What Does It Mean to “Do This”?

Supper, Mass, Eucharist

Michael Root, James J. Buckley, Root, Buckley

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625644169
  9781498222167
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876647
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Jesus' best-known mandate--after perhaps the mandate to love God and neighbor--was given at the Last Supper just before his death: "Do this in memory of me." Indeed, a case can be made that to "do this" is the source and summit of the way Christians carry out Jesus' love-mandate. Of course, Christians have debated what it means to "do this," and these debates have all too often led to divisions within and between them--debates over leavened and unleavened bread, reception of the cup, real presence and sacrifice, "open" or "closed" communion, this Supper and the hunger of the world. These divisions seem to fly in the face of Jesus' mandate, causing some to wonder whether this is "really" the Lord's Supper we celebrate (compare 1 Corinthians 11). Everything turns on just what it means to "do this." The purpose of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology's 2012 conference was to address at least some of the many aspects of this question--to address them together, as Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox pastors and theologians, and all participants in the Supper.

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Do This: Eucharist and the Assembly’s Liturgy

Frank C. Senn

What does it mean to “do this”? Before it means anything else, it means that we are to do what has been commanded. Many meanings cluster around the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, also known as Holy Communion and the Sacrament of the Altar, and these meanings are associated with the benefits offered. But there would be no benefits to receive if we didn’t “do this” in the first place.

Touto poieite—“Do this.” This is the command attached to the institution narrative cited by St. Paul as a tradition (paradosis). It is what he has received from the Lord and “handed over” to his congregation in Corinth. The command accompanies the words of Jesus over both the bread and the cup (1 Cor 11:24, 25).

The command to “do this” also appears in the institution narrative in St. Luke’s Gospel (22:19). There is the textual problem of the two cups in the Lucan passion narrative (short text versus long text). No matter how one resolves the issue of one cup versus two cups, Luke certainly witnesses to the fact that Jewish meals did begin with a blessing over the cup as well as over the bread. The command to “do this in remembrance of me” after the words over the bread may also include the thanksgiving over the initial cup, even though the words identifying the poured out cup as “the new covenant in my blood” are connected to the second cup “after the supper” (meta to deipnesai) in the long text. In the Didache, chapters 9–10, there is an order similar to Luke’s: blessing of the cup, blessing of the broken loaf, and thanksgiving at the end of the meal over the final cup.1 The command to “do this” does not appear in the Matthean or Markan Gospels.

1. The Text

Exegetes and theologians have focused primarily on why we are to “do this.” It is, as Paul’s text says, “for my anamnesis.” The whole idea of the eucharistic memorial is pretty central to the concerns of liturgical and sacramental theology, and a theology of eucharistic memorial has developed in relation to the eucharistic sacrifice.2 But for the purpose of this presentation I will give anamnesis a simpler understanding.

When we come together as the church—the ekklesia, the assembly called out of the world—we are to celebrate the meal that Jesus instituted. In fact, the meetings of the early church were primarily for meals, as was the case with other associations in the Greco-Roman world.3 Part of the meaning of the anamnesis, therefore, is simply to “do” the supper Jesus had with his disciples on the “night in which he was handed over”—not in the mimetic sense of dramatic reenactment, but in the expectation of Jesus’ promise to be present in and to the celebration, specifically in the signs of bread and wine. “This is my body.” “This is me.”

The translation of the phrase “on the night he was handed over” is a bit problematic. In the Gospel narratives the word paradidonai can be correctly translated “betrayed” because in the story of the upper room Judas is intent on betraying Jesus, and Jesus tells him to get on with his sordid business. But Judas is not mentioned in the text received and quoted by Paul. Moreover, in Romans 8:32 Paul presents his view that God “handed over” (paradidonai) Jesus to death for all of us. So the term used in 1 Corinthians 11:23 could be understood by Paul to mean “the night in which God handed over Jesus.” Within the Jewish reckoning of time, since the day begins the evening before, the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples did take place on the day he died. Paul sees the death of Jesus, not his betrayal, proclaimed in the supper, by God’s intention.

Moreover, the words of Jesus are all present tense, not past tense. Paul’s text is not evoking a historical remembrance but a present reality—the presence of the crucified Lord who will come again as judge in the proclamation that occurs not just by words but by doing the supper. The judgment of the coming Lord is actually a present reality that is being experienced in the Corinthian community that has violated the ritual conditions in which the meal is to be celebrated by fracturing the body of the church at the table. “That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died,” wrote Paul (1 Cor 11:30).

So what is it that we are supposed to do to obey this command of Jesus? It was Gregory Dix’s thesis that the institution narrative provides a set of rubrics that implies a liturgical order.4 Dix’s further thesis was that the sevenfold actions spelled out in the institution narrative developed into the fourfold shape of the eucharistic liturgy when the sacramental meal was separated from the actual meal—resulting in Offertory, Consecration, Fraction, Administration. This thesis is generally regarded now as too facile. But just to rehearse the actions in the narrative related by Paul and probably followed in Corinth: they were to take a loaf of bread, give thanks over it, break it, and distribute it. Then, “after supper” (I’ll explain this in a moment), they were to take the cup, give thanks over it, and drink from it. Furthermore, this is to be done in such a way that it demonstrates the oneness of the assembly at the table, not schism.

All of this seems straightforward enough. But we’ve been doing this supper for some two thousand years now, and over this span of time a lot of rubrical violations have occurred in various assemblies. Some haven’t taken a loaf of bread; they’ve settled for the convenience of individual wafers. Some haven’t offered up thanksgiving; they’ve recited the rubrics. Some have even fought over the breaking of bread (which, were a real loaf used, would need to be broken for distribution anyway). Some have not passed around or drunk from a cup; they’ve used individual straws, spoons, glasses, or received no wine/blood of Christ at all. In fact, the cup has been withheld from communicants at one time or another in most of our traditions. And some have not eaten the bread and drunk from the cup discerning the unity of body, the church; they have excluded baptized members of the assembly from the meal for non-disciplinary reasons. The threat of judgment that Paul says hangs over this meal suggests that the eucharistic assembly had better get its liturgical act together. So let me go through the things we are mandated to do to see how we might do them, beginning with the social context in which the Christian assembly in Corinth celebrated the Lord’s Supper.

2. The Social Context

The social context of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper was a gathering of the church in the house of a member, or in an inn rented for the occasion as other supper clubs did in the Greco-Roman world, to have a banquet. The form of the banquet was most likely a symposium. A symposium was a meal (which sometimes degenerated into a drinking party) in which the guests engaged in philosophic discussion. There were a number of literary symposia from ancient Greece and Rome, of which the most famous is probably Plato’s.

Scholars like Blake Layerle5 and Dennis E. Smith,6 who have studied the meal customs of the ancient Greco-Roman world, see the symposium as the form of the banquet that lies behind the Jewish Passover Seder as well as the Christian Eucharist. Typically a symposium begins with a thanksgiving to the god of the feast, the sharing of food and wine, entertainment of sorts in the form of a dance, a poem, a drama, or even a philosophic proposition, followed by discussion of what has been presented, accompanied by additional cups of wine (with copious drinking!). The long night of discussion ended in Plato’s Symposium with only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon left, drinking out of a large cup that they passed around, and Socrates’ two companions not being able to follow his argument because they were drowsy. The symposium broke up at daybreak; Socrates saw his companions home and went to the baths.7

The canonical Gospels also present a symposium on the night Jesus was betrayed that left the disciples drowsy and not able to watch with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane while he prayed to the Father that the next cup would pass from him. The symposium structure can best be seen in John 13–17. In the context of a meal, which is mentioned but not described, Jesus performs the dramatic action of washing his disciples’ feet. This serves as the basis for discussion of the new commandment Jesus lays on his disciples (now called “friends”), that they love one another as he has loved them. Because this is a “last supper,” there is also much discussi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Do This: Eucharist and the Assembly’s Liturgy
• Chapter 2: Karl Barth on the Lord’s Supper: An Ecumenical Appraisal
• Chapter 3: The Eucharistic Presence of Christ
• Chapter 4: What Do We Do with This? Ecumenical Implications of the Handling of the Eucharist
• Chapter 5: Eucharist: The Table That Unites and Divides the Church
• Chapter 6: The Eucharist and Communion with God
• Chapter 7: Communion: A Pentecostal Perspective