Today we celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. Our Gospel – Mark 14:12-16 & 22-26 – gives us an intriguing description of the final meal Jesus has with his disciples. Is this a formal, Passover ritual or a more informal meal?
Mark does set the meal within the formal structures of the annual Passover festival: “On the first day of Unleavened Bread etc”. But he never once alludes to the Passover liturgy. And according to John, Jesus was crucified on the day before Passover – see John 18:28. “Most authors today doubt that it was a paschal celebration, or leave the question open” (José A Pagola, Jesus: An Historical Approximation, translated by Margaret Wilde, Convivium Press, 2015, 346).
Mark’s description is stylized: “‘Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him etc.” Mark says the same thing of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem – see 11:1-6. On both occasions, Jesus sends two disciples ahead of him – secretly – to make preparations; they meet a certain unknown person who is key to making the preparations; things then turn out exactly as Jesus has said they would.
We could reasonably conclude that the meal Jesus shared with his friends that night, was not the ritual Passover meal but a more informal meal – the kind of ordinary meal that he had shared with his disciples many times in Galilee. Recognizing it as an ordinary meal, takes nothing from the momentous nature of what happened that night: “He took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body’. Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, and all of them drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’.”
Understood as an ordinary meal, what happened that night is the pre-eminent instance of sacramentality. In the human is the divine, in the temporal is the eternal, in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup is our redemption! St Paul – writing within twenty years of this moment – indicates that the followers of the Way have already begun to recognize this as an ongoing event in the life of the community: “The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me’. …. ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me’. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26).
We continue this breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup, for it is ‘the source and summit of the Christian life’ (Lumen Gentium, #11)’.
(Audio Available)
