The Feast of Corpus Christi celebrates Jesus; his selfless offering of himself to God the Father; and as he instructed his closest companions to meet him daily through the repetition of his Last Supper by following his words over the bread and wine, we too become incorporated into his life and his sacrificial offering. To participate in the Eucharist is to enter the life of Christ himself and to give ourselves away as he taught us to do.
This understanding of the very deep relationship we are offered with the divine goes very far back, right into the earliest origins of Judaism, as we see in Genesis (14:18-20). What is significant here, and is lost in our Jerusalem Bible translation, is that the patriarch is named as Abram not Abraham, deliberately invoking a period before Israel was anything like a nation, and Abram still a wanderer with his people from distant southern Ur in Iraq. This is a story of people feeling their way from paganism and many deities to recognition of one sole God and the making of the People. Here Abram meets Melchizedek, not merely king of Salem – Jerusalem - but also its priest; and shows his developing recognition of the great change which will encompass Israel. In honour of this, Abram pays him one tenth of all his battle gains, thereby recognising the overlordship of the one God and of the king. What we get here then is the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian understanding of God – unlike that of any of the myriad pagan deities, of weather, fertility, grain etc, and standing as unique, distinct and the start of a story which will end in Christ.
We might think it odd that our Gospel for Corpus Christi, the celebration of the giving of the Eucharist, should choose the feeding of the five thousand, (Luke 9:11-17) rather than focus on the Last Supper, but whilst Luke of course has this in his Gospel, I suspect the Church chose this passage because it illustrates so beautifully the impact this account would have had on Theophilus, Luke’s patron and a convert from paganism and a member of the very rich elite. Theophilus, (and here he is not so very different from many of us who ‘use’ meals as methods of distinction, picking only to invite special friends and those we want to impress) and his status conscious world, held banquets designed specifically to separate out the different status of the invitees. Whole rooms and rich villas were designed specifically for this purpose, as were Imperial palaces, and the villa of the Poppea family near Pompeii. The elite dined in small dining rooms with their social equals, whilst others slightly less elite were accommodated in sumptuous halls; but their underlings, their freedmen and hangers on, could expect to be seated in the far distant undecorated even dingy corridors, dining on far inferior foods and wines. As Juvenal wrote ‘He does it to make you suffer!’ The feeding Luke recalls here is such a different affair. Clearly some had brought provisions, but those either from poverty or witlessness who had not are all catered for together. Jesus, as we have come to expect, just breaks all the boundaries, refusing to follow the disciples advice and send off foraging parties. Jesus simply sits everyone, from providers to the improvident, down and takes a symbolic offering of five loaves and two fish, someone’s lunch box and, using the three Eucharistic verbs ‘took, blessed and broke’ handed the food out. We are told that there were ‘five thousand men’ at this gathering. Now whether Jesus actually performed a miracle which made this tiny offering fit to feed them all, turning it into an eschatological banquet, a sign of the Kingdom of Heaven, or whether his and the original donor’s offering set such an example that the rest of the ‘haves’ took the hint and shared with the needy, is neither here nor there. What we do have is the fact that Jesus, using this event as a precursor of his own self-offering for the salvation of the world, set the example of a truly sharing society. Here there are at this banquet no class distinctions, no special foods for the elite dividing them from those at the bottom of the pile, but rather an insistence that everyone had their fill and that there was plenty left over. We know that today there is plenty of food in our world, but because of our social structures, which are designed to make some filthy rich and keep others in the gutter starving, the graced equality which was Jesus’ great sign continues to evade us all. My guess is that Theophilus and his like who had become Christians found this incident in Jesus’ life possibly just about the most difficult of all to take on board, since its implications threatened Greco-Roman society far more than anything else. They could cope with healing miracles – very useful and what one visited shrines for all over the world - they didn’t mind about healing on the Sabbath - they were former pagans - they were even used to crucifixions; but this smashing down of social distinctions was extraordinarily difficult. It’s where he/we make or break the Kingdom.
Reading Paul’s Letters, it is imperative that we understand that when he speaks of meeting for prayer, he is invariably speaking of celebrations of the Last Supper. Here in 1 Corinthians (11:23-26) he recalls for this unruly and headstrong Christian church the continuity of the meaning of the Eucharist. Just prior to this he had taken them to task precisely because, like Theophilus and his lot, meals, even the Eucharist, were abundant opportunities to demonstrate superiority. Paul, emphasising the timing of the Last Supper immediately prior to the Passion of the Lord, makes clear Jesus command to ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. In Greek the word ‘anamnesis’ conveys far greater depth; the entering into the once and for all event of the Supper and its embrace of the Sacrifice of Christ. Here there was/is no room for mere memorial, for this is an active participation; we are all at that original event, fully implicated in its meaning. Turning it therefore into an occasion for class distinction or separation is therefore a blasphemy and an outrage. Every time we celebrate the Eucharist we must recall whose Supper it is, and what it calls every Christian to become.
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