The Eucharist in Scripture
Part I of a three-part teaching series
This Sunday, I head over to Church of the Messiah in Gwynedd, PA to teach a three-week class on the Eucharist, alongside a six-week training for Eucharistic Visitors.
Here’s my handout for Part I: The Eucharist in Scripture
Argument
Many Episcopalians find Sunday worship to be “more liturgical” than other Christian traditions. The earliest Christians, however, found Eucharistic worship to be a focused distillation of Jewish worship.
The Book of Common Prayer calls the Eucharist a “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” This relates our worship to an offering called the “thanksgiving offering” (zevach todah) in Hebrew and the “sacrifice of praise” (thusian aineseos) in Greek.
Learning about this offering can help us understand the biblical roots of our practice and imagine what more it could mean to us.
Pathway
After learning the four key components of the “thanksgiving offering” from Scripture and Tradition, we will read three key Scripture passages, and think together about what the Eucharist means. Then, we will take down questions for the next session. Time permitting, we will close by reading a reflection on the Eucharist by the Catholic liturgical theologian Dom Gregory Dix.
Key Components
Everyone eats them. Leviticus introduces the thanksgiving offering (7:12–18) as one of Israel’s three “peace offerings” or “communion meals” (7:11–36). What made these sacrifices distinct is that they were eaten not only by the priest, but also by the laity.
No leftovers allowed. Lev 7:16 prohibits Israelites from eating meat left over the next day, distinguishing this meal from other communion meals.
Traditional practices emerged. Herman Gunkel identified three elements you can see in the Scriptures: “The person who is to offer the sacrifice prostrates himself before the temple (Ps 138:2). A number of relatives and acquaintances who expect to participate in the sacred meal stand around him (Ps 22:26 [Heb 22:27]). Then, with a sacred goblet in his hands (Ps 116:13), and prior to the actual sacrifice, he sings his song with a loud voice.”
Thanksgivings will be offered forever. Because thanksgiving offerings were not offered for sin, Jews asserted that these offerings would endure forever: “In the world to come all sacrifices will be annulled, but thanksgiving will not be annulled.”
Thanksgiving stories in the Bible
Jonah 2:1–9
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying:
“I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’ The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”
Psalm 22:1, 19–29
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
But you, O Lord, do not be far away! O my help, come quickly to my aid! Deliver my soul from the sword, my life from the power of the dog. Save me from the mouth of the lion; from the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.
I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; in the midst of the congregation I will praise you. You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel. For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him.
From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever!
All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations.
Luke 15
Now his elder son was in the field, and as he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. The slave replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has got him back safe and sound.”
Then the elder son became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command, yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your assets with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!”
Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”
“Was ever another command so obeyed?”, excerpted from Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy.
Was ever another command so obeyed?
For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.
Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the
fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them.
And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.
To those who know a little of Christian history probably the most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well–remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves—and sins and temptations and prayers—once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each of them once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the Eucharist, and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew—just as really and pathetically as I do these things.
There is a little ill–spelled ill–carved rustic epitaph of the fourth century from Asia Minor:—‘Here sleeps the blessed Chione, who has found Jerusalem for she prayed much’. Not another word is known of Chione, some peasant woman who lived in that vanished world of Christian Anatolia. But how lovely if all that should survive after sixteen centuries were that one had prayed much, so that the neighbours who saw all one’s life were sure one must have found Jerusalem! What did the Sunday Eucharist in her village church every week for a life–time mean to the blessed Chione—and to the millions like her then, and every year since? The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought.
Questions?
If you have a question about the Eucharist — a biblical, historical, theological, or practical question — send me a note at jack@good-samaritan.org, and I will try to address it in Part II of this series on Sunday March 22.