dead peace of an inorganic existence. It is a letting go of the phenomenal world itself, to touch the ancient, primordial archetypal world as a new phenomenality. It is amazing that we are drawn to do that. Desire ceases, and there is no difference between self and other, as previously delineated. There is only communion. The price of this is letting go of all attempt at control, or any form of action.
And yet, there is a real aggression in a strong, positive person who faces death. For all the attraction of death, there is a deep ambiguity and anxiety written into its experience. It is a being rejected, a being cut off from the land of the living, a final separation from everything and everyone. The shock of being exposed to this overwhelmingly different environment,if it is still an environment at all, is experienced as anguish. The response to this anguish is radically aggressive : not just denial, reaction, fighting, or bargaining, but a manly, heroic confrontation with a final negative one cannot eliminate, but which can and will eliminate the human person as human. It leads to a moment in which one knows that one can only fail to integrate one's attempt to do one's own positive act of dying and letting go, with the reality and nothingness of death itself. Death cannot be an ego-expressive act. Ego must die, really die.
What occurs then is indeed a breaking open of the self, a wounding, a division too deep for analogies. It is exactly to this condition that Jesus consecrates himself, in a different kind of love, because of a different sense of truth, at the last supper.
But the mystery of that supper is more even that. He could have come to that existential point of realism in his own solitude (and probably did). He did much more, when he shared it, literally, with his own, at table. This is very different from the sharing of earlier meals, in Galilee.
There is a midrash on Isaiah 53, 12 which reads :
At the last supper, the divided Jesus shared his dividedness with his own. Broken himself, he broke the bread. Handed over himself, he handed over the broken bread, and said, this is my body, broken for you, handed over for you, divided among you. He was inviting them to share with him what he was going through, or better, what was going through him. He asked them to 'eat' it, that is, to interiorise and make it their own as well, to say their Amen to it, for him and for themselves. Poured out, and literally exhausted himself, he asked them to drink and imbibe from his own cup, the cup of his own poured-out-ness, the cup in which his life-blood could not be contained but from which it would be spilled by others. This is the cup of covenant, in the pouring out of my blood. An entirely new notion of covenant is being created here, a solidarity bond in the mystery of the dividedness of death. It is a community of those for whom personal integrity is impossible, a communion of those who share in the dividedness of all of them. This would be both paradox and impossibility, but for the new kind of agape and aletheia that consecrate it.
The fourth gospel has interpreted this as the ultimate meaning of the 'mission' of Jesus (and of his disciples). In its preferred language, it invents the formula, the one who is 'consecrated-and- sent'. Consecration is commitment to the condition of being divided and broken; mission is acceptance of the fact that one's brokenness is dispersed and spread around among others (whom perhaps one does not even know). It is reminiscent of Mark's formula for the ministry of Jesus : to give his psyche as lytron for the hoi polloi (Mk 10,45).
The command to do this as my memorial makes new sense here. It is not an exhortation to recall, or 'remember' Jesus. It is fascinating to reflect how little the early christians who did what they thought Jesus did at the last supper, knew of his historical life, or were even interested in preserving such information. Rather, for them, to enter into the brokenness and out-poured-ness, and to be dispersed among others who are truly other than you, is to become the living memorial of the Jesus of the last supper. It is not primarily a ritual, but a reality.
At the last supper, a readyness for such experiences seems to be the required predisposition for those at table, Jesus and his own. It is more than that. It is a kind of (sacramental ?) effect of being there. When the early christian communities did the ritual they called the Lord's supper, they were doing a dangerous thing. They were thereby embarking on a journey, on the way of their own cross, on the road to their own Calvary. Real persecutions around them made it feel very real indeed. To claim the last supper as the foundation of the rite of the early communities is not simply to give it historical or aetiological credibility. It is to invest in its meaning and significance, with an implication for living that few would dare to claim.
Discussions about historicity of what happened in one or other hour of one day at the end of an individual life, are best left to experts in such matters. My inclination is towards the historicity of some basic kind of last supper of Jesus. If the last supper means that someone was able to stand in the face of death and act as I have interpreted the supper, I would more easily see that person being the historical Jesus than anyone in the early christian communities. To perform a last supper is indeed an awesome thing. One cannot help surmising that perhaps some of the early, and later, followers of Jesus, who celebrated that ritual, did not really and fully grasp the reality that they were doing. In a paradoxical sense, perhaps Crossan has a real point : the eucharist has been turned, so often, into something very different from what Jesus was doing, that it may be legitimate to wonder if that kind of eucharist had a historical basis. This is really to ask how often the later church has really carried out the dominical command, to do this as his memorial.
The Lord's supper.
The eucharist as celebrated in the christian churches is not called the last supper, but the Lord's supper. It is celebrated by the risen Lord, in the glory of Easter, not by the Jesus of the evening of the passion. It is a much repeated rite.
It is useful here to review briefly the development of this rite after biblical times. In the first millenium, although the ritual of the eucharist was dependent on the texts of Mk-Mt and Pl-Lk, the theology of the eucharist was more dependent on the vision of the fourth gospel. John became a kind of canon within the canon in this field. There the church heard the mystery of the real presence of the risen Lord, speaking self-referential words to the loving community of the church, as he himself celebrated his own eucharist among them. This dictated the traditional theology of the Lord's supper. In the Eastern churches, beautiful and sublime eucharistic anaphorae, as it were icons in word and music of the transfigured Christ in glory, expressed this sense of Glory and of Presence. In the Western churches, what was called icon in the east became sacrament in the west, and carried with it the same sense of mystical, real presence of the person of Christ. The person of the eucharisting Christ, not the ritual of the eucharist, dominated the arena of faith, in both east and west.
The visible representative of this Christ in the community was the priest celebrant of the ritual. He had two functions, to consecrate (the bread and wine), and to preside over the liturgical action in the name of the worshipping church. The consecration was an act of Christ himself, channelled through the instrumentality of the priest. The worship was an act of the church community, offering itself through the presidency of the priest. In this way, a dual dimension developed, that is, a Christological and an ecclesiological one, for the role of the minister of the eucharist, and for an understanding of the ritual of the eucharist. In the course of time, and explicitly in the 16th-17th centuries, the Christological dimension absorbed the ecclesiological one, and became not only the central or primary, but the only aspect of the role of the celebrant. Eventually, in the twentieth century, a developed theology of eucharist along these lines became standard, and can be seen behind almost all the documents of the Roman magisterium throughout this century. It stresses the moment of the consecration, the indispensable role of the priest, the mystery of the transsubstantiation of the substance of the bread and wine, the efficacy of the words spoken 'ex opere operato', and the resulting objectively real presence not only of the person of Christ but also of his act of self-giving in the event of Calvary. It is clear that this doctrinal paradigm was very open to an integration with what, in chapter 6, we have called a destructive theory of sacrifice, and a mentality of atonement and expiation.
It is not difficult for liturgical scholars to point out that some of the traditional emphases that have developed over the course of this history have in fact distorted the character of the ritual, and they rightly ask for a present redressing of such imbalances. It is not difficult either for theologians and spiritual writers to point out the difference between the man Jesus of the last supper and the glorious Christ of the church's subsequent eucharist, and they, rightly again, ask today for an image of the priest who represents Christ, to look more like the real Jesus than a long tradition has allowed. In our own time, there have been real changes in the church's attitude to the eucharist. There has been a re-articulating of eucharistic theology, first of all, in terms of the paschal mystery, and then, more recently, in terms of the mealing practice of Jesus. Theologians depended on the work of Joachim Jeremias to give a paschal sense to the eucharist; more recently, they have fallen back on the work of Hans Lietzmann to place it in the context of the meals of Jesus. Perhaps a still more appreciative view of the tradition can also be taken, which can include these developments. It could recognise in the church's practice a sense of the personhood of the Christ of the eucharist as the most important aspect of it. This personhood is that of the risen Lord, sharing himself in the supper rightly called the Lord's. The mood of it is quite different from the last supper, though dependent on it, and it needs greater clarification.
What is the difference between the personhood of the risen, or rising Christ, and the personhood of the Jesus who faced the passion at the last supper, with the courage of commitment and consecration ? Something mysterious happened to him between one moment and the other. The mystery is the real core of his meaning as a person. We have spelt out the former : that condition of immediacy, unmitigatedness and renderedness into a being-divided and being-exhausted, so that there is only a numbness to and of desire in the face of an interdict that has nothing more to say no to, an un-dark-ness that is a new kind of love; even more, an exposure of the bipolarity of gentleness and aggression, to the point where, in a willingness to be dispersed among others and by others, there is a dying of all ego... What can we now say of the latter, the personhood of the rising one ?
None of us has (yet) experienced resurrection, so we can only speculate, by way of contrast and hope. When ego has truly died and been dispersed, something like the material components of the body in their return to earth; when there is no more division and bipolarity within Jesus' very being that can be manifested; when there is no more lethe or darkness; when there is nothing further to be faced up to... then there is only love, agape. But it is a love that is neither numb nor exhausted, neither desiring nor interdicted. It has no concrete, 'personalised' form : all that has dissolved and indeed passed away. There is only an aloneness in the nothingness of all that, a standing at the bar of nothing, being accused by nothing, and forced in no way to be anything in particular. There is a silence to all such shapes. It is like standing in the bareness of a light that is not yet dawn, before colour is possible. Jesus is finally thrown from the high horse of his own (conceived) identity, in real personal death, and precisely 'there' finds a 'moment' in which he can retrieve something deeper than all forms of identity. In that bareness there is a fully uninhibited flowing, a being poured out and given, a pure communioning without shape or form. Mark knew it : the blood is ekkunnomenon, being poured out. Luke will call it 'being given', didomenon, in the same continuous and continuing present. The paradox is that when we finally become who we really are, in our very being, through death, it is not concretely substantive being, but purely flowing, poured out communioning. Jesus discovered it at the death point of his crucifixion. He was then forever, not homo erectus, but anthropos estauromenos, the forever crucified one beyond all form, the eternally unboundaried one. This is the death-state (to all forms of pre-death life), or nekrosis, that is the new kind of life, zoe, in the new kind of agape. There is a trembling moment in the fullness of death where there is already a beginning of this new rising, and the rising one there is forever rising, and never - in full achievement of form - risen.
If we ask not, who, but where is this new kind of person, the rising one, the answer can be even more surprising. Because he is not a shape or form, he is not in a 'where' (or a 'when') appropriate to such things. In a way, he is beyond and yet within every such 'where' and every such 'when'. But he is particularly in and with and among us, who have loved him for who he is without being able to put it into words. He has done more than just show us who we really are, and who he really is, and where we are going as he has gone. He is above all with us, in us, in the love that transcends both the vision of form and the formlessness of dying and rising. In that sense he has risen, and is always rising, into us, and changing us profoundly. His communioning presence within us prevents us from ever being content with a self-concept that is fixed, and so to say, self-standing autonomously. We are drawn into the flow-forward of our own history, knowing it is not our own. It is the flow forward of his history, and of all histories at the same time. We are drawn by the flowingness that he is within us. We are engulfed, positively, in the power of his rising. For he is rising into us, and drawing us into his own rising.
The Lord's supper is well named. It is the supper of this rising Lord in us. It is he who is taking the bread and the cup as we take it into our hands and share it. It is our participation, in memory, of his Calvary, and it is also his participation, in risen reality, in our present sufferings and 'Calvaries'. That is why the resurrection has made the adjective 'my' eternally different in reference for him : when he says, 'my' body, he now means his risingness within our present somatic and historical existence, for the two have become one, eternally one. And when he says, 'my' blood, being poured out, he means his pouring-out-ness in the midst of our dividedness, exhaustedness, numbness, dispersal and death to all forms of ego. The supper may be the Lord's, but in it we are his body, since, in that ordinary, historical sense, he has no body but ours. This is why it is only the church that can gather to celebrate this supper, and when it does, it is not just the church's supper but the Lord's. And this is why it is then not the 'last supper' but the supper to which the last supper has led both Jesus and the church. It is only someone who has been 'through' Calvary who can, in the flowing Spirit, summon matter to become his communional expression, that is, rise from the dead. Always, his new realness makes our present realness different. When we speak of the real presence of his Person as risen, we mean the tangible impact of his having entered into pure communioning within us, who are not yet in the fullness of that condition. This is the 'holy' communion of our present eucharists.
The Roman catholic tradition has always stressed the 'real presence' of Christ in the eucharist. It is essential. But we must ponder the meaning of the words, 'real', and 'presence'. The Lutheran tradition has always stressed the dimension of 'forgiveness', somewhat in the vein of the Matthean formula of the bread-word. It too is essential. But again we must grasp it, not as the factual forgiveness of faults, but as the removal of all possibility of sin (and so of forgiveness as well), that happens when we passover from the separateness of our present forms into the communion of rising being. The tradition of the Easter churches has always stressed the 'glory' of the transfigured Lord in the supper. It is the most essential aspect of all, provided we understand that the glory, of the rising, is at the price of a dying deeper than all deaths.
In this kind of discussion, difficulties can come from inherited religious and cultural systems. The French spirituality of the 'reaction' (to which allusion was made in chapter 6, on the meals of Jesus, and their sacrificial dimension), has focussed too much on the moral rather than on the ontological meaning of dying (and rising), to feel fully comfortable with the approach taken here. The German bourgeois culture of the nineteenth century has focussed too much on the validity and autonomy of person in its present state of being, that is, on its substantiality, to be fully comfortable with the (non-kenotic) flowingness we have indicated as the glory of the (rising) person. The English (and North American ?) sense of ceremony would perhaps be a difficulty for some, to penetrate beyond the ritual, to the reality in the eucharist, which in the last analysis cannot be ritualised. It is not easy for such a mentality to grasp that ritual is at its revelatory best when it breaks down and confesses its impotency to contain what is uncontainable. Perhaps it is the Celt who does best with the undiluted rawness of death, and yet has the unquenchable sense of positivity that cannot die... and yet for the Celt there can well be a (consequent ?) lack of interest in the niceties of ceremony and the proprieties of the shapes and forms of worship. The Lord's supper, is, happily, beyond us all.
The integration of the last supper and the Lord's supper.
It is important to integrate, not just the pre-death Jesus of the last supper with the rising Christ of the Lord's supper in the church, but the last supper itself with the Lord's supper. We have looked at the last supper as a rite of consecration. In the light of our understanding of the Lord's supper and the rising Christ, to what did Jesus really consecrate himself at the last supper ? It was to something more than death. Implicitly, then, to what do we consecrate ourselves when we take part in the Lord's supper ? to that 'more' that is beyond death ?
Our guide here will be the theology of the sixth chapter of the gospel of John. It has special value here, since the author locates it within the mortal life of Jesus, and yet treats there of mysteries of the risen Christ. It is there, rather than in the narratives of the last supper, that John prefers to give his deepest refections on the christian eucharist. The chapter consists of a discourse on the bread of life, in the shape of two distinct homilies about it. The first is located in vv 32-51a, and the second in vv 51b-58. The setting of these homilies is an event in which Jesus withdraws (in a real anachoresis) from his disciples, even into the aloneness of the night, and across the waters. The homilies themselves are full of double entendre, and in many ways unite two levels of meaning.
The first homily is the more important, and probably the more ancient. To grasp its message, some preliminaries are necessary. In the Jewish practice of homilising, there were certain rules, and in this first homily of the sixth chapter, Jesus appears to break them all. There are basically three rules of homily. First, the homilist is really Moses : the actual speaker does not speak in his own name, but in the name of his (Jewish) teachers, who themselves do not speak in their own names, but in the name of their own teachers, as they speak ultimately in the name of the one who established this chain of Jewish wisdom teaching, that is, Moses. Every word ever spoken at any time in a true homily was considered to be literally that of Moses, and the lips of the speaker were those of Moses himself. Secondly, the homily has a logic of its own, which comes from what the tradition called 'pearlstringing'. This is literally a concatenation of semi-quotations and allusions, often verbal, to passages and texts of the Hebrew scriptures, which are thus put into corelation in a different way from their original composition. The homilist does not come up with great ideas of his own, or philosophise about life, but weaves his way through the scriptures with such allusive references, allowing them to have their own effect on the hearers. Thirdly, the purpose of homily is to uncover through this process, for the hearers, a 'secret knowledge'. The 'knowledge of God' was indeed enshrined, even incarnated, with the biblical text, but in that text there was a further wisdom which the words of the text could not convey on their own. To do that they needed, as well, the activity of the true homilist. In the actual preaching of the homilist, this secret knowledge was unfolded in an existential manner through the experience of hearing. It was not really put into words, since the words of scripture are supreme, but it was put into the ears of the hearers and evoked their faith. In a way it was less the common property of the community than the personal property of each responding believer.
Jesus appears to break all these rules, seemingly with deliberation, in the homilies of Jn 6. In the first homily he says that it was not Moses who gave bread from heaven : it is the living Father who is actually giving real bread from heaven in the here and now. He does not seem to go looking for texts to string together : he is rather overwhelmed by a larger sense of meaning and mystery, which comes back and forth like a refrain, and the few biblical references he makes simply exemplify it partially. He does not offer a secret wisdom, but a public one, openly, for all to hear and understand because it is a manifest revelation. There is a freedom here in the person of Jesus, to present himself, as a person, as more than what Moses meant, more than what is contained in the sacred text, and more than what is existential but unwordable in the faith of the hearer. In this way, he has prepared his audience for a communication from himself about himself, that they could never have heard from the Moses tradition.
Jesus has prepared the ground for this first homily by a reflection on the motivation of those who 'seek' him. He says that many of them have sought him for what he can do for them, not for who he is in himself. As Augustine puts it in his commentary on the passage, 'Quaerite me propter me' (seek me for the sake of me).
The homily is then going to be about the real meaning of the personhood of Jesus : that personhood is metaphorically the 'bread' of our lives.
There are two main points made in the homily. First, we have the theme of the inclusion of all in the mystery of the personhood of Jesus. Secondly, we have the theme of the disproportion of every kind of expression, linguistic or ritual, in its attempt to convey the largeness of the God of Jesus. Jesus is the all-including one, because he himself, as person, is included in the largeness of the large God. After these points are made, we can begin to grasp the reason why both of them are true. It is the mystery that we are drawn by God, and live, as Jesus did and does, in the freedom of that drawing God.
First of all, there is an emphasis on all who come to Jesus, that is, on all that the Father gives him, on whoever comes to him. It is again a little like the hoi polloi of Mark, where there is no privilege of any elite, and there is an openness for the nameless masses. They will never be turned away, or lost, or rejected. This is the real reason why they will not be left in a state of death. As a result, theirs is the mystery-gift of resurrection itself. There is even a real sense that this is not simply a fact, but a special kind of necessity built into the meaning of being loved by Jesus and his God. It cannot, in that sense, be otherwise. There is a hint here of a kind of 'universal salvation' which demands our gratitude, as has been suggested, for example, by Hans von Balthasar. (Ambaum: 1991: 35-52)
Secondly, there is no way that these things of which Jesus speaks can be adequately articulated. They are 'hard sayings', in intolerable language. The vocation of language and liturgy is not to capture these mysteries perfectly and comprehensively. It is to breakdown, while attempting to convey them without having the capacity to do so. This is why this kind of language, and liturgy, is Spirit-giving and life-imparting : it does not try to be, in itself, our energisation and enlivenment, but rather points, through its incapacity, to a larger mystery, beyond all words and rituals, that is the real Spirit and the real Life. The role of the word is to genuflect before the mystery, to be more aniconic than iconic, so that there can never be a temptation to turn it into an idol. There can never be an adequate theology, or a perfect liturgy.
Thirdly, we must look at the reason why all these things are true, the mystery of the drawing of God. No one can come into this largeness of Jesus unless drawn by the Father who sends Jesus. In other words, we must all be taught by God, theodicacts, docibiles Dei. We must 'hear' (obey) this teaching from the Father. We must 'learn' from it. The fourth evangelist has here tried to find some kind of language for this greatest of all mysteries. God is drawing us to inclusion in God. God as Person, as Father, is drawing us from the intrinsic limits of our own finite personhood, through death, into the unlimited domain of divine Personhood, through Jesus. What is this drawing ? Augustine again has captured something of it when he wrote, 'nemo venit nisi tractus, id est, tactus' (no one comes unless drawn, that is, touched) by God. It is like entering a field of attraction, and being under the real influence of the final Great Attractor. This is why there is such a disproportion between all we can say or do, and this mystery of the drawing God. We are touched, and lifted into infinity. Augustine again is right when he says that we need to interiorise this, and assimilate it : 'cogitare Christum est ruminare Christum', that is, to chew, or even masticate the mystery, to become completely one with it. It is a process, or rather, the process of our whole lives. When we get a sense, in love, of the unboundariedness of Jesus, in his inclusion of all, beyond all the possible boundaries of every possible language and culture, we touch in fact the unboundariedness of God. We realise that God is not the prime analogue of all that we are, but the Source that delights in active self-participation into all of us. Even more, God, having done that, is not content with that, but actively engages his very personhood in a dynamic 'drawing' of all of us into the GodSelf. This is no longer the language I have used previously, in chapter 4, concerning the use of 'participatory paradigm' for an understanding of God : drawing says a little more than participation, at least as initially understood. Nor is it any longer the language, again used in chapter 4, to describe nature, as an 'evolutionary paradigm' : being drawn is a deeper mystery than evolving, at least as normally understood.
The basic mystery, then, is that Jesus consecrated himself to this 'being drawn' by the Father. This is the inner unity of his commitment to the reality of death (at the last supper) and his entry to the reality of rising and risen life (in the Lord's supper). Both are aspects of and manifestations of the Drawing. The Drawing is the real object of the consecration. It is intriguing to realise, in the text of Jn 6, that resurrection is presented as a function of the Drawing. 'No one can come to me unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me, and I will raise him up on the last day'. The christian life is essentially focussed on the Drawing. That is why, fundamentally, it is a eucharistic life : it is never limited in vision to death-negatives, but always looks to the larger perspective of a Drawing beyond and through all possible negatives. For that, there can only be thanksgiving.
The second homily appears to be of later date, almost as an appendix to the previous text. It seems to take its inspiration from the words which commentators consider to be a rendering of the usual liturgical formula of the bread-word in the eucharistic rite of the Johannine community at that time. 'The bread that shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world'. The originality of that formula is the use of the Greek word, 'sarx', instead of 'soma'. That is, the use of the word 'flesh' instead of 'body'. Flesh in this sense refers to the simple, frugal earthy origins of Jesus in Galilee : his 'flesh' is his humanity marked by the historical and cultural background from which he came, and carrying the sings of fragility as a result. The communicant in the Johannine eucharist is asked to 'eat the sarx' of the Son of Man and to 'drink his blood' : it is as if the two formulae were of the same value, and the negative connotations of 'drinking blood' are present in the new phrase 'eating the sarx'. Both imply an acceptance of and an interiorising of the concrete human condition of Jesus, including in it the potential for a trajectory which would lead to a violent rejection and death. It is psychologically impossible to accept and interiorise such dimensions in the life of Jesus, without accepting and interiorising the same dimensions in one's own life. The drift of the second homily is then a timely reminder to a spiritual community, that the mysticism of the first homily is impossible without the realism of the second. In our terms, you cannot have the Lord's supper without the last supper. The rising Christ cannot be without the Jesus who consecrated himself to what Calvary would mean in the ongoing Drawing Action of God. A christian cannot celebrate the Lord's supper while dispensing himself from attendance at the last supper.
In the second homily, Jesus says that he actively draws life from the Father. This is an additional concept, over and above the primary concept, the Drawing by the Father. It implies a large reconstruction of the psychic roots of his personality, a reciprocity to the action of the Father almost matches it in intensity. The second homily also uses similar language for the christian who communicates with the Christ of the eucharist : he too actively draws life from Jesus. In both cases, 'life' means the entire horizon of possibility opened up by the consecration of the last supper and consummated by the Drawing into the Lord's supper.
Such a way of life is proposed as the true effect (sacramentally, in the language of a later theology) of the ritual of the eucharist.
Conclusion.
It is time to integrate this vision of eucharist with themes discussed in chapter 6, on the meals of Jesus.
First, the 'process' in which Jesus is engaged, and to which he consecrates himself, from the last supper until the rising life he shares and celebrates in the Lord's supper, is very much the same process we have previously named as the 'Gethsemane' process. It is a process that entails the letting go of self, of God, of future, in every form in which it has previously been fantasised, or could be fantasised. But the starkness demanded by that kind of living Gethsemane is tempered, though not diluted, by the mystery of the Drawing of the Father. The response demanded from Jesus is not just abandonment, but much more a real trust beyond all possible evidence. This is why, paradoxically, the renewal of covenant which the last supper includes, demands in a real way a willingness to let all fantasised forms of covenant collapse. Perhaps that is one meaning of the telling symbol, 'covenant in blood'. Covenant is not a solution of anything, it is a being dissolved from all solutions. Then it is pure faith. Some have called it the inauguration of a 'cosmic' covenant. In some ways that is true, since the lifeworld of the consecrated Jesus is then so different from what it was before. But it also, in the same kind of paradox, implies the real 'death' of every possible cosmos : the man of trust does not know from previous experience where the Drawing will lead him.
Secondly, the last supper and the Lord's supper, especially in their integration, have a real sacrificial character. The theory of sacrifice that is most congruent with it, is not destructive, but positive. It is true that there is, if it be insisted, a destruction involved in it, a real death, a cessation even of all cosmic proportions. But it is always in the context of the Drawing of the Father. In that sense it is a supreme example of the spirituality of access we have noted (in chapter 6) as the core of Jewish religion. It is above all an act of faith in the aliveness of God. It seems a matter of some regret that less adequate concepts of sacrifice have dictated a theology and a spirituality of the eucharist in the church, and in many ways missed the mystery that is profoundly taking place. It seems a pity that perhaps the authentic ritual of the eucharist is celebrated in too superficial and obvious a manner, for participants in it to experience much of the process that is its heart. That process is indeed sacrificial, in the positive sense of trust in the Drawing.
Thirdly, in a very real sense, it is correct to speak of Jesus at the last supper, and in the Lord's supper, as priest. Not a priest in the destructive sense of sacrifice, nor even a priest in the constructive sense of some better Jewish theology, nor a priest of an unbloody sacrifice of a culture which offers deities gifts of bread and flowers. He is a priest in a unique sense which redefines priesthood itself, as his suppers involve a redefinition of sacrifice itself. It would be anachronistic to use the word 'institute' to convey what Jesus did to the notion and practice of both sacrifice and priesthood, but it is far from wrong to suggest that he created a genuine novelty in the very conceptions of these things by what he did at the last supper, and in the Lord's supper. The implications of such a view are large. They suggest a way of living for a priest, according to the model of Jesus, that challenges received social practice in the church. It is for the sake of the church that some are called to be living memorials of the Jesus of the consecration and the Drawing, that is, to live lives that are given, poured out, for the nameless many, in such a way that death itself, that is total cosmic deconstruction, is negotiated in pure trust and nothing else. The many need their leaders, in 'suppering', to enter on the journey that leads to such a way of 'life through death'. It is in effect a real 'paschal mystery'.
Fourthly, it could be said that the Lord's supper is an icon of the last supper, and thus a 'remembering' of the Jesus of that supper. An icon has something about it that is familiar, and leads to something that is unfamiliar. There are two levels in it. One does not stop at the first level, without turning it into an idol. The second is not however a removal of the first, but its genuine metamorphosis. The key to the Lord's supper as icon of the last supper, is of course the Lord himself. The Lord - that is, the risen Christ - is the true icon of the Jesus of the last supper. To grasp that, we need above all a clean conception of the resurrection. It is not a compensation made to Jesus for all his sufferings. It is the retention in him, eternally, of the values written into his existence by the last supper, the passion and the crucifixion. The Lord is not someone different from the Jesus of the last supper. The Lord is the Jesus of the last supper, permanently 'estauromenos' (crucified), that is, broadened into cosmic unboundariedness through the experience of the cross. What is proposed here concerning the unity of the two suppers is another way of presenting the unity of death and resurrection.
Fifthly, some brief notes can be added on the classic emphases in the theology of the eucharist in the western Roman catholic tradition. This tradition has highlighted the (moment of) consecration. Perhaps it could be desired that a sense of the self-consecration of Jesus might be given as much prominence as the sense of the consecration of the bread and wine. The role of the priest has always been seen as central. Perhaps it could be desired that the priest present himself in more credible ways as the living memorial of the Jesus of the last supper. Transsubstantiation has been the church's preferred teaching concerning the manner in which Christ becomes really present in the eucharist. Perhaps it could again be desired that it be grasped as a model for the understanding of the more profound 'transsubstantiation' to which all eucharistic participants commit themselves in their own personal 'consecration'. It is taught that the rite has an efficacy 'ex opere operato' : this is true, but again it needs to be put in the context of deeper things. We ourselves have no efficacy in our own 'goodwill', to undergo the full process of Gethsemane-Drawing. The only efficacy there is to make that real for us, comes from outside us, and is pure grace. The only source of that grace for us is Jesus of the last supper, cross and resurrection. The only contact we have with that Jesus is the Lord's supper. There is a most real presence in our eucharist, not only of the person of Christ, but also of the act by which he consecrates, commits and gives himself to the Easter process. There is less and less reason to separate the person from the process. The two are inextricably one. That is the unity of the paschal mystery itself.
It is not changes in the ritual of the eucharist that are needed. What is needed is a profound change in the heart of those who dare to celebrate it, and call it Thanksgiving.
Readings.
J.Ambaum, An empty hell ? The restoration of all things ? Balthasar's concept of hope for salvation, Communio, 1991, 35-52.
M.Casey, The original Aramaic form of Jesus' interpretation of the cup, Journal of Theological Studies, 1990, 1-12.
B.Chilton, A feast of meanings : eucharistic theologies from Jesus
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