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ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 2.3  Catholics, indeed most Christians, have celebrated the Eucharistic meal as the central and most often ritually performed symbol and sacrament of their beliefs. In this extract from his manuscript looking at the First 500 Years of Christianity, Tom Lee, examines how this came to be and how, over time, the meaning changed through reasons of governance and other cultural influences of later periods in human and Church history… Looking at the institution of the Eucharist in some detail Were the women and children invited? Passover is probably the best-known Jewish feast amongst Christians, falling as it does, for good reason, during March-April coincident with Christian Easter. For eight days a pious Jewish family has no leavened bread in the house. Instead of bread the family eats the biscuit-like matsah, to commemorate the bread of affliction of the Jews as slaves in Egypt. As the spring festival, the season of Nature's rebirth, Passover celebrates the birthday of Israel as a nation on the Exodus from Egypt. Passover is a family celebration, not solely a meal for thirteen men. Our impression that it was solely Jesus and the twelve comes from later artistic impressions of the scene. The apostle's wives and daughters would have scrubbed the floors and scorched the utensils and dishes clean of leaven. They would have prepared the foods while the men and boys took the lambs to be slaughtered in the Temple. Then the women would have prepared the eating area and performed the ceremonial lightings. Preparing for Passover in strict observance took time and energy, and the entire family or multi-familial group would have been immersed in these labors of love for the Law. The men, women and children who attended the Passover meal all wore white like the Jewish priests — a token of the fact that all partook of the priesthood of Israel. It was impossible to observe Passover properly without the women and children.
The festival is introduced by a touching and beautiful home service, Seder, that enshrines the Jewish people's most precious memories and most exalted hopes. An invitation to all who are hungry to come and eat forms the prelude of the Seder. The youngest child asks, "Why is this night different from all other nights?" The answer tells of the eloquent story of deliverance with its implicit promise of an even grander universal redemption. The service is interrupted with a festival meal. Traditionally there should be a chair vacant and a glass of wine waiting for the prophet Elijah, in case he comes to inaugurate the Messianic age. The service concludes with Psalms, hymns and popular folk songs in hopeful anticipation of the coming of the Kingdom of God. In Jesus' time the festival was inaugurated by the slaughtering and eating of the paschal lamb; and the agricultural aspect of the festival was celebrated by the offering of a sheaf of barley on the Temple altar in gratitude to God as Giver of the Harvest. Why we celebrate the Last Supper on the Thursday… The Jewish day begins and ends with sunset — not midnight. So the Jewish Sabbath was celebrated from sunset of Friday to sunset of Saturday. The Passover feast in Jesus' time was always celebrated on the fourteenth day of the month of the spring equinox called Nisan. In 36 it fell on a Friday i.e. sunset Thursday to sunset Friday March 30th, according to the Roman's Julian calendar. But as the actual method used by the Jews to fix the festival dates in those days is unknown, this is an educated guess. It is theorized that because at the time of Jesus' death the fourteenth day of Nisan fell on the Sabbath, the Pharisees and Sadducees differed in their practices. The Pharisees were concerned that in preparing for eating the Passover meal they might violate the law requiring rest on the Sabbath. To avoid that possibility, they anticipated the eating of the Passover meal and ate it on Thursday night. The Sadducees, on the other hand, were more concerned about eating the meal on the day designated by the law — the fourteenth of Nisan — than with violating the mandatory Sabbath. According to this theory, then, Jesus and his disciples followed the practice of the Pharisees, who were regarded as the spiritual leaders of the people, and ate the Passover on Thursday evening. The institution of the Christian Eucharist… The Christian Eucharist is, in its origin, a transformation of the age-long Jewish ritual of the Passover. Only the Gospel of John places the supper a day earlier. The accounts of what happened at the Last Supper vary in details, but common to them all is the central fact that Jesus, by certain symbolic acts and significant words transformed the Passover ritual into a new thing. In the official translations promulgated by the Christian churches Jesus tells his disciples that the Paschal bread that he has blessed and broken and distributed to be eaten by them is his flesh, and that the cup of wine which he has blessed and told them to drink is his blood. He says that by his death a new covenant will be inaugurated, a new relationship established between God and man. He signifies that in what he is about to do and suffer, the divine activity of redemption prefigured in the ritual and cult myth of the Passover is now to be fulfilled in him. But the earliest liturgical text that includes the words of consecration dates from 337 CE. Some Biblical scholars, notably Professor's Bruce Chilton and Bernhard Lang, contend that this consecration language is a mistranslation or misunderstanding by Gentile Christians after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and loss of contact with the Jewish roots of their faith. What Jesus was doing, they believe, was replacing the flesh and blood sacrifices of the Temple by the offering of Bread and Wine in their stead. What he was actually saying in his Aramaic tongue, in which there is no word for is, was "This my flesh of sacrifice, this my blood of sacrifice." The form of words was an echo of the actual words of sacrifice used by the priests in the Temple. As in Essene practice, Jesus was substituting bread and wine for the Temple's flesh and blood sacrifice. He could not have meant that he was transforming the bread and wine by some magical formula into his own flesh and blood, a totally abhorrent thought in any society that lacked cannibalism as part of its culture, and totally objectionable in a society with a taboo against ingesting blood. As Albert Schweitzer pointed out in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Macmillan 1964): "It was only when Jesus' actual bodily presence had been removed, and only when the Christian community had existed for some time, that such a conception as is expressed in that formula could have arisen." Christianity influenced by the practices of the Essenes rather than mainstream Judaism… In mainstream Judaism, ritual meals were and are part of the routine of religious practice; the custom in Jesus' time was to bless bread at the beginning of the meal and wine at the end of it. The Essenes, however, blessed bread and wine together with no interval and this has passed into Christian practice. The Essenes also regarded the meal as a substitute for Temple sacrifices and the worshiper consumed bread and wine in place of the sacrificial animal; this too passed into Christianity once the doctrine had been developed of Jesus as the Lamb of God. According to John's Gospel, Jesus never spoke the words instituting the Eucharist before his death. As he was already dead at Passover, Jesus himself is the slaughtered paschal lamb. Uncertainty of Jesus' intention… Whether Jesus intended his symbolic acts and words to become a rite to be continuously repeated is uncertain; but the earliest account of what took place on that Passover night is Paul's, in his first letter to the Corinthians (C.57), more than twenty years after the event. It shows that even before the earliest Gospel was written, the primitive Church had come to regard that as his intention: "...the Lord Jesus took some bread, and thanked God for it and broke it, and he said, `This is my body, which is for you; do this as a memorial of me.' In the same way he took the cup after supper, and said, `This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Whenever you drink it, do this as a memorial of me.' Until the Lord comes, therefore, every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death, and so anyone who eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be behaving unworthily towards the body and blood of the Lord." Hans Kung opines: "Of course it is open to doubt whether Jesus 'instituted' a supper. The twice-repeated order to recall it, as reported in Paul, is lacking even in Mark. But, in the light of the sources, it is not so easy to doubt that Jesus celebrated with his disciples a parting meal, a last supper." The simple but profoundly significant scene in the upper room in the house of a disciple, possibly that of John the beloved disciple, in Jerusalem, has in the course of the centuries, been expanded and developed into a tremendous dramatic ritual representing in unending repetition the saving mystery of the passion, resurrection, and triumphant vindication of the Suffering Servant who is also the King of Glory; rather than a Passover memorial, as Jesus intended. Many nonChristians, as did many Romans, view Christian doctrine as transforming a loving God into a blood--thirsty God like that of the Aztecs, requiring the bloody sacrifice of his own son.
Jack Miles in his book, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, suggested that the story of the New Testament is the story of a self-rescue — a rescue by God from a calamity that God had created. God had cursed his own creation in Eden, after Adam's sin, and was now lifting the curse, or, at least, allowing for the- possibility of remission. "The world is a great crime, and someone must be made to pay for it," Miles writes. "Mythologically read, the New Testament is the story of how someone, the right someone, does pay for it.... In its broadest outlines, the story of the Bible is the story of how God first turned his blessings of fertility and dominion into curses and then turned his curses back into blessings." Lack of recorded knowledge of the first years of Christianity… We know next to nothing about the thirties and forties of the first Christian-century, the lost years after Jesus' execution, before oral and pre-canonical written traditions broke the surface in Paul's letters and the known gospels. St. Paul says that he has received of the Lord the account that he gives of what took place at the Last Supper. Presumably what he means is that when he was received into the early Christian community at Damascus, and received instruction, this account of Jesus' actions and words was given to him as an essential part of the sacred tradition of the Church. Christian worship originally had a domestic character. The earliest Jewish Christians continued to attend Jewish worship, while adding to it specifically Christian observances, pre-eminent among them the communion service, in the homes of members of their community. Eucharist was celebrated as part of a regular meal. The head of the house most likely presided. As the institutional church gradually developed, officers were appointed (ordained in the Roman sense of given a special mission) to regulate those liturgical observances. Later bishops became more influential and took to themselves and their presbyters the function of presiding at the Eucharist. When the Jewish Christians and gentile converts were expelled from the synagogue, they did not abandon the synagogue worship altogether, but celebrated it themselves as part of- their own meetings for worship; when those meetings included the communion, the synagogue readings were prefixed to the Eucharistic liturgy and the Gospels that had been written as complimentary readings were included, paralleling the Old Testament readings for the Sabbath, recycling Old Testament messages by tying them to Jesus' ministry. This pattern became the norm. The Gospels inform us that after the Last Supper was concluded and the Passover hymn had been sung, Jesus and the disciples went out to the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives, immediately below the towering wall of the Temple, where a very human Jesus doubted his ability to do what he believed he was asked to do, and on the cross, he doubted the loyalty of God.  ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 2.3  PHOTO CREDIT: The main headline image today is of an oil painting by the artist Hyatt Moore entitled "The Last Supper with Twelve Tribes". It was painted in the year 2000 to commemorate the inclusion of all peoples under God. It’s oil on canvas (with acrylic under-painting) and at 20 feet wide by 4.5 feet high it is basically life size. Painted in British Columbia, Canada, it is currently on display in California, and sometimes on tour. Depicted (from left) are: Crow of Montana, Berber of North Africa, Masai of Kenya, China, Ecuador, Afghanistan, Jesus, Ethiopia, Tzeltal of Mexico, Canela of Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Salish of British Columbia, Mongolia. To order prints, refer to the subcategories above. Copyright 2008 Hyatt Moore. For more information and to order prints visit the website at Hyatt Moore: www.hyattmoore.com/thelastsupper
What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum. ©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409 |
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