The Greek word for giving thanks is εὐχαριστῶ (eucharisteo), which is where we get the name for our Sunday service of worship – Eucharist. So the Eucharist is basically a service of thanksgiving. Traditionally, the church, through its liturgy, has given thanks to God for sacrificing His only Son, Jesus Christ, in order that humankind might be restored to a good relationship with God, and share in eternal life with God.
That liturgy, and the worldview of the church, has of course been based on the traditional Christian image of God as a supernatural being who exists outside of time and space, and who intervenes directly in the affairs of the world at given points in time to bring about His will in the world.
But what if that image of God is not who or what God really is?
During the first session of our recent series of ‘Faith Based Conversations’, we discussed that very question. As we acknowledged in that session, the traditional Christian image of God, that we see in the creeds of the church, was shaped by how people in those early centuries understood the world and the universe. They believed the Earth was at the centre of the universe and that the Sun orbited the Earth. They had no understanding of the vastness of the universe that science has provided us in the twenty-first century.
Our discussion during that first session of ‘Faith Based Conversations’ challenged the traditional image of God, and I was surprised at the number of people in our group who actually didn’t believe in that traditional image of God, but who were still perfectly comfortable with their faith. The various ways in which they understood God, or thought about God, while different to that traditional image of God, didn’t undermine their underlying Christian beliefs.
Arguably, the most important aspect of the liturgy of the Eucharist is what Anglicans call the Thanksgiving Prayer, during which the priest recites the ‘Words of Institution’ that were attributed to Jesus at the ‘Last Supper’: “Take, eat, this is my body given for you . . . . . this is my blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
Depending on the particular Christian denomination, these words, which are associated with receiving the bread and wine in the service, can be interpreted as literally referring to the body and blood of Jesus, or as being symbolic of Jesus’ body and blood. I imagine that in any congregation of worshippers, regardless of the denomination, there are probably some people who believe the bread and wine are the physical body and blood of Jesus, and some who believe they are symbolic, and then there are possibly others who aren’t convinced one way or the other. Does it really matter?
The earliest record we have of the ‘Words of Institution’ is in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, written two decades after the death of Jesus, and some fifteen to twenty years before the first gospel (the Gospel of Mark). This means the ‘Words of Institution’ must have been circulating as part of Christian tradition for some years before being written down. Does this make it more likely that Jesus did actually utter these words, or something similar to them, at a final meal with his disciples? Possibly, but we can’t know for sure.
Each of the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) contain a version of the Last Supper that includes the ‘Words of Institution.’ The Gospel of John, however, does not. In John’s Gospel, the final meal that Jesus has with his disciples is famous for Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. There are no ‘Words of Institution.’ Instead, John devotes much of chapter 6 in his gospel to the subject of the ‘living bread’ or ‘bread of life’, which is of course a reference to Jesus. John uses what we would call ‘Eucharistic’ language to describe this:
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” (John 6:53-58 NIV11)
John doesn’t intend for his readers to take these words literally. He is saying to his readers that they must take Jesus’ life into their life. Eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood, is the way he chooses to communicate that.
When we receive the bread and wine (or body and blood of Jesus if you like) during the Eucharist, it serves as a reminder to us that we are to take the life of Jesus into our own lives. It is a reminder to us that Jesus transcended the human barriers of division that sought to keep people apart. When we gather as a community of faith to share in the Eucharist, we are reminded that although we may be people from diverse backgrounds, with diverse personalities and interests, we are all one in Jesus Christ. That is something worth giving thanks for.
