CHAPTER 6:

PERSON IN SHARING: THE TABLE OF THE POOR.

Kevin O'Shea

There is much paradox in what Jesus did as a consequence of the 'Happening' of the healing Kingdom of God in Galilee. He shared meals with the poor who were being healed. At first sight, there is an incongruence between the grandeur of the Advent and the ordinaryness of the celebration. The cosmos is stirred, and the poor, whom the cosmos has not usually given enough to eat, honour the occasion at their simple tables. John Dominic Crossan has happily, and rightly, named the ministry of Jesus as 'healing and mealing'.

Most inquiries into the meals of Jesus focus on the Eucharist in the churches, or at least on the last supper of Jesus with his disciples before the passion began. The meals of Jesus are presented as the preliminary context of those mysteries. They are indeed, but there is much more to the meals, and much more to those mysteries, than that. The last supper does receive significance from the series of meals in Jesus' life, but it has a deeper meaning that comes from its place in Jesus' final act of going to the Father through the death of the cross. The eucharist does receive significance from the meals in the public life of Jesus, but it has a deeper meaning that comes to as the feast of his risen life. The meals of Jesus lose much of their original and historical significance if they are seen only as preludes to these greater mysteries. The lose the sense of meaning that is theirs in the immediate horizon of the Galileean Advent of the Kingdom. For these reasons, this chapter will treat of the meals in themselves, without entering into questions about the last supper or the Lord's supper in the churches. Chapter 12 will deal with those mysteries.

There are three parts to this chapter. First, an introduction to the meaning of the meals; secondly; the significance of the mealing practice of Jesus for his sense of personhood, and for the sharing of this personhood with others; and thirdly, the (very different) senses in which the meals of Jesus might be called sacrificial, and the difference they made to the very idea of sacrifice.

The meaning of the mealing.

Robert Funk has described sketched a picture of the Galileean Jesus as someone who fraternised openly and shamelessly, and shared meals with, on the one hand the affluent and powerful, and on the other hand, the prostitutes, the petty tax officials, and other 'riffraff', in violation of the social codes of the day. He sees him as someone who (unlike John the Baptist) disavowed fasting, who (unlike the Pharisees) did not observe the rules of either kosher or Sabbath, or purity regulations, and who (unlike the Deuteronomist theologians) did not believe that only the respectable prospered, while the unjust suffered. He considers that in public image Jesus was a glutton and a drunk, a comic savant who embedded wisdom of a strange kind in a humourous acting out of the values he believed in. He did not ask people to repent, fast, or observe the rules : he opened up to them the way of celebrating life. (Funk : 1996)

John Meier formulates his own summary of the evidence :

Some comment is needed here. First, it is customary (and correct) - since the gospels themselves - to speak of the meals of Jesus in terms of the contrast between his lifestyle and that of John of the Baptist. The contrast is drawn between a socially-relational person and an ascetically-withdrawn person. Contrasts of this kind usually depend on the prior bias of the observer. There is always a dimension of both communication and distance in any relationship, and in any personal lifestyle. There is no evidence of a contrast (in public character and comportment) between Jesus and the Baptist prior to the conjunction of Jesus baptismal experience and his experience of the coming of the healing Kingdom. Jesus came from the 'school' of the Baptist, and behaved as the Baptist behaved, as long as he was 'with' the Baptist and the baptist movement. When the Kingdom overwhelmed him, prepared as he was by his own baptismal experience, the positivity within his responding person surpassed and left behind the previous asceticism both he and the Baptist had practised. The 'mealing' lifestyle of Jesus stands out even more strongly in contrast, not just to the Baptist's refusal of such a lifestyle, but even more to Jesus' own refusal of it prior to these great moments in his own life.

Secondly, Jesus did not assume the character of a 'bon vivant' (as both Funk and Meier call him) for its own sake, or enter into the positivity of human life and celebrative expression for its own sake, or as an expression of some kind of secular humanism. What he did was not the choice of a human posture. It was the necessary overflow in him, of the Overflowing Joy released into his world in the actual Coming of the Kingdom. This Advent of the Kingdom healed in him any inclination there may have been previously in him, to be less than joyful. His mealings derive, entirely, from that Healing Mystery.

Thirdly, questions could be asked about the primary significance of certain people at the meals of Jesus. It is customary to highlight the presence there of those publicly designated as undesirable, and classified as morally reprobate. This is to emphasise the role of the meals as symbols of divine mercy. That such people were present at the meals is historically sure. That mercy was there for them is divinely revealed. But perhaps it could be said that the sweeping Joy of the Galileean event was something larger and more superabundant than mercy. It was a sweeping Joy in which it did not matter whether people were, and were thought to be, by human judgment, righteous or unrighteous, ready to repent or not. Sanders has grasped this well (Sanders: 1993).

Fourthly, it is usual, in the accepted rhetoric that describes the meals of Jesus, to speak of them as a 'banquet'. It is a metaphor of the Kingdom, (and even in that capacity it has real limits), but it is not a really accurate description of what happened, at least always. Some of the meals were as simple as the simple people who had nothing to make a banquet out of. In the eyes of the rich, their gatherings at table did not look much like 'banquets'. The Kingdom came to the Galilean poor : the meals that these Galileeans normally had (not 'banquets') were the best way to celebrate its coming to them. It was they, in their own way, who could celebrate, enjoy and express what the Kingdom meant. The Healing God of all Fullness had entered the ordinaryness and the simpleness and the realness of the lives of these very 'little' people, taken away their negatives, and left their positives as they truly always were, without replacing them with the human extravagant banquets of others. Jesus, as one of these people, lived among them in astonished, grateful, joyful responsiveness to the Kingdom come among them all. His meals were as open as the Kingdom itself : it is from that breadth that there flows unlimited access to every table.

Jesus' meals were fellowship events among those who knew the fellowship of the arriving Kingdom. He ate with his own, that is, with all who were 'there' in the Happening. That, from God's point of view, meant everyone. These meals are not 'family' or 'fellowship' meals (in the sense of a club, or association), they are Kingdom meals, although they take the external form of any kind of meal and any kind of gathering. No one can be consciously excluded from them. No one is consciously excluded from the open table of real peasants. There is a natural peasant welcome about them. This kind of peasant openness is the natural and appropriate locus of the Kingdom itself. There are no purity or kosher rules about these meals. The only kind of purity in them is the earthy, peasant realness of those who share whatever food there is, and whatever company is at hand. It is apt that in Galileean homes at the time, there would have been more emphasis on drinking the wine than on eating the food. (Stephen Moore has grasped this well, when he hazards a rendition of 'Can you drink the cup that I shall drink ?' as 'Can you match me, drink for drink ?') (Moore: 1992)

Historically, the texts we possess concerning Jesus' presence at various meals are in the main intended to convey his typical practice rather than to record specific incidents or detailed occasions. He was generally not the host at these meals. He was one of the guests. As such he was neither the organiser of the fellowship nor the convenor of the meal nor the presider at table.

He did not decide who would be there, or what would be talked about. He was in a relatively powerless position. He took part in the natural flow of the interaction and conversation, in the dialogue and the drinking, and in the singing (which usually accompanied a meal). It is probably an exaggeration to say that these meals were the chief medium of his 'teaching' : teaching, in that sense, would have been an excellent way to wreck the meal.

It is often said that Jesus accepted invitations from those who had the wherewithal to offer a meal, but to whose meals no respectable people would go. Tax-collectors and prostitutes would be like that. This has some truth in it, but ought not to be over-emphasised. Galileeans of the peasant kind did not typically bother much about protocol. And the Kingdom was larger than all protocol.

Jesus did not have to set up, or declare his meals as parabolic enactments of the Kingdom. The Kingdom had already caused the meals to be what they were : there was no further need for declaration. The 'spirit' of these meals was that of the Kingdom. They were ordinary in format, but extraordinary, even unique in mood and atmosphere. They are more than a hint of Incarnation.

The poet, Jessica Powers, has captured the aliveness of these meals :

that the staid road now wanders all amiss,

and that the wind walks much too giddily,

clutching a bush for balance, or a tree ?

How then can dignity and pride endure

with such inordinate mirth upon the land,

when steps and speech are somewhat insecure,

and the light heart is wholly out of hand ?

'If there be indecorum in my songs,

fasten the blame where rightly it belongs,

on Him who offered me too many cups,

of His most potent goodness - not on me,

a peasant who, because a King was host,

drank out of courtesy.'

(Powers: But not with wine)

The 'King' of the Kingdom is someone who loved peasanthood so much that, having become a peasant among peasants, he wanted to share with those who had become his 'own' a peasant kind of meal. Is there a double courtesy here - that of the peasant who drinks, and that of the God become a peasant who offers and shares as a peasant does ?

Meaning and personal sharing.

A meal, fully entered into, is a very special symbol of personal and interpersonal presence. A meal is an occasion for taking food, but it is much more than that. It is an occasion for interpersonal conviviality. The need for oral satisfaction that is met in the intake of food and drink, becomes subsumed into the higher need for personal mutuality, which is met in the convivium. The former becomes the symbol and the context of the latter. This is true only when, at table, there is a real and actual convivium taking place. If that is not there, there is a feeding, not a mealing. A meal is a powerful human expression that symbolises and communicates makes an overture of an integrated person to another. The integrity of the person comes from the harmonisation of the oral and relational aspects of the person. In a real sense the oral needs are 'healed' into the relational possibilities of the person. Only then the person is ready, in the fullness of integrated personhood, to encounter another person with real presence. A meal is the occasion for this to happen. It does not do it magically. It is the conscious experience of persons that takes them beyond their usual level of internal dividedness and their usual level of separateness from one another. It could be said that it is persons who turn feedings into mealings.

The eucharist is intended, in this full sense, to be a meal. Jerome Murphy O'Connor has often said that the eucharist is a sacrament of charity in the community which celebrates it, and that, if there is a significant lack of charity in the celebrating community, their eucharist signifies (and effects) nothing and is thus 'invalid'. That thought could be extended from charity to personal presence. Without such real presence of persons, there is no meal, and in the received theological language of a long tradition, there is a real lack of presence, and no 'real presence'. Like the efficacy of a meal, the efficacy of the Eucharist is sacramental, not magical.

It is not any kind of human person who can truly partake of a personal meal. It requires a person whose oral needs are healed and integrated into relational experience. It requires a person who can recognise and make the table the symbol of interpersonal presence. A human person who has seen the significance of personhood as an actual participation in the Self-participating Personhood of God ought to be ready to do this. In such a person, there is a real and existential subordination, in the positive sense, of the relational dimension of human personhood to the Divine Presence overflowing into that person and into all other persons. When this occurs, there is, derivatively, also a real and existential subordination, again in the positive sense, of the oral dimension of the person to the relational dimension. In this sense, a true meal always implies the presence of the Divine Personal Mystery, participating the Divine Selfhood with us as we partake with one another. God actively shares his Personhood with us, as we share ours with one another while we, together, share in the one table.

The meal, as the personalised expression of oral satisfaction, is a mirror and image of the sustenance which the entire cosmos receives from the Sustaining Creator, at every moment of its being. The meal is a symbol, not simply of the mystery of personhood, but of the mystery of the cosmos as well.

More than the mystery of creation is involved. Incarnation is given a new meaning when it is seen in the light of true meals. Incarnation is the entering of a divine person into human life, not simply as a human being, but as a 'peasant'. In a peasant, there are real, indeed oral needs; but there is also an easy readyness that ordinary material satisfaction for those needs is not enough, and the relational responses of other persons cannot always be relied upon. Thus, in a peasant, there is a kind of readyness to be open to, and saturated with, the fullness of divine personal participating love. Once Incarnation has occurred, the 'divine-person-become-peasant' takes great delight, from the roots of his being, in sharing meals with other persons, especially other peasants. A meal, rightly understood, is something like a peasant. Just as the peasant has a natural openness to divine personhood, so the peasant meal has a natural openness to the sharing, symbolising and celebrating that characterise the divine interpersonal exchange. This is so, because the peasant meal is uncluttered with extraneous things, that is, because they are just quite simply what they are, namely, the basic stuff and staff of life shared freely and openly with all who are around the table, as an expression of sheer, unreserved openness of person to person, and of human person to divine person, and vice versa. God-incarnate as a peasant seems to have made the discovery that peasant meals are the best thing going in the universe to unfold his deepest joy as a peasant, and as a God. God realises that these joys are one and the same, and that all they need for expression is the simplest, most basic, earthy, real context of an ordinary meal. In the breaking of bread together, all this happens. It is the 'breaking open' of persons to one another, be they divine or human. This is why the mealing of Jesus is most appropriate as a response to the 'Breaking in' of the Kingdom in Galilee.

Meals and sacrifices.

Bernhard Lang has proposed some tentative, but intriguing suggestions about the meals of Jesus, seen in the context of the sacrificial practice of Israel. He locates his remarks in the framework of Jesus' act of overturning the tables of the money-changers, who provided the kind of money needed for temple sacrifices. Jesus, having overturned one kind of table, would have set up an alternative table.

Lang has proposed the existence (which he concedes is biblically unattested) of a 'presentation ritual' and a 'presentation formula' prior to the offering of a temple sacrifice. The lay offerer of the sacrifice, after buying his animal for the sacrifice (with the required money, obtained at the tables of the money-changers), would have placed his hands on the intended victim, and said, as in a formula, to the priests receiving it, 'this is my victim'. Lang suggests that the word for 'victim' would have been the word for 'body' (in the sense of animal). The offerer would have claimed his own victim and said to the officiating priests, in the presentation formula, 'this is my body'. Lang considers that this form of lay participation in the ritual and the formula of temple sacrifice, had been much restricted, and indeed fallen into practical disuse, by the time of Jesus. He sees Jesus as having advocated its restoration as a reform/renewal of the ritual of sacrifice, and as a recognition of the right of every Israelite to offer sacrifice (as a member of a priestly people). He thinks that this attempt by Jesus did not succeed. Jesus would then have created a new and different form of sacrifice in which there could be unrestricted lay participation. This happened precisely in the meals which Jesus and his companions shared with one another. Here the ritual and formula of presentation could be used with a very new referent. By being present at the meal and at the table, each person was giving him or herself to the others at table, and so was equivalently and implicitly saying to them, 'this is my body', in the sense of 'this is me', given to you in the covenant we are now sharing. Lang wonders if this does not amount to the creation and spread of a kind of alternative worship among the Jesus people of Galilee. He wonders if it constituted grounds for antagonism against Jesus on the part of the priestly authorities in Jerusalem, who were responsible for the ritual of the temple sacrifices. He seems to see this as one factor, at least, in the emergence of the opposition to Jesus which climaxed in his arrest and crucifixion.

Most scholars would be loth to base a case on a totally unattested ritual and formula, on a conjectured intervention of Jesus, and on a conjectured failure of that intervention. They would also be hard to convince that Jesus was significantly interested in the purity of temple ritual, and in the reform of its practices. It is hard to see a Galileean peasant intending to set up, in simple country meals, an alternative to the temple sacrifices. But Lang has made a contribution, in insisting that Jesus' peasant meals did have a dimension that could be called sacrificial, in a spiritual and symbolic way, that was very different from that of the temple. For they were a self-offering and a self-giving of one person to another, in the active presence of the Self-giving and Self-given God of the Kingdom. No special rituals or formulae were needed for that. Everything is contained in the sheer simplicity of it all.

The Qumran community had arrived at a notion of spiritual sacrifice, but not at the idea that the Kingdom had arrived, in the healings. When Jesus was at table with his peasant friends, whom spiritually elite people like the Qumran Essenes would have regarded as unapproachable, he was making a declaration that the God of the healing Kingdom found all these people, and many more, completely approachable. When he shared himself with them, without discrimination, he was making a declaration that the God of the Kingdom was sharing the GodSelf with them all without any trace of discrimination. They were all - equally - acceptable at the table of the Lord. The table of the Lord was not something special, or somewhere special. It was everywhere, it was here, in the simplicity of a poor man's house or of a poor woman's table. Sacrifice itself did reach a new meaning here, in continuity with, though in profound and expanded difference from, the Qumran notion of sacrifice. It did not need special formulas and rituals. It was internally redefined as the grateful response to and joyful overflow of the Happening of the Kingdom itself.

This attitude to sacrifice would have worried the Jerusalem temple authorities no more and no less than the miraculous healings themselves. In itself, and outside that context, it would not have looked significant. It was not, on purely ritual grounds, a serious contestation or intended critique of temple practices.

An excursus on sacrifice.

Professional reviews of the literature about the meaning of sacrifice agree on one thing. There is no agreed language, historical framework, or consistent perspective in those who write about it, and, as a result, there is no consensus about a theory of sacrifice. (Hecht :1982) (Malina : 1995) (Strenski: 1996). There is also a large gap between received impressions about the meaning and role of sacrifice in human life, and acquisitions of personalist philosophy. In christian theology, long-standing attitudes to interpretations of the eucharist, at the last supper or in the churches, have also coloured the discussion about the meaning of sacrifice. These questions need to be addressed, in order to pursue the seminal idea that the meals of Jesus were a new way of doing sacrifice.

Sacrifice : its language.

In the ancient world, sacrifice was practised long before there were any attempts to define it. It came from an instinctive cultural impulse, rather than from clearly thought-out ideas. The situation has not changed much in the modern (cultural or religious) world. Outside theology, people spontaneously think of sacrifice as indicating outstanding acts of altruism, such as patriotic death, in which some heroically 'sacrifice' their lives for others. In theology, the governing models of sacrifice are the 'sacrifice of Isaac', the 'sacrifice of Calvary', or the 'sacrifice of the Mass'.

It is clear that there is an ambivalence in the very word 'sacrifice'. It names something we do not particularly want to be clear about. Many different things are called sacrifice. The term includes rituals that are done in a mood of festivity, fellowship and celebration, and rituals that are done in a mood of immolation, expiation, and destruction. In some cultures there is distinction

between familial (or domestic) rituals of sacrifice, and public (or political) rituals of sacrifice. In christian theology, the immolative and public rituals seem to have governed the unfolding of the theme of sacrifice. It is on them that this inquiry will focus.

The roots of the English word, sacrifice, come from the Latin, sacrum facere, to do something sacred. Yet, what appears to be done does not appear to be sacred : it appears to be violent. The very language looks like an attempt to justify and soften the violence, by creating for it a peculiar form of rhetoric and logic. There, sacrifice is a euphemism, and focusses less on what is done, than on the motive for which it is done, and on the results expected from what is done. The motive is that of making an offering to a superior (divine) being, to induce that being to intervene on behalf of the offerer, or those who are important to the offerer. The desired result is the life of those for whom the sacrifice is made : life granted, spared, or increased. The relationship with the deity here is not a contract. It is rather an act of persuasion and hope, in the expectation of a response that is not due in justice. The overall purpose of the sacrifice is to celebrate the beneficence of the deity, in thanksgiving, when the desired response comes, and/or (especially) to atone for an offence to that deity, who was offended, in expiation for what was done. Where there is a large area of non-negotiated guilt, there is already ground prepared for the practice of sacrifice. Communities with a large sense of undefined guilt, tend to practice sacrifice. The collective unconscious would seem to prefer to do these practices, rather than look at the guilt and do something about it. Perhaps we are not far from the roots of human violence : violence implies action without conscious awareness of the motivation or strength of the action. When such action is done on a 'victim' in 'sacrifice', it is called 'sacred', and the violence is deemed to 'demand' a (positive) divine response.

The violent act that is done is intended to render something humanly irretrievable to the sacrificer, that is, for all intents and purposes, 'dead' to his interest and gain. In that sense, sacrifice costs him dearly. In this way, a 'real' offering is made to the deity, and transferred to the deity, since what is offered no longer belongs to the offerer, and is eliminated out of his domain. It is passed over to the exclusive domain of the deity, and so 'made sacred'. If what is sacrificed is something living, an animal, it is called a victim. A victim is thus the object of a sanctioned form of violence : it is 'legitimate' for society to treat it as a victim. The sanction consists in the establishment of a ritual for the performance of this sacrifice, and an office (priesthood) socially instituted to conduct it. Sacrifice is thus institutionalised and ritually justified and controlled violence, for a 'good' cause. The implication is that animal slaughter is permitted, not only for the sustenance of carnivores, but for other social purposes. In some at least of these case, violence is allowed in the manner in which the killing takes place. There is a further implication, less developed in the theoretical literature, but present in fact, that this sacrificial violence cold extend at times to the taking of human life.

There is always a tendency to use the language of sacrifice in an increasingly metaphorical sense, to describe situations of social life that are more less analogous to the above base description. We tend in this way to speak of the way that capitalism at present 'sacrifices' lower-income earners to the interests of the propertied class, for the sake of 'progress'. We speak of the way Nazism 'sacrificed' the Jewish people, the sake of its myth of racial purity. We speak of the way many people become self-effacing victims, who sacrifice themselves for those they love, or those to whom they have made commitments, for example, in family life. A certain spiritual language applauds the idea of 'self-immolation', that is, of presenting one's self as a (willing ?) victim, by sacrificing self-interest for the sake of altruism. Certain forms of culture, prior to the advent of feminism, proposed this pattern particularly to women.

It is necessary to look at the historical evolution of these ideas.

Sacrifice : historical framework.

Sacrifice as legitimised violent victimisation can be studied in three dominant historical frameworks, two christian, and one Jewish.

The first is a certain stream of catholic theology of the past hundred years, which comes from the spirituality of the French oratory. That was a spirituality of kenosis, or self-emptying, or self-annihilation for the sake of others. It was the climax of a peculiarly French reaction to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Entire theologies of Christ, redemption, and the eucharist have been built on it. It is interesting to note that liberal Protestantism in France, which has not significantly recognised the sacrificial dimension of the Eucharist, has not advocated patriotic sacrifice ; on the other hand, Roman Catholicism there, which strongly emphasised Eucharistic sacrifice, also encouraged patriotic sacrifice. This spirituality has made a significant contribution to French approaches to politics (as in de Maistre), to culture (as in Peguy), and to theology (French modernism was a reaction against it, as in Loisy). It has been seen as the flowering of Tridentine Roman Catholicism, in which a strong sacrificial imagery confirmed an exclusively male and celibate priesthood, ensured the succession of the hierarchy, and left women and children in a relatively subordinate role. In this framework, there was insistence that the Eucharist was a true sacrifice (that of Christ on Calvary), and not simply a meal, and that the last supper be studies without being located in the context of the ongoing meals of Jesus. (Jay : 1992)

The second framework comes from the christian fourth century. At that time, there was a rise of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a synthesis of ideas about hierarchically organised, celibate, male priests who live ascetical lives of spiritual sacrifice, and who represent the community in the ritual of the Eucharist, and thus serve the formation of a devotional church. Studies have suggested that many of these men came from father-ineffective families, and from a relatively low status in society (that is, from the 'proletariat'). It is suggested that they created a 'bourgeois' social christianity in which the patterns of patriarchy became hardened. Thus they (unwittingly) set up a situation for themselves, and their successors, in which social and internal conflict existed. The social conflict was between their real 'proletarian' character and the 'bourgeois' system they made for themselves, in which to find a kind of prestige to which they were not naturally accustomed. The internal conflict was between their claim to be priests, and their duty to be victims, who lived lives of spiritual sacrifice. Their resolution of the conflict came from a synthesis of the priesthood and victimhood of Christ in the Eucharist. Christ was simultaneously priest and victim there : his ministers could do the same. This in practice meant the adoption of what psychologically could be called a paranoid position. It demanded submission to the bourgeois patriarchy of ecclesiastical establishment, in the name of imitation of Christ and devotion to mother church. (Carroll: 1986)

The third framework is Jewish. Much of the discussion of sacrifice is conducted on the assumption that 'pagan' approaches to sacrifice did not exist in ancient times among Jewish people. Pagans were known to have practised human sacrifice and child sacrifice, especially the ritual killing of a first-born son, at the behest of, or at the hand, the father. It seems now that these practices were not unknown among the Jews. Human and child sacrifices, such as were practised in the religions of Moloch, Baal, El, etc., were historicaly conducted in Israel, and the impulse to do them never really died out. Levenson has shown that the Aqedah, or binding, of Isaac, is modelled on these things, and that the notion of Passover itself depends on the notion of sacrifice implied in them. It is true that the notion is transformed in Israel, but the transformation implies a 'redemption' or 'salvation' of those who were the intended victims, through the substitution of an alternate victim (such an animal). The result is a focus on religious identity as a 'spared victim'. This has been called the 'supreme paradigm of religious life' in the Jewish, and subsequently Christian, tradition. To be a person is at best to be a rescued Isaac. Issues of guilt and atonement are unconsciously affecting one's sensitivity to the entire arena of sacrificial concepts. (Levenson: 1993)

Much of the use of the language of sacrifice today is, without knowing it, an heir to nuances written into the meaning of the word in these three historical (and perduring) situations.

Sacrifice : various negative theories.

Different perspectives are adopted in attempts to get to the roots of the meaning of sacrifice. Some prefer to study sacrifice from the point of view of the victims : either innocent children, who are threatened and abused, or excluded women, who are not allowed to take part in the sacrificial cycle and are thus eliminated from its social benefits (like other victims). Others study sacrifice from the point of view of the one who performs it, identified in one way or another with the 'murderous father'. There is, however, unanimous interest in the violence of the act of sacrifice. It is difficult to synthesise these perspectives.

The various attempts at a synthesis exhibit two main difficulties. They are too willing to accept descriptive data without criticism, and they are too ready to identify various structures of society without asking why they are there. In a classic sociology of the matter, from Mauss to Durkheim to Douglas, the act by which a society makes a distinction between what is sacred to it and what is profane, and so establishes itself, is simply described. It is usually said to do so by creating the difference between what is pure and what is impure, and thus establishing bonds within a group and boundaries around it. This is the ritual process. Sacrifice is addressed as one of its clearest examples, outside the family circle. The summit of this approach is what is now termed 'structuralist' (for example, that of Victor Turner), which attempts to uncover the underlying structures present in sacrificial experience, and the resulting benefits for society in the establishing of necessary boundaries.

At present, there is a more sensitive awareness to the reasons why such boundaries have been established. It is recognised that often they are in favour of the position of men in society, vis a vis that of women and children. In this horizon, sacrifice is seen as a male-engendered rite, biassed in favour of men. It is a ritual of differentiation and separation from women (and children), and of their subsequent subordination to and exclusion from the 'men's club' that 'runs' society. It creates exclusive male bonds that are stronger than blood bonds or marriage bonds. It even transcends intergenerational links and differences. It is now recognised as well, that the process that does all of this is violent. Once this dimension of violent elimination is seen in the sacrificial act, theories based on mere description of what is going on in society seem inadequate. There is something different, and quite specific, about sacrifice. It cannot be reduced to one more example of a ritual that serves one model of society.

There is a new quest for a post-structuralist analysis of the collective unconscious that does such things. It is deconstructionist in attitude : it reduces the classical notion of sacrifice to underlying (psychoanalytic) dynamics. Rene Girard was the first to work in this direction. He has exposed the actual, historical character of western civilisation as founded on profound acts of (sacrificial) violence against scapegoated victims. (O'Shea: 1996) A number of thinkers have followed in the same direction.

Some of them seem to glorify violence itself, and regard the expression of it as a good thing. The best example of this is the 'College de Sociologie' in France, whose representatives include Bataille, Caillois, Breton, Leiris... Taken to its full limit, their view would in effect deconstruct all culture, and all religion as it has been known. They tend to regard strong, hard-edged, transgressive violence as something to be celebrated : they are agents of violent extremism. They would destroy both the plane of the profane and the sphere of religion at the same time. For them, both are the result of a false, bourgeois, individualist consciousness. They advocate a violent sort of death to all of this, a kind of ecstasy of annihilation in which animal instincts are constrained neither by reason nor by social utility. There are shades of Nietzsche here, and of Hegel along the lines of Kojeve. This thinking influenced Lacan (via Caillois and Kojeve), and it has emerged in the Nazi Holocaust. It is not irrelevant to note some parallels with the French ascetical thinking outlined in the annihilationist spirituality above. (Strenski: 1996)

In his own different way, Mircea Eliade has embraced the same kind of romanticism of the irrational, in his approach to religion, ritual and sacrifice. Through interest in the 'coincidence of opposites', in tantra, in the 'via negative', he has developed a mystique of what is beyond all rational understanding and control. There is also a tendency in such thinking (in the wake of both the French school and of Eliade), for mysticism-without-understanding to become either nominalist or strongly orthodox.

In contrast, other scholars have undertaken a more radical analysis of the experience of victimhood in sacrifice. Four can be mentioned : Levenson, Carroll, Beers, and Strenski.

Levenson recognised the prevalence of child sacrifice in the historical and conceptual roots of Jewish and of Christian religion. He set up the model of the 'spared victim' as the sublime paradigm of religiousness in those traditions. His is an attempt to maintain these religious traditions, but the price he asks is high. There is little room for positive development of personhood or mutual relationship, and the kind of religion ('annihilationist') that remains, is at odds with the (legitimate) aspirations of contemporary (personalist) culture. Levenson seems to canonise a victimal kind of holiness as a counter-cultural necessity, and to trace its origins in the (undesirable) reality of violence in human matters. (Levenson: 1993)

Carroll begins his theoretical thinking on the basis of observations about fourth century christianity (summarised above). He sees that there were then some ego-weak males who, in developing their devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, were expressing a desire for their mother, that is, for an identification with the feminine. They desires they (unconsciously) repressed. Unconscious conflict resulted. They projected it. They wanted both identification with the Blessed Virgin, and the office of sacrificing priests : that is, they performed a ritual which of its nature was designed to subordinate and eliminate women from positions of significance in the community, while asserting in the strongest terms the supreme place of one woman, Mary, in the church. In Carroll's analysis, there followed a self-punishment for taking this incongruent position. It took the form of (ineffective) attempts at self-emasculation. An instance of this, according to Carroll, was the emergence of clerical celibacy. As celibate, the male sacrificers were forbidden access to women, and so could not harm or do violence to them. A further instance is the emergence of the entire set of ascetical practices (around which a metaphorical language of sacrifice emerged) that surrounded the spirituality of the priesthood. A theology of the sacrificial passion and death of Christ on the cross, both emerged from this, and supported it.

(Carroll: 1986)

Beers is to a great extent dependent on the psychoanalytical vision of Heinz Kohut for his analysis of sacrifice. Kohut's interest is in the self, and its emergence into full selfhood. He has his own theory about the emergence of the male self. It begins with the special relationship of the male child with his mother. In this theory, the mother presents herself as different from, and thus alien to, the identity of the male child. She is thus perceived as a danger to the self-esteem, integrity and capacity to act, of the male. As a result, the male who is no longer a child is characteristically threatened, in ways similar to his infantile experience, by dangers to self-esteem and integrity and potency, that occur in later life. In brief, the male is more threatened than the female by engulfment by the feminine. This is then the reason why men, in their own male way, tend to fear, envy, control, degrade and even abuse women. In reality, they are trapped in their own Narcissism and afraid of experiences of differentiation which they also want. Profound conflict exists here. (Beers: 1992)

Beers makes use of this model and extends it, when he looks at ritual sacrifice. He is aware that it is men, not women, who perform this ritual. He sees the male as deeply desirous of merging with his own idealised self-object, and yet deeply unable to merge with it because of the fear of entrapment by it. For the male, the prospect of connecting with it is also the prospect of being destroyed by it. The name for this is 'disintegration anxiety', a dominant function of male Narcissism. There stems from it a strong desire to separate (from mothers, women, and ideals). Beers then suggests that the male investment in the performance of sacrificial rituals is an example of these dynamics. The sacrifice is an attempt at the elimination of the 'problem', so that unworried differentiation can take place. But the story does not end there. The anxiety of the male is so deep that it re-activates when the male is aware of his attempt to be free from the anxiety. This is why men - in the classic example of sacrifice - tend to negate their own gender by sacrificing their own first-born sons. The sacrificial model of 'negated identity' has begun, and continues in the language, rhetoric, and logic of metaphorical sacrifice.

Strenski points out that the male act of performing sacrifice runs the risk of the extinction of the male altogether, that is, of the termination of the male line, through the murder of the first-born. He sees this as part of the deep ambivalence of the act itself. The result of the ritual, as he sees it, is the establishment of the priority of 'second order', abstract, artefacted relationships, over 'first order', concrete, natural relationships : a situation that itself retains deep ambiguity.

(Strenski: 1996)

There is a common denominator of all these critical theories of sacrifice. It is a particular notion of the human person. This notion is Narcissistic, self-punishing, closed to relationship with others, and with God, even with its self. There is a kind of individualism here which separates the human from the other, whether it is another human or a god. It opens the way to a non-relational, impersonal view of life. Malina has observed that in historical fact it has led to the extreme separation of church and state, to the triumph of the technological, and to the elevation of economics (not kinship or even politics) as the focus of social institutions. There is a real dimension of depressiveness in the overall approach to sacrifice, which presents itself as a ritual of desperation in the face of an excess of negativity in human life. There are links between this view of the person and some telling analyses of contemporary western culture. But it is hard to see how such notions of sacrifice can be applied in any positive way to the kind of mealing practised by Jesus. (It is interesting to note, all the same, that Jesus has often been made the carrier of all of these negative notions of sacrifice.) An alternative approach to sacrifice is needed.

Sacrifice : a positive theory.

This approach is rooted in a phenomenology of gift-giving. Our language itself shows us how fundamental a reality 'giving' is. We speak of 'given' facts. To be is the same as to be given (in German: es gibt). we 'give and take', we give something away, we give way to another person. When we give a gift, we call it a present : and the temporal present is constituted by the gift of what has been, and of what will be. The gift, or the present, is in the here and now of the giving. It is like an e-vent that stands out from the run of things. It is not a thing, but a person, that gives and is given. In giving a gift, we give ourselves as givers, in the very act of giving, for the other to whom the gift and the giver are at once given.There is something sacred about the process of gift-giving. The act of giving is indeed a 'sacrum facere', a 'sacrifice'. It does not imply alienation, but overture. In it there is no irretrievability, but transfer of one's very self to the enjoyed delight of self and other. (Milbank: 1995)

The act of such giving does not of itself imply a demand for a return. Even if a return gift is made by the recipient of a gift, the return is never quite the same as the original gift. Each gift is unique, and different in its own right. One is original overture, the other is gracious gratitude. There is strictly no 'exchange' of gifts, there is only the integrated process of engagement and responsiveness, a giving and a thanksgiving. The receiving is itself active. It is implies in the recipient the recognition of now being a 'gifted' person, that is, of having been graced already before one could do anything about it. This is a kind of self-transcendence, that mirrors the self-transcendence of the original giver in the act of giving.This discovery of similarity in the transcending of what might seem to have been, in the process by which real difference is expressed and enjoyed, is the foundation of the primordial sense of analogy that each person carries in his or her personal awareness. There is a quality here that has no need of defence, and can thus be purely enjoyed : that is its sacredness. Sacrifice is a good term for these mysteries, but it is a term without any connotation of negativity, or of destruction. The difference here from previous theories is the focus on positive persons who positively interact, rather than on things that are used in the interaction. Interpersonal communication is itself a holy mystery.

It can be noted here that only with the sense of analogy outlined above, can there be a real and positive understanding of the act of giving as sacred and sacrificial. If human acts are regarded as all being much the same, that is, as univocal in significance, there is no real engagement of distinct persons. If they are regarded as all being quite different, that is, as equivocal in significance, there is no meeting of person with person. There is a link between the lack of appreciation of this analogy and the development of theories of sacrifice based on destruction.

The act of offering a gift is an act of agape, not of eros. It transcends the opacity of desire, and opens up a mysterious access between person and person. This is much more true when a human person makes a gift to God. A divine person is not only someone who can -infinitely- make an overture of self-giving to a finite person; a divine person is also someone who can -infinitely- be present to the offerer, receive and welcome the offering, and reciprocate, with the infinity of the divine Self, to the giver. Even more : a divine person is someone who so enjoys this event that he, as it were, longs for it, and is always in the posture of someone accessible and available for its happening.

This more positive vision of sacrifice does not sit very congruently with rituals of sacrifice that involve the killing of a living being. It is much more germane to certain Asian cultures, and their practice of unbloody sacrifice. In the Vedas, there is a focus on the sacrificial offering, to a deity, of rice-barley cakes, of flowers, of fruit. It is an act of wisdom, not of violence. It stems from the attitude known as Ahimsa, or non-injury, non-violence. It could well be suggested that, at least in the domain of ritual sacrifice, these cultures have reached a level of civilisation not (yet) achieved in the west. In Greek and in ancient Jewish cultures, there were rituals of sacrifice other than those known as 'expiatory' : they were called sacrifices of celebration and festivity. In some ways they share something of the higher gentleness of the Asian world. (Doniger:1990) (Malina: 1996)

Sacrifice : the genius of Israel.

Our interest in this chapter is in the (sacrificial) meals of Jesus, and as a result we need to focus on the Jewish context of sacrifice, and on rituals that are unbloody. Despite failures in practice and in some forms of interpretation, there is in the core mystery of Israel something that is not only open to the more positive mystery of sacrifice we have looked at, but that transforms even the practice of bloody sacrifice in that vein. What Jesus did in his meals was indeed a transformation of the idea of sacrifice, but it continued a metamorphosis that had already been present in the ancient times of Israel.

The whole genius of Israel, as a people of faith in covenant, could be termed a spirituality of living access to God. Their God was much nearer to them than the gods of the nations were to the gentile peoples. Their God was bound to them in the covenant bond. Even when they violated the covenant rules, their God never abandoned the covenant relationship with them. They had, always, the right and privilege of access to their God, so that He could heal and care for them. It is this faith that changed the meaning and interpretation of what they did, when they copied the bloody sacrificial rituals of their gentile neighbours.

When they took an animal, and laid hands on it to identify with it, they then took the blood from the animal to present it to their God. The result was in fact the destruction of the animal, but their intention was destructive. If they could have obtained the animal's blood without destroying or killing it, one senses that they would have done so. The aim of the act was the obtaining of the blood. The blood was considered to contain the life of the animal, and so to be sacred. Once they got hold of it, they took it to the place where they considered God to be specially present, for example, the holy of holies in the temple, and there they either poured it over the altar of God's presence, or sprinkled it towards the place of the presence. The meaning of the gesture was to unite their own life, symbolised by the blood, with God's life, and thus to renew the covenant that bonded these two lives into one.

The same positive, constructive mentality can be seen in the meaning they attached to the practice of burning the carcass of the animal that had been slain to obtain the blood. The purpose this time was not to annihilate or destroy the animal, or to reduce it to ashes. It was to turn the physical remains of the animal into smoke. Smoke (a little like blood) was considered to be holy, on the grounds that it could, naturally, rise to the heavens where God lived. They (in various intercessory formulas) identified their lives with each puff of smoke as it rose up, and allowed the smoke to go to the God of the heavens, and thus unite their lives with his, again, in a renewal of the covenant bond.

If anything remained of the animal, it was used for a communion ritual, in which they considered that God's people, and God himself, partook together in the same meal, since they partook of the same covenanted life. This transformation of the referents of the symbols of bloody sacrifice goes as far as possible towards a real change in the meaning of sacrifice itself.

Recent work from biblical researchers has shown the real meaning that was attached to the process we have translated into English under the name 'expiation'. It fits into the constructive model of sacrifice just suggested. It comes from the ancient ritual known as 'kipper' - specialists now tell us that it is very ancient indeed, and not, as was often said, a development in post-exilic Israel. The ritual took place in the temple, and was conducted by the high priest, on the day known as Yom Kippur. The word 'kipper' linguistically means to cover or recover something, to repair a hole, to cure a sickness, to mend a rift, to make good a torn or broken covering. The object of the verb in ancient times was not a person or a sin, but a place or a thing that was considered contaminated and in need of cleansing. Behind the temple practices and rituals that involved 'kipper', there were creation myths. What was taking place in the temple in the rituals, referred to things that had taken place, or better, were still actually taking place, in the heavens themselves. The temple was the symbol of heaven, and indeed the meeting place of heaven and earth. There was a liturgy in heaven which was being symbolised by the liturgy taking place in the temple. The Lord himself was the celebrant of the heavenly liturgy, and the high priest in the temple symbolised and stood for the Lord. What the high priest did, was considered to be actually done by the Lord. In the myth of the fall of the angels in the cosmos, it was thought that damage had bene done to the fabric of creation itself. The temple, like the cosmos, was considered to have been polluted thereby. The Lord was then believed to be purifying and cleansing the cosmos as the high priest cleansed and purified the temple by sprinkling it with blood and pouring blood, that is, life, on its significant places. (Barker: 1996)

Whenever iniquity occurred among the chosen covenant people, something similar to the original angelic fall was thought to have happened, and needed similar treatment. The high priest, acting in the name of the Lord, had to carry away, that is, remove, the iniquity, and cleanse the temple and the lifeworld of the people. The sin or iniquity was not carried by the victim that was slain, in a destructive interpretation of sacrifice. It was 'carried' by the high priest, in three complementary processes. First, he applied blood to the parts of the temple considered to be affected and contaminated by the iniquity committed. Secondly, he literally absorbed the negative effects of the transgression, by eating the flesh of the victim which symbolically represented the contaminated people : he assimilated and took them into himself. The mythic understanding meant that the Lord himself was prepared to do exactly this, and actually did it, as the high priest performed the temple ritual. Thirdly, the priest then transferred the iniquity he had taken upon himself, to the goat called the scapegoat (not the animal slain) : the hebrew word for this scapegoat is the same as the hebrew word for devil. He then banished the scapegoat that bore the iniquity and removed both from the people.

In the Danielic prophecies of the Son of Man, we find a myth that takes these themes even further. This Son of Man, anointed and chosen by God, ascends to the Throne (of God) itself, bringing with him the blood of the Just. The idea is that there will be one Central Man of all history, of all Jewish and indeed human history, who as a universal high priest will cleanse and carry away universal iniquity itself. This theme is central to the argument of the epistle to the Hebrews, which identifies Jesus as this priest, in these very functions of priesthood.

In the Isaian songs of the suffering servant of the Lord, the same core of ideas is present. The suffering servant is seen to sprinkle many peoples, and carry away their sicknesses and weaknesses; he is charged with the defilement of all of us; the covenant bond of our peace is his responsibility; he pours out his very life as sin-offering. Matthew has used the themes, and many of the word-patterns, of these songs, to describe what Jesus did in his healing ministry in Galilee.

The letters to Ephesians and Colossians, in the hymns which form their prologues, suggest something of a cosmic reconciliation achieved in this manner. In doing so they pick up the lines of Paul's great vision of cosmic 'togethering' in 2 Corinthians 5.

It is a pity that the ancient Hebrew word, 'kipper', has been translated into English as 'atone' or 'expiate'. It gives the impression that the subject of the verb was the human being who had sinned, and not the Lord, operating through the high priest. It also gives the impression that the object of the operation was the appeasement of the divine anger, and not the cleansing of humanity and the removal of iniquity and its traces from the human world. As a result, the thematics of cleansing ('kipper') have been changed into those of expiation, and the negative and destructive theories of sacrifice have constructed a foundation for themselves.

A natural logic could be discerned here, which would want to see the mindset of this theology of access and positivity in the gift-offering of sacrifice, extended to the situation of unbloody sacrifice, and in particular to that of the family meal. Historically, this did not happen in Israel, at least, in times prior to those of Jesus. Malina has suggested that Levitical reforms of sacrifice virtually eliminated domestic sacrifice, so that all recognised forms of sacrifice henceforth were, in his terminology, public and political. Whatever the reasons, there is no evidence that an extension of the constructive theory of sacrifice to the meal, has actually occurred.

Sacrifice : the meals of Jesus in Galilee.

That is, until Jesus began to celebrate the meals of the Kingdom, in the full consciousness that the Kingdom had advented through the healing miracles. Then there was much more than a theory about a positive God. There was an overwhelming by the positive activity of that positive God. The persons entering into the conviviality of a meal were not then ordinary human persons meeting the ordinaryness of their everyday needs. They were privileged persons who lived in the kairos of the divine coming, and in a sense of the divine positive presence, that had never previously been experienced in the history of Israel, or of humankind.

This is not simply a statement of fact. The manner in which these people were constituted as persons is different, and depends on the Irruption of God in Galilee. There is a new sort of personhood here. It is seen in Jesus ; in him there not only a subordination and a sublimation of anal needs, and oral needs,to relational dimensions of his being, but those very relational dimensions are themselves subordinated and sublimated to the active presence of God in and through him. There is an integrity in him which is not 'from below' but 'from above'. The point at which being is at its fullness in him, that is, the core of his person, is the point at which he is wholly dependent on the invasion of the divine Fullness into him, and through him into others.

At the same time, the divine Fullness here is different from an abstract idea of that Fullness. Divine personality itself presents itself differently. It is revealed in the activity that happened in Galilee. It is not simply that there was a large quantity of it, there was a different quality of it. One way of putting it comes from the model of 'kipper' outlined above. In the ritual of 'kipper', the high priest, acting in the name and person of the Lord himself, absorbed, and so carried away the iniquity of the entire Jewish lifeworld. In the Galileean event, there is a glimpse of a God, who, precisely as a divine person, 'absorbs' and 'removes' all the iniquity of the lifeworld of finite persons. This absorption is not something passive : it is a mysterious activity of this different God. It is something like the presence of a powerful light, 'absorbing' the darkness and removing it. To conceive of a God who is not only supremely positive, but who thereby absorbs every possible negative, may ask something of standard systematic theology, but it is the real claim of the ancient Jewish ritual of 'kipper', and the real significance of the positive meaning of Jewish sacrifice. It is nearly impossible to find examples and analogies for such a mystery. There is perhaps one : it is the way that peasants, especially Galileean peasants of old, retained in difficult living circumstances a real positivity of life, in which they 'took in' the negatives that occurred to them all, and so 'took away' the power of these negatives to overcome them. There is something in peasanthood, which almost defies analysis, but which is very like the personhood of the God who moves in, hurriedly and definitively, to take to himself and remove from other persons all the negativity of their entire cosmos. Jesus is the Son of this God, person originating from his Personhood, and he is peasant among these peasants, of one 'stuff' with them all.

The realisation of this mystery leads to a new appreciation of the Galileean meals of Jesus. They are not simply meals as such. They are not a revindication of domestic sacrifice. They are not just occasions of a human interpersonal conviviality. They are events in which the kind of God we have spoken of, and the kind of peasants we have spoken of, come together in mutual recognition and action, and partake of the one active mystery of the absorption and removal of all negativity by sharing in the one table. A 'kingdom- meal' is a profound demonstration of the presence of God, Jesus, and peasants together, in the integration of primordial bodily needs into the divine need to renew the cosmos.

The purity demanded of such a coming together is of a different order from the purity usually required of ancient meals. It is the purity of God irrupting into a world made pure in a new way by his active coming. It is non-exclusive : the whole theme of non-discrimination is demanded by it. In that sense, the advent of the kingdom has redefined purity. It is not a human convention, for the sake of boundary marking and internal organisation of a specific human group. It is a divine attribute, participated into a world of finitude that would not know it without receiving the gift. Jesus is not primarily someone who wanted to demonstrate his willingness to include the marginals and nobodies. He was unable to do anything but demonstrate how God included and hallowed them all, while respecting all of them in their own different realities. A new Sabbath in the table of the poor, that was the climax and the restoration of creation itself. The difference between Jesus' meals and the meals of Qumran does not lie principally in the inclusion or exclusion of 'undesirables'. It lies in the recognition or not of the actual coming of the Kingdom of the all-desiring God. It is the Kingdom, understood in this sense, that makes all the difference. Neither persons nor meals can be the same after its coming. There is no room for destructive theories of sacrifice, and no need to fall back on other models of unbloody sacrifice (for example, from Asian cultures). There is something theological special about the meals of Jesus that has not been present in any previous ritual. The sacrificial process, if it is still appropriate to use the term, is initiated by the Gifting God who 'kingdoms' his cosmos, not by human beings who approach him with their own gifts. We are not far from a recognition of the primordiality of the act of thanksgiving in our access to this living God.

Links with theologies of Eucharist.

The last supper of Jesus, and the christian Eucharist, will be treated in chapter 12. There are, however, three accepted areas of discussion concerning the Eucharist that have contributed to the obscuring of the original meaning of the meals of Jesus, and of their special sacrificial dimensions. These same areas have thereby contributed to an obscuring of the meal and sacrifice dimensions of the Eucharist. They are : first, the tendency to contrast the ritual concerning the bread, with that concerning the cup; secondly, the tendency to contrast the ritual concerning the entire 'consecration' (of bread and cup) with the whole symbolic process; and thirdly, the tendency to contrast the entire arena of ritual process with the real presence of the person of the Eucharistic Christ. These tendencies end up by fragmenting the mystery, because they fail to locate in the divine activity at work in everything that is happening.

The first of these tendencies is to contrast the bread rite with the cup rite. Much more will be said about this in chapter 12. For now, it can suffice to say that a contrast between bread and cup has been interpreted as a contrast between body and blood, indeed a 'sacramental' separation of body from blood, that is, in a sacramental and mystical sense, a death. This contrast does not appear to be intended in the earliest biblical texts. Its presence in the liturgical and theological tradition has opened the door to destruction theories of sacrifice as applied to the Eucharist. It has thereby closed the door to any understanding of the Mass as a meal.

The second tendency is to contrast the 'consecration' rite with the whole symbolic process. This has, unfortunately, created a kind of opposition between the consecration and the rest of the liturgical rite. In the early centuries, this gave rise to grave conflict between western and eastern churches, specifically on the question of the role of the epiclesis of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist. In effect, in the west, the entire remainder of the rite, including the epiclesis, was so subordinated to the consecration, that dimensions of sacrifice were sought in the words of consecration as if they existed in solitary isolation. This too removed the congruence of seeing the rite in any sense as a meal : a meal is not primarily a formula of (sacred) words.

The third tendency is to contrast the entire ritual process with the person of Christ, present really in the Eucharist. This has created an impression that the real presence of the Lord, as an objective reality, is more important than and different from the signification of the ritual and its symbols. It has focussed discussion away from the primacy of the meal and the sacrifice, for this reason.

The basic problem with all these tendencies is that the divine action (the coming of the Kingdom) is not included or given sufficient prominence in the Eucharistic event. The double ritual,in its entire symbolic context, and with the real presence of the Lord, is explored in a forgetfulness of the most important dimension of all : the actual adventing of the God of the poor.

Something is lost to the theological synthesis, and something is lost to the historical reality of what Jesus did.

An impression could be taken that something is unfinished in the meals of Jesus, especially in their positive sacrificial dimension. An impression could be formed that Jesus, as a person, is trying to perform a fully personalised, relational act of self-giving, and has not yet found the right context in which he can do so. An impression could be felt that he can do more as a person, that he can express who he is and what he wants to do, in ways that are deeper and better than these. There is a sense of a level of presence which, so far, in his life, he has not fully manifested. Here we can simply register this sense of incompleteness. It is one of the reasons that there is more in the last supper, and in the supper of the resurrected Lord, than in any of the Galileean meals. Only there, will those meals find their ultimate point of reference and meaning.

Readings.

M.Barker, The Great Angel. A Study of Israel's Second God. London, 1992.

M.Barker, Atonement : the rite of healing, Scottish Journal of

Theology, 1996, 1-20.

W.Beers, Women and sacrifice : male Narcissism and the psychology of religion, Detroit, (Wayne State U.Press), 1992.

M.Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Princeton (Princeton U.Press) 1986.

B.Chilton, A feast of meanings : Eucharistic theologies from Jesus through Johannine circles, Leiden (Brill), 1994.

R.O'Toole, review of Chilton, Biblica, 1995.

J.D.Crossan, The Historical Jesus : the life of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. See Chapter 13, Magic and meal, pp. 303-353, especially pp. 332 ff.

W.Doniger, Jesus, Myth and Ritual, Chicago (U.of Chicago Press), 1990.

A.Dewey, R.Miller, Where there's enough bread : the feeding stories, Jesus Seminar Seminar Papers, 1994, 1-14.

R.Funk, Honest to Jesus, 1996.

R.Hecht, Studies on Sacrifice, 1970-1980, Religious Studies Review, 1982, 253-259.

N.Jay, Throughout your generations forever: sacrifice, religion and paternity, Chicago (U.of Chicago Press), 1992.

B.Lang, The roots of the Eucharist in Jesus' praxis, Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers, 1992, 467-472.

B.Lang, The Eucharist : a sacrificial formula preserved, Bible Review, 1994, 45-49.

J.Levenson, The death and resurrection of the beloved son : the transformation of sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, New Haven (Yale U.Press), 1993.

B.Malina, Mediterranean Sacrifice : dimensions of domestic and political religion, Biblical Theology Bulletin, 1996, 26-44. With bibliography.

J.Meier, A marginal Jew : Rethinking the historical Jesus, vol.2, New York, (Doubleday), 1994.

J.Milbank, Can a gift be given ? Prolegomena to a future Trinitarian metaphysic, Modern Theology, 1995, 119-161.

J.Milbank, Only theology overcomes metaphysics, New Blackfriars, 1995, 325-341.

S.Moore, Mark and Luke in poststructuralist perspectives, New Haven (Yale U.Press) 1992.

N.O'Donoghue, In the beginning was the Gift... a marginal note on

'God without Being', New Blackfriars, 1995, 351-353.

K.O'Shea, Person in Analysis, Bristol, (Wyndham Hall), 1996.

J.Powers,

E.Sanders, The historical figure of Jesus, London (Allen Lane) 1993.

I.Strenski, Between theory and specialty : sacrifice in the nineties, Religious Studies Review, 1996, 10-20.

H.Taussig, The meals of the historical Jesus, Jesus Seminar Seminar Papers, 1994, 30-37.

G.Ward, Introducing Jean-Luc Marion, New Blackfriars, 1995, 316-324.

Return to Index page