Wanderings along the road to Emmaus

On the day of the Resurrection two companions, disciples of Jesus before their hopes had been dashed by his death, were walking along the road from Jerusalem to the town of Emmaus, when they met a mysterious stranger, and struck up a conversation. They spoke of the tumultuous events in Jerusalem of the previous few days, of the Messiah and of the reports of Jesus' Resurrection. And then, "beginning with Moses and all the prophets, [the stranger] interpreted to them what referred to [the Messiah] in all the scriptures." Luke continues:

As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. But they urged him, "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over." So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.

Then they said to each other, "Were not our hearts burning (within us) while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?"

So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the eleven and those with them who were saying, "The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!" Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread. Luke 24:28-35

"The breaking of the bread" is what the earliest Christians called the celebration that we today call the Mass (see, e.g., Acts 2:42). And if the liturgical significance of this episode still isn't obvious enough, consider that both halves of the Mass are represented in this story: the Liturgy of the Word, in which the Scriptures are read and explained, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the re-enactment of the Last Supper. How important then must be the Mass! In Luke, the institution of the Mass is both the last thing Jesus does in this world before the Passion, and the first thing he does once he was raised.

But that only begins to hint at the incredible mystery and significance of the Mass. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you" Luke 22:20, Jesus says. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood." With these words Jesus places the Mass at the very center of God's salvation plan. It is the covenant. It is the Passion. Indeed, the mystery of the Mass is woven throughout the whole of the salvation story laid out for us in Scripture. It appears at all of the most significant moments in history. In God's ancient covenant with Abraham, the covenant that created the Jewish people and bound them forever to God, the covenant that Jesus fulfills and supersedes with his "new covenant" at the Last Supper. It appears on the doorstep of the Exodus, on that terrifying night when the Angel of Death spared only the children those who had marked their doors with the blood of a lamb, a night ever after commemorated by the Jews in the Passover celebration, by Jesus at the Last Supper, and by Christians in the Mass. It is there with the Jews in their Exodus through the desert, in the manna, the mysterious bread from heaven that sustained them on their journey, just as the Eucharist sustains us on our journey through life: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world" John 6:51. It is there in Abraham's sacrifice of bread and wine with the mysterious, ancient pagan priest Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18), before there even was a Jewish people, in a time so ancient that Abraham still had no problem worshiping God with pagan priest. It is there in Jesus' parable of the grain of wheat that must die in order to produce fruit (John 12:24), it is there when he says "I am the vine," (John 15:5), in the multiplication of the loaves (John 6), and in the "give us this day our daily bread" of the Our Father. It saturates the Book of Revelation. It is present throughout the long history of sacrifice by the Jews in the temple, all of which was intended to prepare us to understand the sacrifice that God would one day make for us.

The Bible is an amazing thing, easy enough to lead even the simplest people to God, hard enough to occupy the greatest minds, the minds of men like Aquinas and Augustine, for a lifetime. I once read a review of Moby Dick in which the reviewer noted that the story was so saturated with metaphors layered upon imagery layered upon story elements, each interacting with another, deepening the others' meaning, adding new perspectives and twists, that the story became something that even Melville himself could never have explained. The Eucharist in Scripture is like that. Each thread is a path leading to a deeper understanding of God's salvation plan, but the paths soon intersect with and weave into one another until no mind is subtle enough to comprehend the tapestry of the whole. I certainly am not able to follow every path. In Revelations and in the priestly sacrifice of the Jews I can perceive at a distance whole continents of meaning, the journey through which I have not the time nor the training to undertake.

But to have a blog you have to have words. So I will try to follow a few of the paths that have most occupied my mind throughout my life. To start, I have to say that I am not a fan of the term, "the Mass." It is a random, meaningless word unconnected with the early Church. It serves only as a barrier between Catholics and other Christians, separating us from one another with its other-ness. According to Mike Aquilina, author of The Mass of the Early Christians,

Mass is a medieval English coinage derived from the Latin rite's words of dismissal: Ite, missa est ("Go, it is ended"). The first generations of believers called their worship by many other names, each evocative and some even poetic. In the beginning it was most commonly referred to as "the breaking of the bread." This, however, was immediately supplemented by "the sacrifice," and related terms such as "the offering" and "the oblation"; for the Mass was understood to be the Church's participation in the once-for-all sacrifice of the new covenant. Some called the new rite "the liturgy," from the Greek leitourgia, meaning "public service." The Latins, from an early date, used the term "sacrament," while the Greeks favored "the mysteries." Some terms were merely descriptive, such as "the table of the Lord," "the Lord's supper," "the chalice," and "the altar." Others were compact, but rich in meaning: "the passion of the Lord," "the presence," "the communion." Overwhelmingly though, the title that won the day was "the Eucharist," from the Greek eucharistia, which means, literally, "thanksgiving."

Using this spectacular web site we can see that "εὐχαριστήσας" (eucharistia) is the Greek word used by Luke and the other New Testament authors to describe Jesus' actions at the Last Supper: "and he took bread, gave thanks (eucharistia), and broke it, giving it to them." So for the rest of this post I will use the word "Eucharist" in place of "the Mass." This helpfully blurs the distinction between the ceremony and its object. This is useful because Jesus and the Church themselves blur the distinction between them, and between the Passion and the covenant and the mystery of salvation itself. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood." In the Eucharist we are transported back to Calvary. The past is made present, and the covenant is made manifest.

In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says that he found in Christianity just that aura of the unexpected that characterizes real things. "Reality," he says, "is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity....If it offered just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have." Nowhere is this more true than in the Eucharist. Not only is it unexpected, it is shocking and often scandalous, unasked for and even unwanted. We would not have thought to ask God for it, and had we thought to ask, we would not have dared to do so. One of the saddest scenes of the Bible occurs in John 6, when Jesus was abandoned by his disciples because of his teaching about the Eucharist: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him," he said, and "then many of his disciples who were listening said, 'This saying is hard; who can accept it?'....As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, 'Do you also want to leave?'"

It's impossible to read this passage without contemplating the sad loss of fellowship between Catholics and Protestants, who because of the sinfulness of the Reformation-era Church abandoned, not the person of Jesus, but his teaching about the Eucharist, or at least the long unbroken understanding of those teachings that the Church had held since the earliest days, since Paul penned the first known written description of the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11, and warned that "anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself." Because of the neo-original sins of the Reformation-era Church, which drove out the Reformers, and because of the sins of the Reformers themselves in turning their backs on a Church that Jesus himself promised never to abandon, we find ourselves in the sad state we are in today, unable to come together as Christians and share in the profound mystery of the Eucharist, the mystery of salvation itself.

"This cup is the new covenant in my blood." With these words Jesus ties a thread from the Eucharist into God's ancient covenant with Abraham, the original covenant in blood. With this covenant God promised the land of Israel to Abraham and his descendants. With this covenant God bound himself to the people of Abraham, with his promise that "I shall be your God and you shall be my people." With this covenant the Jewish people came to be. In Genesis 15 God said to Abraham, "I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans (in modern-day Iraq) to give you this land as a possession. 'O Lord GOD,' he asked, 'How am I to know that I shall possess it?'" Abraham asked this not because he lacked faith in God's promise, but because it seemed appropriate to him that the bond be formalized by some concrete act. He asks God for guidance, and God answers, "Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon."

The ceremony that God then performed was one familiar to the ancient Semitic tribes: it was the formation of a covenant relationship. When we today hear the word "covenant", we tend to envision a kind of contract, but that is not at all the picture that the ancient Semites would have had. In a modern contract, two sides agree to be bound by the terms of the agreement, or else to face the consequences of the law. But among the wandering tribes of the deserts of the ancient Near East, law was not the strongest force that bound one people to another; the strongest bonds were those of family, clan and tribe. When two tribes formed a covenant with one another, those were the bonds they were attempting to extend to one another. They were saying, "Our two tribes are now united, we are one and the same family, and we will treat an attack upon you as we would an attack on one of our own." A contract may be nullified if one of the parties fails to live up to the terms of the agreement, and the two parties may then go their separate ways. But a covenant can never be nullified, any more than your father can stop being related to you just because he breaks a promise to you. Tribes entering into a covenant relationship were pledging a kind of union that by its very nature cannot be broken. It is exactly like marriage used to be: indissoluble, "the two become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). This is why the Passion and the Eucharist are so often referred to as the wedding ceremony between Christ and the Church, particularly by Paul and in the book of Revelation. The new covenant, like the old one, is a marriage, an indissoluble union between God and humanity, the two made one flesh, God and man united as never before conceived. From here lead other threads that may be followed to a deeper understanding of the Eucharist, but that will have to wait for another day.

In the ancient world of Abraham, when two tribes formed a covenant they would perform a ceremony that seems strange and barbaric to us today: they would cut a cow in half, the two pieces would be separated, and the tribes would walk together between the pieces. Blood would have been everywhere--this was intended to be a very bloody ritual. Blood was the symbol of life among the Semitic tribes. By walking together through the blood the tribes were signifying the new unity of their formerly separate lives. This also explains why the sign that God chose to mark his covenant with the Jews--circumcision--is such a bloody one, and together with the location of the cut obviously signifies the union of the life of Jews and their descendants with the life of God.

"[Abram] brought him all these, split them in two, and placed each half opposite the other; but the birds he did not cut up." Lest we doubt the gore of this scene, performed in the heat of the desert sun, Genesis continues, "Birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses, but Abram stayed with them. As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram, and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him....When the sun had set and it was dark, there appeared a smoking brazier and a flaming torch, which passed between those pieces." In a change-up, God walks alone through the bloody pieces, while Abraham remains in a trance. This will be an unequal covenant, a covenant of God sharing his life with us; we have little to offer to God in this arrangement. Jesus' new covenant would be similarly one-sided, a bath of blood through which God alone must walk, in order that his life could be shared with us. But from Jesus' side on Calvary flowed not just blood, but blood and water, and the sign of the new covenant in the people of God would not be a bloody one like circumcision, but Baptism, a sign of water. Blood, the symbol of life in the flesh, would be superseded by water, the symbol of life in the Spirit. Thus in the new covenant are we united to God in a new and deeper way, and even Baptism is enmeshed in the threads that emanate from the Eucharist.

If the blood of the Passion, which is the blood of the Eucharist, derives from the blood of the Abrahamic covenant, it derives no less from the blood of the Passover lamb, for the Eucharist is nothing other than the continued Christian celebration of the Jewish Passover meal. On that terrifying night of the Passover, when God unleashed the tenth and final plague upon the Egyptians for their enslavement of the Jews, the Jewish people were spared from the wrath of the Angel of Death only by the blood of a lamb splashed across their doorways, the blood of an innocent shed to protect the guilty. We as Christians also have the blood of Christ upon our dwelling places, marking us as a people set apart, protecting us from Death and freeing us from our slavery to sin. And just as the Jewish Passover meal was celebrated with unleavened bread, so too is the Eucharist today, celebrated with the waybread of a traveling people, a people who can't tarry long enough in one place to give their bread time to rise. Thus the Eucharist is also food for the journey, "our daily bread" that sustains us in our long travels through the deserts of this life.

So through the Eucharist Jesus' sacrifice upon Calvary is made present for us; we are allowed to receive it directly, in person, not as something that happened long ago in some distant land. We are given a seat at the wedding feast of the Lamb, the marriage covenant that binds Jesus to the people of God. We are allowed, like Abraham, to witness God walking through the blood of the new covenant. And we, like the Jews in the deserts of the Sinai, are blessed with the daily miracle of the bread that comes down from heaven, which becomes food for our long journey through the deserts of life.

All this we can perceive and, within our limited capacity, can understand by following the trails that are woven through salvation history as recorded in Scripture. And yet none of this lessens the raw shock of the central truth of the Eucharist: that God, creator of all the universe, loves us so much, so desires intimacy with us, that he wishes to literally feed us with himself. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you." The long ages of sacrifice by man, Jew and pagan alike, of food for the gods to eat, has been turned on its head, and we are faced with a God who wishes to sacrifice himself for us, that we may have him as food to eat. There would appear to be no bottom to the insane humility of this God, who descended from the heights of glory to become one of us, as if a man were to want to become a worm in order to save worms from their sins; who washed the feet of his disciples; who underwent an unjust, unspeakably tortuous death for us; this God wants also to become the food that sustains us in our journey through life. We cannot truly fault the disciples of Jesus who abandoned him over this insane teaching, nor the Protestants who could no longer trust in a doctrine as shocking and bizarre as this, when delivered by a corrupt and broken Church. All we can do, when faced personally with the question that Jesus posed to the Twelve when the rest had abandoned him over this teaching--"Do you also want to leave?"--is to recall, as did the disciples on the road to Emmaus, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us and opened the Scriptures to us?" and to answer as Simon Peter answered: "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."