THE EUCHARIST
3. Prophetic Energizer of Christian Hope and
Protest Against Unjust Powers & Principalities
- Dr. George Therukattil, MCBS

Human nature is not subsistent but existent. We have no substance in ourselves but are on-the-way towards something and realize ourselves in the light of the future wholeness. That is why humans are beings who hope for and dream of their future. We are never fully and wholly ourselves in our present. Our lives are lived in memory and in hope. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but hope to live. It is hope that brings about an 'existential restlessness' and a 'salvific disquiet' in us, for our wholeness is in God. When we hope, we see that we are incomplete in ourselves and this makes us turn from ourselves - 'ex-centre' ourselves - into the centre which is God Himself. So it is in hope that we actually come into harmony with our real self and thus realize ourselves.

This phenomenological insight is confirmed by the fact that the God of the Bible is a God of promise and hope drawing us into His future. Future is his essential nature. Because He is future He cannot be grasped. He can only be experienced in hope, which is timeless and oriented to the future. It is by hope that one reaches out to the God of the Resurrection, the God who raised the crucified Jesus. This is why Christian hope is grounded in the risen Christ. The resurrected Christ is our future and our hope. The God who raised the crucified Jesus is perceived when we wait in active hope, which liberates us from the narrow limits of the present and enables us to think and act completely in terms of what is to come. In the light of this future, Christian hope makes a critique of everything present and activates and mobilizes us to transform the present. This is what is meant by the theological statement that the God of the risen Christ is realized in an active hope that is rooted in a historical praxis of transforming this world for the Kingdom of God.

Hence a Christian always looks beyond the present to the Kingdom that is promised. Christian hope is directed towards the transformation of this world by the God who raised Jesus Christ. In as much as it liberates us from existential anxiety and anguish, it makes us free to struggle against unjust structures so as to welcome the Kingdom of God. The Resurrection gives the new hope of the Kingdom and the strength to overcome all obstacles and endure even death and martyrdom that come in the way of the promised future. In this we get our salvation. This is the great significance of Christian hope. In fact, Christianity is Christian hope and Christian hope answers the earnest expectation of human beings for freedom [mukti] and truth.

The Eucharist is a perennial energizer of Christian hope. The very purpose of the eucharistic celebration is to enable us to have hope in an alternative community in which new human beings are born in Christ. The focus of the Eucharist is a new human being and a loving community in a transformed society based on justice. In the Eucharist we are asked to participate in the mystery of the Resurrection inviting us to transcend ourselves. The Eucharist strengthens our capacity to transcend ourselves. As a Resurrection symbol and 'promise of life' it breathes new life into us, a life of hope, and inspires us to transcend our present. The present which Jesus breathed into a dying world is concentrated in the Eucharist and points to the joy of the Kingdom:

…for we are ordained of God to be a people of hope. It is there by virtue of our being in the image of the promissory God. It is sealed there in the sacrament of Baptism. It is dramatized in the Eucharist - 'until he comes.'

[Walter Bruggemann, The Prophetic Imagination]

Every eucharistic celebration announces the coming joy, the messianic banquet of the Kingdom, where all the brothers and sisters will be accorded their due. This foretaste kindles a passionate hope for a just order. And the divine self-giving expressed in the Eucharist gives birth to a firm confidence and a self-forgetful love leading us to do what is good and just. The present order of things is challenged by the 'promise of the Kingdom' contained in the Eucharist which forces us to condemn the existing economic and social injustices.

The Eucharist is both a source of power for Christians to change society and a condemnation of false confidence in any existing society in as much as it falls short of the Kingdom that God wills to bring about.

[James White, Sacraments as God's Self-giving]

The hope of that Kingdom announced in the Eucharist is not cheap and cross-free, but is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretensions of the powerful and dares to question the status quo to which we have all made our commitment. The hope generated in the Eucharist helps one not to fall into the temptations of 'concretism' and despair, and helps one not to worry about results when one works for social change, because one is sure that God will fulfill his promises.

Faith in the Eucharist and its hope-inspiring dynamics is linked to the pouring out of the Spirit … The Spirit alone gives life … The celebration of the new and everlasting covenant in the Eucharist is a prophetic event through the Spirit filled with hope… It is through the … Spirit that bread and wine become for us the body and blood of Christ so that we become one body and one Spirit and can fully enter into the prophetic event…of…Christ's resurrection… It is through the power of the Spirit that Christ's death frees us from the fear of death (Rom. 8:2). Through Him the Eucharist is the great event and experience of hope. By receiving the body and blood of the risen Lord we grow in consciousness of his presence; he is with us on our road that leads to his final coming … and strengthens in us the hope for a new Jerusalem.

[B. Haring: The Sacraments in a Secular Age]

It is the Spirit of Jesus who transforms the whole pattern of our lives and hopes by impregnating the reality and power of the Resurrection into the fabric of our being. The Christian hope given by the spirit of Jesus in the Eucharist generates a radical dynamism and energy to struggle and work for a new future. Thus the Eucharist brings to public expression the hopes and yearnings that have long been denied. It has important political dimensions because it symbolizes a future for the disinherited. 'The new futuring of God is for those who have a future and have not only resisted these exploitative practices, but been even victimized by them.'

As the celebration of the resurrection of Christ, the Eucharist is the ultimate prophetic energizer of Christian hope for the new future:

His resurrection is the end of the non-history taught in the royal school and a new history begins for those who stood outside history. This new history gives persons new identities (Mt. 28:19) and a new ethic (20), even as it begins on the seashore among the dead enslavers (Ex. 14:30)

The Eucharist is the symbol that injects hope-hormones to energize Christian hope for the future Kingdom. It energizes by its summons to present an alternative consciousness (Christ consciousness) and by its evocation of a prophetic community. As a symbol and a beacon of hope, the Eucharist contradicts the situation of hopelessness. It energizes hope against the world of despair and evokes a radical commitment to integral freedom in the light of eschatology (Lk. 22:16; Mt. 26:29; Mk. 14:25).

Each time the Church gathers to make the Eucharist and celebrate the sacrament of unity, that day is advanced in anticipation, just as the actions of the prophets advanced the events they foretold. So, in the Eucharist, Christians pray and act to bring about the final completion to which the Eucharist always points. Then, and only then, will God's self-giving be complete. In the meantime, we have a foretaste of that love already made visible in the Eucharist.

To commemorate the Resurrection in the Eucharist is to hope that injustice will not be the last word but justice will triumph over evil. "To celebrate the Eucharist is to endorse the act of the Father who radically negated the injustice by which the sin of the world victimized the Just One. Participating in the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ means that our lives do not lead towards what is dead. We participate in the Eucharist meaningfully only if we share in it by struggling in the interest of new life, by making people who are oppressed and dead to rise again. In this way we become witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus Christ who was tortured to death two thousand years ago, a person whom it proved impossible to kill. By celebrating the Resurrection in the Eucharist, we shall await in active hope for the Cosmic Easter.

Eucharist: Eternal Protest Against Unjust Powers and Structures

The genuine Christian hope generated in the Eucharist gives us courage and strength to protest against the unjust power and structures and to bear whatever suffering issues as a consequence of this protest. As the Eucharist is the celebration of the Resurrection via death, it empowers us to hope in God's power coming to us in the form of death, and to trust in the fact that real happiness and victory come only through death. In the light of this hope, the Eucharist is a protest that consists not in standing over against but in standing with; the ultimate criticism is not one of triumphant indignation but one of the passion and compassion that completely and irresistibly undermine the world of competence and competition. This theology of hope in life in the shape of death, and in power in the form of suffering, is contrary to the dominant understanding of life and power. To suffer, to grieve and to die is an assault on the dominant consciousness which desperately hold on to the present, in fear and despair. Re-living the suffering and death of Jesus, the Eucharist is a radical protest against this common consciousness. It protests against the dominant culture of our time, and is in solidarity with the marginalized and the outcasts.

A celebration of true life via death has meaning and vitality only through a participation in the subversive and protesting practice of Jesus against the unjust structures which caused his death and thus brought true life to him and to all others. Participating in the Eucharist should make us feel guilty of belonging to social structures that tolerate the existence of injustice of hunger. It should disturb us that the poor and hungry world exists because of us. All authentic Eucharist is an act of protest and is therefore a threat to the unjust world because it calls the world into judgment. "The Eucharist periodically celebrated should be a loud cry of alarm and protest., disquieting and awakening us to socio-political responsibilities." The Eucharist asks us never to be a party to machinations of slavery and death. By responding thus, we act in companionship with the One who rose from the dead.

In the Eucharist we are invited to an Exodus, to come away from our 'Egyptian' way of life and structures we are accustomed to and to prefer the desert, hunger and persecution. When we accept the present unjust structures, we prefer the 'fleshpots of Egypt' and do not see that we are in the slavery of Egypt.' (Dorothy Solle: Choosing Life). Every genuine Eucharist should be a call to denounce the unjust values and the unjust systems into which we are woven and in which we live. By living in them, we affirm them. Our Eucharistic celebration should be a rejection of the idolatrous worship of power, money and wealth. It is an invitation and call to choose life, to struggle in the interest of life that is invisible, life that comes through death, hunger and persecution borne for the sake of justice and the Kingdom. It requires living in solidarity with the crucified of our times, finding Jesus among them. Only those who recognize God in the poor and work with them in the hope of the Kingdom truly participate in the Eucharist.

As a sacrament of communion and unity the Eucharist is a protest against all divisions, alienations and long silences in interpersonal relationship.

When we reflect on the meaning of our being the Body of the Lord and then look at our lives as they actually are, a disturbing question cannot but rise in our minds. How can we dare to celebrate the Eucharist when in fact our lives are far from the unity of the body of the Lord?
[Powers: Spirit and Sacrament]

When we refuse to reconcile, when we refuse to speak to people for years, our eucharistic participation is a scandal. 'Our Eucharist should have a bitter taste indeed, if we are divided from ourselves and from one another - as in fact we are. The scandal of division eats at the very heart of our Eucharist and vitiates its sacramental power.' Before we come to celebrate this sacrament of reconciliation and unity, we should first fight against the conditions that have created divisions, alienations and long silences (Mt. 5:24). We should examine our conscience whether we have separated ourselves from our neighbours by our attitude of intolerance, lack of forgiveness, cultural favouritism towards those who are rich and in power, and against the powerless, non-important persons without titles or names. All of us are powerless, equally in need and stand before the table of Jesus wanting the daily bread of life which is mercifully given to us by God.

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