THE EUCHARIST
2. A Powerful Prophetic Symbol and Memorial
- Dr. George Therukattil, MCBS

Human beings cannot act or even exist except in symbols because they are inextricably spirit in matter, bound by space and time. We realize ourselves in corporeal gestures and symbolic signs. We have to use sign symbols to reveal our inner selves. For example, to express ideas we use words, which basically are symbols. In the process of self-expression we take material things as symbols, thereby transforming them. A 'pregnant alienation' takes place. Material symbols are robbed of their physical individuality and become human sign-acts. They are trans-substantiated. A symbol points to a reality different from itself and makes it present without being identical with it. Symbols are 'super-charged' realities which make present what they symbolize. For example, a letter, a souvenir, or a gift acquire deeper meaning and communicate the personal presence of the giver. In the sign-acts by which we express our personal life, there is a fundamental unity between the signs and the signified. The whole personal reality and one's whole attitude reach out to another in an expression of love, hate or other personal attitudes. This is also true of gestures. A gesture is a meaning made manifest in the body. We are where our gestures and intentions carry us, rather than where our bodies keep us.

As subject, the body bears within itself the consciousness of what it signifies. Our bodies are not just an indication of our existence. Our bodies are ourselves, though not fully because we are more than our bodies. Thus, our bodies are sacramental symbols of us, of our existence. The surrender of one's body is the surrender of one's person. It is the supreme manifestation of love, for the one who gives his or her body has nothing left to give. Thus symbols and gestures make us transcend the narrow confines of our physical presence and of our body. A person who raises his hands to heaven opens himself or herself to God's gifts, grasping him and in a sense being grasped by Him.

Applying this phenomenological analysis of symbols and gestures, we see the Eucharist as the supreme example of giving oneself. In this gift, Jesus puts His whole person into our hands. And as the giving of one's body is everything that a person can give, the Eucharist is the supreme manifestation of Jesus' love for us. This much we can say about the Eucharist as symbol. But the Eucharist is a sacrament, and sacraments are more than symbols. They are performative. In real though mysterious ways they make the reality symbolized present to us. This is so because the reality symbolized is somehow immanent in the sacramental symbol, though transcending it.

Jesus' self-gift in the crucifixion and death, vividly depicted in the Eucharist through words and actions, is the most powerful symbol of Christianity. Jesus created this dynamic symbol at a moment of deep emotional experience. He did it in the awareness of his impending death and at a moment of great uncertainty. The eucharistic symbol was thus born out of Jesus' brokenness for others. He saw himself as broken bread. Because it came out of Jesus emotional and even traumatic experience of self-sacrifice, the symbol has an intense evocative power.

Besides using this sign-act, Jesus could draw from the memories of the Passover. The setting of the celebration was the Passover, which was the celebration of two feasts, pesah and massoth (Passover and Unleavened Bread). Both acquired a further meaning - the memory of the event of the Exodus. The meal did more than recall the Exodus. It revealed it. The words used confer on this meal itself a power to evoke the past and hope for the future in such a way that those who ate relived in a real way the trials of the Exodus and came thence to live in the hope of the messianic promises.

Jesus thus used symbols sanctioned by history and tradition which had moved the people in the past. Only against such a background can we gauge the meaning and power of the action of Jesus in the Last Supper.

Jesus' Body and Blood given to the disciples was not simply a gift. By eating and drinking the disciples enter into communion with the sacrifice present before them in the person of Jesus. The action of Jesus in the Last Supper gives the meaning of his passion and death, events which could otherwise appear as a mere historical tragedy. The body of Jesus was not slain but "given for you". Thus the Eucharist proclaims the saving death! It is symbolic of the sacrifice Jesus makes of himself as he dies in order to live and give life. The Eucharist is thus an anamnesis of the Lord who died but is alive. And it evokes (by the Holy Spirit) a further reality: the participation in the life-giving death of the Lord by those who celebrate it.

At the core of the Eucharist we make an anamnesis: we relive the memory of Jesus and his unnatural death, the socio-political murder, a consequence of his fighting against structural injustice. The Eucharist is, therefore, the celebration of Jesus' project of total liberation which ended up in his being put to death. In the Eucharist we celebrate the most radical liberative act of the man Jesus, his Passover, his passing on to life through death (the consequence of his stand in the cause for the downtrodden and their liberation, in confrontation with the religio-political authorities).

Hence the Eucharist is not a symbol of a thing but of a liberative action. It is a summary of Jesus' life as a being-for-others. Jesus invested in the paschal meal which commemorated the fundamental experience of the liberation from Egypt, his own action for liberation of those in the slavery of sin and oppression. More than trans-substantiation, the Eucharist is a trans-event-ualization, since it is the event that was changed. Even at the ritual institution it is actions and gestures, like the washing of the feet of the disciples, the blessing, the breaking and the sharing of the bread and wine that he told us to do in remembrance of him. The breaking of bread and the sharing of the cup would continue to tell his followers who he was for them, how his body was broken and blood poured out in sacrifice to save them all. "this is my body … Do it to keep alive my memory … It will be a challenge to you to realize what I have realized, to live and to die for that which I have lived and will die for." In the Eucharist the saving actions of Christ especially his suffering, death and resurrection are re-actualized, not merely recollected. Under the veil of symbols there is present the salvific deed of Calvary in physical reality.

The Eucharist is thus the powerful symbol pointing to the death of Jesus, who was crucified not between two candles, but between two thieves, in Golgotha, where the out-casts lived outside the gates of the city. We cannot celebrate Jesus' passing over from death to life meaningfully unless we are prepared to go through those prophetically charged actions of Jesus' giving of himself, body and blood, as a result of his fighting with the downtrodden for their total and integral freedom. At the core of the Eucharist there should therefore be a solemn pledge to be disciples of Jesus and to imitate his life-style. Every Eucharist should be a continual renewal of our commitment to his ways and to his cause. 'Do this' does not mean merely repeating ritually the Last Supper. It means daily living that life of Christ which caused his passion and death.

The simple, central action of the Eucharist is the sharing of food: not merely eating but sharing. This is a powerful symbol of what Jesus himself did. He did not wish the crowds to be dismissed without food (Mt 14:15-21; 15:32-38). Jesus' power to feed the hungry world has been given to us in the Eucharist. His inspiring words call on us to share our resources, even if they be small, on behalf of the poor and the oppressed. "Every Eucharist made to serve as an excuse for evading this commandment ('give them something to eat yourselves,' Lk. 9:13), in the face of heart-rending reality is not only vain but blasphemous." No one may have more than what is needed. Both from the age-old spiritual point of view as well as the political and economic yard-stick, amassing a disproportionate wealth while depriving others of the necessities of life is a theft and a crime against society. The Eucharist is a contradiction to a life lived in corruption by enjoying a disproportionate share to the national wealth.

The dynamic meaning of the Eucharist as a new food language for the world can challenge each one of us to make the crucial decision to change our life styles and imitate Jesus in initiating effective political and social action that will decisively affect the world and feed the hungry.

Our Eucharistic celebrations, therefore, should be a celebration that deepens and re-roots our lives, our bodies, our energies to give everything that we do not need to those who do not have. It is not possible to celebrate the Eucharist without living in communion with those who have nothing (1 Cor 11:22). The Gospel of Matthew presents the Eucharist as a manifestation of God's merciful covenant. In it wounds are healed and bread is shared. The Eucharistic covenant is a protest against those conditions that create suffering and keep people in poverty. Our Eucharistic celebrations should therefore be models of mercy, healing and resource-sharing at every level, personal, inter-personal and infrastructural. They should stand as a countersign to the world's oppression, poverty and discrimination.

None of us can be in communion with Him (Jesus) without being responsible for feeding the multitudes by sharing in their distress and putting what we possess at their disposal. Poverty, struggle and hope borne in common and lived in remembering and invoking the living Jesus together with the repast that concretizes this communion are the core and the meaning of the original Eucharist and of the Eucharist that is really contemporary today. Apart from that there can be any number of denuded or overblown liturgies harking back to traditional models or moving to daring innovations but all comes to nothing. They are tombs whether simple or ornate, for a dead Jesus.

The logic and structure of the moral imagination of Christians need to be shaped by this prophetic symbol. To get the vision revealed in the life, teaching and death of Jesus we have to probe the depths of meaning contained in this prophetic symbol: The eternal movement of love. "Christianity … is bread sharing and cup-sharing. It is the body and blood of Jesus poured out for us in a way that radically changes the rules of the game … It is the bread and wine of the final kingdom banquet made present here and now, a kingdom of justice and peace."

The Eucharist as Memorial

The power of memory is extremely great. It transcends the framework of time and space. When we commemorate or 'do this as a memorial of" him, the object of the memory is not an image or a replica of the Last Supper, but the Last Supper itself. This is because as Edmund Husserl says, in memory, the object of memory and what immediately appears in the act are identical. What is remembered was once present in the same unity of time in which the memory is now actual. The act of Jesus' self-gift, a past phase of Jesus' life is recaptured in memory through its actually present phase, thanks to the unity of absolute time constituting memory's flow, with its retentional and protentionl movements. Just as the disciples encountered and remembered the living Christ in the breaking of bread, so the Eucharist creates a sacramental memory through which the community experiences Christ present and alive. "The richest meaning of memory is, however, the making present here and now of the effects of a past reality event."

The worshipping community gathered around the memory of Jesus re-appropriates the entire life, death and glorification of Jesus in full authenticity, and in virtue of what he did appeals to the Father to be merciful to humanity. What can be a better re-appropriation of Jesus' life than the shared meal he told us to do as memorial of him? Whenever we break our bodies through acts of service or give our whole lives to fight unjust economic, political or social situations we activate the memory of Jesus who gave his whole life for this end. This memory also anticipates the future and visualizes what is to come.

The very remembrance of the past (death and resurrection of Christ) thrusts the Church forward in a movement of longing and anticipation towards the unfulfilled climax of her complete, final liberation. The fullness of the eucharistic memorial looks simultaneously backward and forward to the past and to the future, to Calvary and to the Parousia.

Each Eucharistic memorial thus, became a link between the past and the future.

The memory of the resurrected Christ is the memory of one who will return in glory … In that sacramental moment the historical becomes eschatological and the eschatological becomes historical. Surely this must be the meaning of the real presence of Jesus Christ at the Lord's Supper. In the Lord's Supper Christ is present both historically and eschatologically. It is the remembrance of the past that ushers the future into the present. It is also the remembrance that anticipates the future which in turn redeems the past in the present. It is the mystery surrounding the Lord's Supper. And it is the power of memory that brings this mystery home to believers.

Thus in each Eucharistic memorial the saving effects of the past flow into the present and at the same time enable us to have a foretaste of integral liberation. "Thus the Lord's Supper is a promise to be fulfilled, a hope to be realized and a vision to be actualized." The celebration of the Eucharist is no mere recollection of the past. It is also an event with abiding consequences and pregnant with the promise of the Kingdom. As participants in this memorial we prove inconsistent if, in the light of the final Kingdom that we experience in the Eucharist, we do not protest against all kinds of unjust situations in our society and its manifold divisions. We are inconsistent if we do not actively participate in the struggle for building up the Kingdom of God.

As the memorial meal, it is the activation of a "dangerous and liberating memory", a memory of Jesus which enables us to clearly define love in action, lived to the point of laying down our lives for others. Here we shall resurrect the traumatic memory of the "scourged Christ" of India and of all the poor and of the victims of the exploiters of this earth. Celebrating the Eucharist meaningfully calls for an attentive hearing and doing of the words of Jesus: "This is my body broken up to be shared; this is my blood shed to be shared." Eating this body and blood of Christ should transfuse and energize our consciences to give our bodies and our blood, if need be, for the poor and the oppressed.

Remembering him who offered and still offers himself as bread for the world, we shall find courage and strength to struggle for the cause of the poor and the oppressed. As a critical 'memoria Christi', the Eucharist should help us to raise a prophetic voice against injustice and protest against the economic institutions based on profiteering and competition, and against social customs that enslave our people.

Back