The Last Supper

Today is Spy Wednesday, and tomorrow the Christian church celebrates Maundy Thursday, Jesus' gathering with his twelve apostles to eat their final meal. Or were there only twelve apostles present? While Matthew 26 has Jesus eating with the twelve apostles, Mark 14 has Jesus speaking of a large upper room. Well, you could get thirteen at squeeze into my living room, which is not very large, so why have a large one unless there were more than just the apostles at the supper? We know that some women were with Jesus, and so, as the Passover is a meal for the assembled community, male and female, why would Jesus have excluded his own mother and other treasured women, such as Mary Magdalene? Moreover, Mark's Gospel says that Jesus was eating the meal with his disciples, a group wider than the twelve. So I believe that a larger group was present at the supper.  

The basis of the idea that only the apostles were present at the Last Supper is that it was then that Jesus instituted the priesthood, which has been traditionally male, so women could not have been present, but that is a weak argument, for the last supper was the first Eucharist, the ceremony in which the Christian community bands together. At this all members are welcome, so it is necessary that there were both women and men present at the supper.

So what is the significance of the Last Supper for Christianity? Like its sister faith, Judaism, Christianity is a community religion, and both of these faiths believe that religion involves being  member of  sacred community centred round God. Judaism is a faith founded on God's covenant with the sacred people of Israel; while Christianity celebrates the new covenant with all humankind instituted by Christ. Each of these faiths has its covenant meal; the Jews have the Passover feast to celebrate their liberation from slavery in Egypt; the Christians have their own Eucharist to celebrate Jesus' death and resurrection in which God took upon himself what the powers of evil could throw at him and came out victorious at the resurrection. The Jews celebrate the Passover once a year; Christians celebrate the Eucharist almost everyday, Good Friday being the exception.

Jesus must have enjoyed table fellowship with his disciples, where the assembled group gathered around their master, humans congregating around the incarnate word of God.But at the Last Supper a change was wrought. As this was to be the final meal that he would eat before his death he announced that the meal was to be in memory of him and that the bread and wine were his body and blood. The word for memorial is anamnesis, which mean a reliving, so the implication is that somehow Jesus' presence is relived in the Eucharistic ceremony and the church has taken this to mean that he is present in the sacred elements of bread and wine. This is a doctrine that puzzles many people, but I think it necesssary to assert that religion can and does contain elements of mystery, for it deals with realities that are beyond the reality of the physical world.   

There have been differences of opinion in the Christian community about the presence of Christ in the sacred elements of bread and wine. The Catholic tradition believes that in some way the sacred  elements become the body and blood of Christ, whereas the Protestant tradition tends to regard the presence as a mere memorial of the Lord. But the church has always disagreed with simplistic explanations. In 999 AD a cleric, Berengar of Tours,  was in trouble with the Catholic Church for propagating a simplistic account in which the faithful were told that in the Eucharist they actually chewed the flesh of Christ. The church has ever  rejected such simple accounts of what is a transcendent mystery. 

Some time in the 1970s the Reverend Ian Paisley, now deceased, a senior minister [indeed leader and founder] in the Free Presbyterian  Church in Northern Ireland, speaking at an Oxford Union debate, held up a Catholic host, the bread used in a Eucharistic ceremony, and made a claim that it was ridiculous to call that Christ.  I do not know whether the host had been consecrated or how he got hold of it, but he would not have been given it by the Roman Catholic Church, so I was unhappy about his possession of it and his caricature of a fundamental and much loved Catholic belief.  But what is the truth? Should Catholics or other Christians think that Christ is somehow "in" the sacred elements of bread and wine? They should not, for this is to misusunderstand and caricature their belief. Benedict the Sixteenth writing in Jesus of Nazareth, Volume 2, called Jesus' presence in the Eucharist a transcendent mode of presence, a mode of being with humans that goes beyond the ordinary. 

You can only begin to comprehend the Eucharist when you have an understanding of the true nature of the Christian Church. In Christian belief the church is not merely an institution composed of humans on Earth, but a fellowship of all Christian believers living and dead centred around the living Lord Jesus Christ, who through his resurrection is present in the world. Thus the church is a sacred reality, though sadly marred by the faults of her members. Thus all those who have become members of the church and have stayed members through faith live in a community in which Jesus is present and are in communion with him. The Eucharist is to be understood in the light of this belief. 

Thus when Christians congregate in the Eucharistic ceremony they are not just a visible congregation, but an element in a greater, sacred reality centred on Christ who is present through his Holy Spirit. The sacred bread [the host] and cup of wine are not to be regarded as containing Christ, but as being contained in the wider and greater sacred reality of the church in which Christ is the living centre. They are points of contact with the living Lord, reception of which renews the bond between them and Christ .