Writing

by Fr Chris Borah

---

There are many words and phrases we use to describe the Holy Eucharist.

• “Holy Eucharist” simply means “thanksgiving devoted to God.” 
• Holy Eucharist is also the “Lord’s Supper,” which points back to Jesus’s Last Supper with his disciples (Mt 26, Mk 14, Lk 21), and points forward to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb (with all his disciples from all time; Rev 19). 
• Holy Eucharist is the “Paschal Feast” (1 Cor 5:7), pointing us back to the Passover Meal (Ex 12) and to Jesus the Lamb of God setting a table that fulfills, completes, and transforms this ancient Jewish festival (Jn 1:29; Jn 6; Rev 19:7, 17).
• Holy Eucharist is also “Communion” or…

Koinonia

“Communion” (koinonia), points us to the fellowship of all the saints in heaven and on earth, to our participation in Christ, to the mutual indwelling of the members of the Body, because of Christ–“that he may dwell in us and we in him… by him, and with him, and in him”–we participate in the koinonia of the Holy Trinity because we are united to Christ the Son.

In the koinonia of Jesus, we share with someone (a person) in something (a shared, deeply personal participation)–it is both personal and affectionate–it is adoption into the Father’s family as sons and daughters because we share in Christ. We are made one in Christ (Gal 3:28), we are altogether the fullness of Christ (Eph 1:23), we are united to Christ in baptism (Col 2:12), we are raised to walk in newness of life (Rom 6:4), and we are seated with Christ in heavenly places (Eph 2:6). With him we die, and with him we rise. As he ascends, we ascend.

Koinonia Lifts Us Up

There are two broad movements in our worship service that always go together: (1) Word and (2) Sacrament. We begin our service with the Liturgy of the Word, and then we end with the Liturgy of the Table. The word “liturgy” comes straight from the Greek word in Acts 13:2, usually translated as “worship”–it’s a compound word for “people” and “work”–our worship is “the work of the people,” liturgy.

Our liturgy goes all the way back to the early church (see Justin Martyr in A.D. 155). In A.D. 215, in The Apostolic Tradition, Hippolytus described the call and response at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Table:

“The Lord be with you.
And with your spirit.
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them up to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give him thanks and praise.”

Hippolytus, The Apostolic Tradition

At the beginning of our Eucharistic liturgy, we “lift up our hearts” together into the heavenly courts where Jesus–in his physical, resurrected body–sits at the right hand of the Father. St. John Chrysostom exhorts us, “Let us beware that we do not remain on the earth.” Fr Alexander Schmemman explains:

“… if we remain on earth we have no place in this heavenly eucharist… [we must] turn our hearts on high… Thus, when we hear this ultimate summons let us ask ourselves: are our hearts turned to the Lord, is the ultimate treasure of our heart in God, in heaven? If so, then in spite of all our weakness, all our fallenness, we have been received into heaven, we behold now the light and glory of the kingdom.”

Schmemman, The Eucharist, 169

At the Lord’s table, we are lifted up in the Spirit like John (Rev 4:1) to sing praise to God and to the Lamb (Rev 5:8) with “Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who for ever sing” the heavenly song, “Holy, Holy, Holy” (Rev 4:8). Our worship is heaven-and-earth-united worship.

• lifted up, Rev 4:1;
• holy, holy, holy, Rev 4:8;
• altar, Rev 8:3;
• white robes, Rev 4:4;
• candles, Rev 1:12;
• incense, Rev 5:8;
• manna, Rev 2:17;
• I could keep going…

“The Eucharist [is] proof of a koinonia held out to humanity now… [and] a truly human participation in God must happen in a truly human way,” at a table, with the most basic of human acts: a shared meal (Julie Canlis, Calvin’s Ladder, 160-61). Following Calvin, Canlis describes this movement of koinonia as our being…

“…drawn up to God rather than dragging him down to us – whether it be in the Lord’s Supper, idolatry, or carnal ways of conceiving of God. Yet it is not only that we must ascend to Christ (and not he to us), but that our whole lives are now reoriented and repersonalized by our communion [koinonia] with the Son of God.”

Ibid., 119

Calvin asks, “[H]ow could we aspire to what is on high, without Jesus Christ drawing us there?” We cannot unless we are united to Christ. Canlis concludes then that “the Christian life is not response to God but inclusion in God” (Ibid., 125-27).

“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also… You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I will come to you.’ If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I.”

John 14:3, 28

Why did Christ come down to us? Christ descended…

“… that he might unite us to God; for until we have reached that point, we are, as it were, in the middle of the course. We too imagine to ourselves but a half-Christ, and a mutilated Christ, if he does not lead us to God… Let us therefore learn to behold Christ humbled in the flesh, so that he may conduct us to the fountain of a blessed immortality; for he was not appointed to be our guide, merely to raise us to the sphere of the moon or of the sun, but to make us one with God the Father.”

John Calvin; quoted in Canlis, Ibid., 126

Calvin says that we only have a “half-Christ” if we only imagine Christ as coming down to us. Christ descended so that we might ascend “by him, and with him, and in him” to be one with Father. Jesus is one with the Father. Christ came down to us not because of any want or need in himself (this is God’s aseity). Rather, Christ came down to us in order to display God’s loving character (for God is love), and he desires to multiply love and rejoicing in his presence. “Jesus Christ leads us there and raises us by the graces which He distributes” (Ibid., 130).

The physical, bodily resurrected Christ has ascended to the right hand of God the Father in heaven, and because we are united together in Christ, we are lifted up into his heavenly presence with the saints and the angels. Importantly, this heavenward movement is physically embodied at the Lord’s table, not as individuals having a personal spiritual experience, but as one body, united together with and in Christ. Canlis concludes:

“Communion [koinonia] in the Lord’s Supper is not a human activity but the Spirit’s means of grounding and reconstituting our very being. As such, the Eucharist is an extension of that all-radical, all-transforming communion we share, by invitation, with the Trinity. For communion with the risen Jesus can never be anything but material and mediated by creaturely things.”

Ibid., 171

Koinonia In The New Creation

Holy Scripture begins with Creation. The story begins in a garden, where heaven and earth overlap, where God and man are intimately together. God tells man to guard and keep this place (the work of a priest; Gen 2:15) and to cultivate seeds [bread] and fruit [wine] (Gen 1:12). But man took the fruit of the devil and destroyed this intimate space (Gen 3:6). Heaven and earth were separated. Man continued to plant vineyards (Gen 9:20), but like Adam, the fruit of the vine brought destruction (Gen 9:21).

Holy Scripture ends with New Creation. But before the end, those who live in the city of man, Babylon, drink the cup of destruction (Rev 16:19, 18:6). Their gluttonous feast is demonic and destructive.

“The fruit for which your soul longed has gone from you, and all your delicacies and your splendors are lost to you, never to be found again!”

Revelation 18:14

But the story does not end there. The Lamb of God shed his blood (Rev 5:6), he drank the cup of wrath for us (Lk 22:42), and after this, he gives us a cup, not of judgment, but a cup of life in his kingdom (Mk 10:39). Holy Scripture ends with heaven and earth reunited at the Marriage Feast of the Lamb (Rev 19:9). Heaven and earth restored, spiritual and physical united at the table of the everlasting feast.

When we gather at the Lord’s table, we are not simply looking back (at the Last Supper); we are not simply looking forward (to the Lamb’s Supper); we are participating in Jesus restoring heaven and earth right now. The end has come, heaven has come down in Christ and we are lifted up in Christ. The New Creation is breaking into the present at the table, and this is exactly what we pray before we receive the Supper: “Our Father… in heaven… thy kingdom come… on earth as it is in heaven…give us this day our daily bread.”

“At the Lord’s table, we receive an initial taste of the final heavens and earth, but the Lord’s Supper is not merely a sign of the eschatological feast, as if the two were separate feasts. Instead, the Supper is the early stage of that very feast. Every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we are displaying in history a glimpse of the end of history and anticipating in this world the order of the world to come.”

Leithart, Blessed are the Hungry, 15

From beginning to end, Holy Scripture sets a physical table with bread and wine as the place where God and man meet: in the garden, in the tabernacle and the Temple, at the Passover, at the Last Supper, and at the Supper of the Lamb. “There is no room given to develop a spirituality that defies creation and the importance of the human body for spiritual formation” (Kreglinger, The Spirituality of Wine, 71).

The Lord’s table is the place where heaven and earth is being reunited now, where koinonia in Christ is created and renewed, where intimate and mutual indwelling happens on earth as it is in heaven. Let us therefore keep the feast!

by Fr Chris Borah

---

Eucharist is just a fancy (Greek) word for thanksgiving. When we think about “the Holy Eucharist,” we generally rush straight to the table–to the meal on the table–to the bread and to the wine. In modern times, we go even smaller, talking about the atoms that make up the bread and the wine (this is the modern discussion about transubstantiation; read Article XXVIII in our BCP, p. 783). We will get to the bread and wine, but eucharist is so much bigger than that.

The Whole Picture

Read just a little bit of pre-modern eucharistic theology and you’ll find very little conversation about questions like “Is the bread bread?” or “grape juice or wine?” Why is that? Because the Lord’s table is a bigger picture. There is Someone seated at the Head of the table, there are many gathered around the table, and the bread is broken and the cup is passed to all to make them one at the table. We zoom in and focus on ourselves and upon the elements to our peril.

“When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk.”

1 Corinthians 11:20–21

We focus on atoms and yeast bacteria and not on Jesus. We keep our heads down and make the meal about me and myself, when we should lift up our heads and see Jesus and all the saints gathered around the table as one. Eastern Orthodox theologian, Fr Alexander Schmemann laments our present age as being consumed with “utterly individualistic piety,” and this in the Orthodox Church (not the self-declared “independent” churches all around us)!

“The man who says, as is so often the case in our day, “I am deeply faithful, but my faith does not need the Church,” may possibly believe, and even deeply, but his faith is something other than that faith that from the first day of Christianity was the thirst for baptismal entry into the Church and the constant quenching of this thirst in the “unity of faith and love” at Christ’s table in his kingdom.”

Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 151

Before we start talking about our practice of drinking from one common cup, before we talk about the one loaf of bread and the Lord’s table–before we get into the smaller details–we must see the big picture, all of us together as one around the table. “In Christ Jesus” we are made “one… in his flesh,” in him we are “one new man,” reconciled together in “one body,” granted access to God in “one Spirit,” “in him” we are built into a single holy place. (Eph 2:13-22) “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16–17). Peter Leithart answers the Apostle Paul’s question (1 Cor 1:13),

““Has Christ been divided?” The answer is, in a sense, “Yes,” for at the table the bread is broken and distributed to the church, just as at the cross His body was torn for us. But this division of Christ has the goal of uniting the church. On the cross, Christ was broken in the process of breaking down the dividing wall separating Jew and Gentile; in the Supper, Christ is divided so that His one loaf can feed many.”

Peter Leithart, Blessed are the Hungry, p. 136

Schmemann perfectly sums up the fullness of the unity that God has accomplished in Christ:

“The miracle of the church assembly lies in that it is not the “sum” of the sinful and unworthy people who comprise it, but the body of Christ. How often do we say we are going to church…? We forget, meanwhile, that we are the Church, we make it up, that Christ abides in his members and that the Church does not exist outside us or above us, but we are in Christ and Christ is in us.”

Schmemann, Ibid., p. 23

At the beginning, we must get our heads up and see the unity that is pictured, and created, and renewed, and sealed at the Lord’s table. Holy Eucharist is the Sacrament of Unity. We do not go to church, we are the Church (Matt 18:20). We are made one in Christ as we partake of one bread. One Mediator. One Spirit. One loaf. One cup. One body.

—

Right in the middle of our eucharistic prayer, the celebrant says these words: “We celebrate the memorial of our redemption, O Father, in this sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving [eucharist!], and we offer you these gifts.” (BCP p. 133) What we bring to God every Sunday is very little: our simple songs, our humble prayers, common bread, common wine, maybe a little bit of money–we bring our unified sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. And the miracle of the Eucharist is that he receives our childlike offerings and then he gives us himself in return. What an exchange!

Our offering of praise and thanksgiving culminates at the Lord’s table, but it begins way before that. On Saturday night, in homes scattered throughout the world, we pray looking forward to our shared eucharist: “Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven.” (A Collect for Sabbath Rest, BCP p. 24)

When we wake on Sunday morning, when we scramble to get semi-decent clothes on our children (and on ourselves!) and everyone in the car on time, we are waging war against the world, the flesh, and the devil in our pursuit of God in the assembly (that’s what the word “church” means). The early church called this the “sacrament of the assembly.” If we don’t gather, we are not part of the assembly. The work of preparation, the warfare of going to be the assembly (church!) is sacrifice. This is unseen praise. This is thanksgiving.

Jesus unites our voices together in harmony. He makes us alive together with his word. We proclaim one creed. Jesus makes us one on our knees in confession. He gives us peace. Jesus lifts up our hearts together as one at his table. We are “made one body with him, that he may dwell is us and we in him.” Heaven and earth are united together in one assembly in Christ, “with all your saints into the joy of your heavenly kingdom, where we shall see our Lord face to face.”

“All this we ask through your Son Jesus Christ. By him, and with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours, Almighty Father, now and for ever. Amen.”