Today’s readings: Exodus 24, 3-8; Hebrews 9, 11-15; Mark 14, 12-16.22-26.
The eucharist offers an alternative vision of what constitutes a peaceful social body. The feast of Corpus Christi we celebrate today is meant to provoke in us a deep uneasiness in the face of all that is going wrong in the world we inhabit. This calls for a deep meditation on a theme which lends itself to a myriad of understandings.
Our understanding of the eucharist, in fact, determines the vision we project in the world of the Church itself and of our presence and responsibility for the world at large. The way the eucharist is projected in today’s Scriptures and the way we normally take it seem to be at variance, at times even radically distant.
Throughout the history of theology, an inversion came about, making the eucharistic host an object of reverence, rather than the centre of a communal performance. But the more we emphasise the miracle of transubstantiation at the priest’s hands rather than the transformation of the community itself in its participation in the eucharist, the more we fail to grasp the real meaning of the liturgies we celebrate and their implications for the concrete life.
Mark distinguishes between the wine, as fruit of the vine, and the new wine in the Kingdom of God. Even the letter to the Hebrews speaks of Jesus entering the sanctuary “once and for all”, in contrast to the tent made by men’s hands. There is the idea of something accomplished, no longer provisional, surely no longer in the cultic vein.
We have to keep in mind that apart from John, for the other three gospels the immediate context for the institution of the eucharist is Christ’s impending passion or the gift of self. It is in connection with this giving of self and the death he endured that the words of Jesus “Take it, this is my body” are to be read.
The context of what Jesus is doing is the festival approaching and the community preparing to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem with sacrificial lambs. It was a central feast of the cult in Jerusalem. But in the background, there was an undercover operation of the authorities against Jesus. Mark fully integrates this in his own narrative symbolics. As Ched Myers writes in his political reading of this gospel, this is “Mark’s final assault upon the Jewish symbolic field”.
Jesus is not, after all, participating in the temple-centred feast of Passover. This eucharist here in Mark is not backward-looking but forward-looking. This is a completely different narrative that sets the scene even for us today to grasp the real meaning of where we should situate the eucharist in today’s social and political context of the Christian commitment.
Jesus abolished once for all the ancient rites of Israel and we need not reinvent them. That confirms how unfortunate it is when many still focus on the ritual part of it, as if ritual can ever be an end in itself. We cannot separate the eucharist from our responsibilities towards the world and humanity. So when Jesus takes the bread, breaks it, shares it, and tells his disciples that the bread is his body, he speaks of a way of living in which his followers’ bodies, like his, are to be gifts for the nourishment of others.
The eucharist, writes author Matthew Whelan, is no mere moment in a Mass or service. Rather, it is the summit of Christian life, toward which everything is directed and from which everything flows. For a Church focussed upon the communal performance of the eucharist, and situated squarely in the prophetic tradition, hunger is symptomatic of a profound wrong in the present social organisation. “There are so many hungry people among us that God would only dare to appear in the form of bread.”
The world we inhabit, with all its beauty yet marked as it is with its wrongs, can easily be likened to a disordered social body with so many wrongs which are simply made tolerable rather than remedied. The eucharist provides nourishment lest we succumb to uneasiness and vision in all that unsettles the core of ourselves.