THE EUCHARIST
1. The Prophetic Energizer for Christian Living
- Dr. George Therukattil, MCBS

Created by God and endowed with an infinite spirit, human life is a tension towards the Infinite, an existential longing for the Absolute. And it is through religious symbols that human beings try to satisfy their hunger and thirst for God. Religious symbols enable us to enter the depth of ourselves in our search of what is ultimate. Invented by our creative spirit they reveal the deepest aspects of reality and the hidden modalities of being and have the power of transforming our minds and hearts and elevating them towards God. In this area we find the basis of the cultic dimension of the Christian sacraments.

But the emotional life of man is not a life of the contemplative spirit alone. It involves active freedom also. Human beings co-create themselves with their free decisions and actions. This is the basis for the prophetic dimension of the Christian sacraments. They stem from God's dynamic initiative and summon for our response and creativity through religious symbols, thus mediating God's spirit and empowering us for prophetic action. The sacraments announce and make concrete the redeeming presence of God whose very essence and ways are identified with justice (Dt 32:4). They can carry us to new levels of realization of the meaning of our struggle and make us experience the hope that we are in the hands of a loving Father. They are thus evocative instruments that promote the growth of the reign of God through a process of self-awareness (prophetic listening) rooted in radical discipleship. It is the task of the sacraments to keep hope alive, to keep on conjuring the proposing alternative futures amidst the problems of human existence, to transform society into the Kingdom of God.

The sacraments provide the prophetic stamina, the driving force, to break the institutional structures when these no longer enshrine Kingdom values. Hence they can be means of enforcing justice. They are liberative and have a bearing upon the praxis of the Christian way of liberation. If this is so, the sacraments are valid and efficacious to the extent that they are consciousness raising and motivate the celebration of human liberative action in history.

"A community gathered around a liberative paschal message needs signs which fashion it, question it, which imbue it with a sense of responsibility and enable it to create its own word about human history. This is precisely what the sacraments are - and nothing else but that."

In the past, the sacraments were often experienced solely in terms of the inner life and cultic worship. They did not lead to transformation in living one's interpersonal relationships. They did not inspire people to overcome structural injustices. Today sacramental activity involves an ethical concern for justice.

Seen in this perspective, the Eucharist is the center for all sacraments. It is an authentic, authoritative sacrament of God's redeeming and saving presence with his people. Here God makes himself present 'in communion' with us, renewing 'his hour' with us, inviting us to eat and drink with him Christ makes himself 'seen' in the breaking of bread 'opening our eyes.' When we 'do this', we are making Christ and his work present with all his power to save:

It is not a matter of 'recalling' or 'remembering' someone once here, but now gone. Both these verbs are inadequate. Christ is again present to give himself to us through our re-experiencing his past works. Past events are made contemporary; we have overcome time. We engage in a time mystery where past events become present with their power to save. Thus the dynamic of the original event - Christ giving himself for us - exists once again whenever we make the Eucharist.

The Eucharist thus calls us to the specifically salvific activity of the Lord, i.e. to his death and resurrection, which if lived by us brings salvation. The community celebrating the Eucharist is called to suffer and die, if need be for bringing about a transition from a situation of slavery and sin to an environment manifesting the Kingdom of God.

Considering the situation of poverty and oppression and given the depth and extent of social injustice in India, one may ask how adequately our Eucharistic practice reflects the fullness of God's self-giving in the Eucharist. Does it respond to our problems in India? What has the Eucharist to say to the yearning of every Indian for an integral liberation based on equality, fellowship and prosperity for all? Participation in the resistance to evil and in the struggle for justice in the world is an intrinsic dimension of an efficacious Eucharist. By its very nature the Eucharist is prophetic. By word, by deed it proclaims moral judgments, condemnatory or salvific about today's socio-political situation in the light of God's future, which is the norm, source and authority of this critical judgment. For in the Eucharist we represent and relive the resistance to evil and the struggle for justice which led to the historical Jesus' giving himself totally to others in death and the consequent liberation of himself and others. In the Eucharist we celebrate God's unifying presence. But how can we do that if a community is torn by injustice, discord and divisions? The efficacy of the Eucharist should be measured by the change that it produces in the lives of the community that participates in it.

The Eucharist is the life-giving source and animating heart of the Christian community. As any other sacrament it has both a cultic and a prophetic dimension. If there is any doubt about which is prior, Jesus made in clear: "It is not the one who says, Lord, Lord … who is saved, but the one who does the will of the Father. (Mt 7:21). The cultic dimension has been relativized and put in the service of liberative human relationships. The efficacy of worship depends more on just and cordial relationship with one's neighbour than on sacred action. The true worth of worship consists not so much in the fidelity to liturgical or canonical prescriptions, but in the expression of a covenantal fidelity to justice, mercy and compassion. "The test of worship is how far it makes us more sensitive to the beyond in our midst, to the Christ in the hungry, the naked, the homeless and the prisoner." Just and cordial relations with our neighbour are more important than rites. Jesus wants signs, not rites (Mk 5:25-34; 6:3-40; 7:31-37).

Unfortunately, in our bickerings and quarrellings over the rites, the rituals and the meticulous observance of the minute prescriptions of the liturgist, the prophetic dimension of the Eucharist has often been lost. The one thing that Jesus shied away from and opposed was ritualism. Would he not criticize the fanatical liturgists who with such tenacity insist on minute details and casual traditions for the Eucharistic celebrations of today? "Go and learn the meaning of the words: It is mercy that I desire not sacrifice" (Mk 9:13). Jesus tore the masks off the liturgists of his day: "You make void the word of God through your traditions" (Mk 7:13).

The explosive power of the 'dangerous memory', as J. B. Metz calls this sacrament, must be recovered and ever activated according to situations and circumstances. The Eucharist is shockingly unconventional. In the Eucharist, God is raging in anger for the millions who are starving for bread and for freedom. The silent agony of the plundered poor and the compassionate anger of God find expression there. Considering the appalling structure that govern our society and which deny full humanity to millions of human beings, there is a moral urgency to emphasize the Eucharist's prophetic and critical role in the work of total and integral liberation. In this land of misery the prophetic action for justice is the most important and difficult aspect to bring out. The pageantry of excessively solemn celebrations can be seen as a kind of idolatry. To celebrate the body of Christ forgetting the country's two-thirds of starving and crushed bodies is blasphemous.

The sacrament that has most suffered at the hands of the fanatical liturgists is the Eucharist:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the Eucharist has been the most ill-used; but not only was its relational character destroyed by replacing a meal with a rite, but the sweeping invitation of Jesus, his welcome to the hungry, and his initiative in sharing bread and acting as host to them - all has been turned into a sacred mystery for initiates only.

Ritualism and an almost magical sacramentalism have mummified the symbol of the meal, choking real life with rites, rubrics and prescriptions of the liturgists.

The Eucharistic reality transcends the rite. What began at the Last Supper as an action has come to be treated as a thing. It is primarily the action of Jesus and not things, which is the symbol through which the Lord is present in the Eucharist. But in our liturgy the Eucharistic action has become almost a 'thing', a specialized discipline, an aesthetic passion encased in laws and solemn rites. The Eucharistic 'thing' has prevented people from encountering God in the poor by offering a cheap encounter which requires only an effort to find a little time. By enclosing the Eucharist within a ritualistic context and jealously guarding it with a sacred precinct, 'we have dehumanized it and betrayed the incarnation by making Christ into someone separate, distant, someone outside". The Eucharist is the synthesis of the mystery of Christ who is the incarnation of God in the world. As Arturo Paoli says, "we have kidnapped him to make him king, raising up the thrones of gold and precious stones for him." The eucharistic Jesus may feel so embarrassed to sit on them that he would rather leave, as he did during his life on earth when people wanted to make him king: "Perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountains by himself" (Jn 6:15). We have surrounded the Eucharist with an aura of supernaturality. The sweat, tears, pain and thirst and death of the carpenter of Nazareth, his arrest, torture and crucifixion, which are commemorated in the sacrament, have been smothered by pious sentiments.

This is a subtle way of hiding from ourselves the real, historical circumstances of his tragic end… We soften the memory of what the priest and the procurator combined to do with Jesus…when we detect the hands that did the foul deed and the interest that lay behind it, and begin to sense the presence and activity of similar interests in our history, we can be neither passive nor neutral.

We have domesticated the Eucharist - the permanent protest to the established structures of our unjust society. We have practically reduced the presence of Christ in the Eucharist to its localization in the sacramental species, the bread and wine. We have definitely lost the savour of the Cenacle. By our stress on the cultic dimension, we have "spiritualized, depoliticized and ahistoricised the broken bread and poured-out wine so that no one remembers or is reminded of the fact that Jesus' death was (as in the death of millions today) the result of a religio-political coalition of those who wanted to protect and perpetuate their social and economic positions."

The Eucharist ought to put concrete projects of social and economic transformation into motion. "Man must sense that the establishment disorder, institutionalized violence cannot sing the glory of God, even if the voices are loud and liturgical symbols are proclaiming praises and glory. As Helder Camera says, 'Christ would not accept an excess of glorification while "the other Christs" live in misery and oppression. It is time that we put the Eucharist into the hands of the poor people since it is theirs.

We must have the courage to go back to that simple and ordinary Last Supper of the Lord at the Cenacle, so charged with meaning, and work out its true significance. We must make it a symbol specifically to the sensibilities of the poor and oppressed. "How can we sit in beautiful buildings, eating and drinking from silver plates and chalices, 'in remembrance' of Jesus who presumably never owned a house or silver utensils?" Do our Eucharistic celebrations help us to figure out just exactly what it was that Jesus died for, if this is the way we commemorate him? The Eucharist is a sign. Instead of wracking our brains and spending our whole energy in liturgical niceties, perhaps we could reflect on what it stands for and in which direction it is pointing. Only once did Jesus celebrate the Eucharist, and within forty-eight hours he was killed by the unjust institutional and social structures he sought to liberate the people from. We must understand that 'the fully energized Lord' of the Eucharist 'is not some Godly figure in the sky but the slain lamb who stood outside' with the downtrodden and the marginalized 'and was punished for it'.

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