Reflections - Maxwell Ojukwu - 11108

Maxwell Chibueze Ojukwu, OCD, 11108T

The Eucharist as a Gift of Love

Book: The Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis

The Eucharist is the self gift of Christ to us. It reveals the love of God the Father who gave us his only Son to be our food by giving us his body and blood (Jn 3:16-17; 6:51). It is for this reason that the Church finds in the Eucharist the very center of life, and she is always anxious to proclaim to all, that God is love. Precisely because Christ has become our food of truth, the Church turns to everyone, inviting them freely to accept God’s gift, a gift given by the Triune God, thus St. Augustine will exclaim “If you see love, you see the Trinity”.

The Lord gives the Church this gift of himself and commands her to make it sacramentally present for all ages in remembrance of him. And this is done through the guidance of the Holy Spirit who is Christ’s first gift to the Church when according to Cyril of Jerusalem: “we call upon God in his mercy to send his Holy Spirit upon the offerings before us, to transform the bread into the body of Christ and the wine into the blood of Christ. Whatever the Holy Spirit touches is sanctified and completely transformed". This shows the importance of the prayer of anaphora which contains the epiclesis.

In relation to the other sacraments, the Eucharistic sacrifice perfects within us the gifts given to us at Baptism which are the gifts of the Spirit given for the building up of the Church. In this way, the Holy Eucharist, brings Christian initiation to completion and represents the centre and goal of all sacramental life. It is love for the Eucharist and to be worthy to receive Christ in the Eucharist that pushes us to embrace the sacrament of reconciliation. It is by means of the Eucharist that the sick is united with Christ who suffered for love of humanity. The Eucharist is closely linked to all the sacraments and manifests in a unique way the love of Christ that is present in the celebration of these sacraments. In this way, the Eucharist is a mystery to be celebrated.

The Eucharist should be celebrated as an authentic mystery of faith, and with a clear awareness that the intellectus fidei has a primary relationship to the Church's liturgical practice. The Eucharist is not something we should just believe but something we should celebrate as well because it is the radiant expression of the paschal mystery, in which Christ draws us to himself and calls us to communion with the command to ‘do this in his remembrance’. Thus, when we celebrate, we recall the gift of Christ’s love, and we are invited to celebrate as a community of love.

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The Eucharist as a Resurrection Event

O’Collins J. Believing in the Resurrection: The Promise and meaning of the Risen Jesus, New York: Paulist Press 2009.

The command “Do this in remembrance of me”, would never have been practiced if Christ did not rise from the dead. In other words, the Eucharist would never have begun if not for the Resurrection. Though Paul and the Synoptic trace the origin of the Eucharist “on the night when the Lord Jesus was betrayed” (1 Cor 11:23), John clearly links the Eucharist and our participation in the resurrection of Christ (John 6:54). In the Eucharist, Christians receive the risen Lord and through him, they too will be raised to resurrected life. In this direct way the Eucharist and the resurrection illuminate each other.

The Eucharist makes the resurrection present in a fuller sense when Christians recognize the risen Lord not only in his sacramental body on the altar but also in the ecclesia body that is gathered together in worship and prayer. This is so because the notion of transubstantiation of bread and wine is better understood in the light of the presence of the risen Lord who is mystically united with the worshipping community and is to be received not only in the species of bread and wine, but also in the poor and hungry members of the ecchlesia community (1 Cor 11:29).

At the Eucharist a first epiclesis ask the Holy Spirit to come down upon the gifts of bread and wine to make them into the body and blood of the risen Christ. A second epiclesis ask the Holy Spirit to come upon the gathered community to transform them. So communicating with the risen Jesus and acting in his name, they provisionally participate in his resurrection and look to the day when he will raise them to share in his eternal glory.

So the Eucharist is a sacrament of the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, and of waiting for the second coming of the risen Lord. So it will be erroneous to link the Eucharist with the suffering and death of Christ without a link to the resurrection. This is because the Eucharist is a sacrament of the Paschal events of Christ which includes his suffering, death and resurrection. This makes the Eucharist a sacrament of love as I will discuss in my next reflection from the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict the XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis.

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The Eucharist as Sacrifice

O’Collins J. – Farrugia M., Catholicism: The Story of Catholic Christianity, New York: Oxford University Press 2009.

The Fathers of the Church have always quoted the passage from Malachi 1:2: to support the notion of Eucharist as sacrifice. Following from St. Paul, the post-NT writers like Justin Martyr started seeing the Eucharist as not being an ordinary food or drink. They began to see the Eucharist as the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ who suffered for our sins. They saw the Eucharist as a spiritual nourishment effected by the Word of God for the good of our own bodies.

Apart from the text from Prophet Malachi and other texts often quoted to link the Eucharist to the sacrifice of Christ, scholars also see the words used by Christ himself when instituting the Eucharist as having a sacrificial character: ‘covenant’, ‘memorial’, and ‘poured out’. Christ as such is seen as a high priest who offered himself as a sacrifice to God the Father and commanded his disciples to repeat it in remembrance of him.

So the priest, when he celebrates the Eucharist acts in place of Christ as high priest and offers one and the same sacrifice of Christ that John Chrysostom argues was offered once and for all “… We offer the same sacrifice; or we make a memorial of that sacrifice”. He also argues that the human ministers of this memorial sacrifice are just that, ministers of the invisible Christ: “He who did this at the supper is the same who now performs the act”. This means that Christ is the primary minister of this sacrament as Augustine says. It is Christ who was once sacrificed in his person that is still being sacramentally sacrificed every day says Augustine.

Thus the Eucharistic liturgy is the sacrificial meal of the new covenant. It will be a wrong attempt to separate the meal from the sacrifice or the sacrifice from the meal. Since, as I pointed out in my earlier reflection, the Eucharist emanated from the Last Supper Meal of the Lord. My next reflection will be on the Eucharist and the Resurrection of Christ.  

Nature of the Eucharist: Meal/Sacrifice

Maxwell Ojukwu

Maxwell Chibueze Ojukwu, OCD

Book: The Feast of the Eucharist: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy by J. Ratzinger

In chapter two of his book, The Feast of the Eucharist, Joseph Ratzinger tries to look at the form and structure or nature of the Eucharist. Borrowing from the ideas of his master, Romano Guardini, and from Joseph Pascher, Ratzinger argues that it seemed that the basic structure of the Eucharist was unequivocally that of a meal, since it was instituted by Jesus himself in the context of the Last Supper. “The determining structure is that of the meal”, said Joseph Pascher. Ratzinger also acknowledges the position of dogmatic theologians in describing the Eucharist as a sacrifice. And these two structures to some are in-compactable and these have been the source of a long debate among theologians on the nature of essence of the Eucharist.

Ratzinger made the clarification on these two positions by stating the position of liturgists that argue that: “to describe the Mass as a sacrifice was a dogmatic statement referring to the hidden theological essence of what takes place in it; to speak of the meal structure on the other hand, was to direct attention to the visible liturgical performance”. Thus he would state that what was presented liturgically in the structure of the meal could without difficulty mediate what, dogmatically speaking, was a sacrifice. Thus it makes no sense to absolutely separate the one from the other.

Ratzinger stated that Joseph Pascher was the first to make an attempt to reconcile these two by speaking of sacrificial symbolism being introduced into the meal structure. He says that the separation of the gifts of bread and wine, symbolically indicating the fatal spilling of Jesus’ blood, introduces the mark of sacrifice into the structure of the meal.  But Jungmann argues that the basic structure, dating from the first century, is not the meal but the eucharistia; substantiating his point by saying that after 1 Corinthians 11:20 the designation of the Eucharist as a “meal” does not occur again until the sixth century. Thus he argues that the eucharistia thesis is able to put the dogmatic (sacrificial) and liturgical (meal) levels in touch with each other.

In my next reflection, I will explore how Ratzinger states the transition from meal to Eucharist, from the Last Supper of Jesus to the Eucharist of the Church.