Eucharist and Time

Eucharist, as Danny shared, is one of the great responses to Empire insofar as it is our “yes” to all to whom the empire says “no” and it is our economic answer to the world’s patterns of materialism, commodification, and possessiveness. “There is never to be any cost to taking in the body and blood of our Christ.” The Eucharist also deconstructs and demolishes the walls built up by the Empire’s sense of status and superiority for it brings everything down to the very basic need of all mankind regardless of status. It evens the playing ground by reminding us that we all–rich, poor, male female, legal, illegal–need bread… sustenance… something seen as a luxury by the poor yet is taken advantage of by the rich. Jesus tells us that this is his body.

Another dimension of the Eucharist is what it says about time. After serving the bread Jesus said, “…do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Remembrance is something that takes place not in our minds, as we usually understand it, it is not something I can quite do still and in solitude. This kind of remembrance happens with our hands and with our bodies. It happens in us as the very real bread and the very real drink happen in our very real bodies, brought together as a body. Remembrance happens in your stomach, in your gut, not in your head. We are not just recalling the suffering of Christ but we are calling it out of the past and into the present. We remember as a way of saying, together with those who need bread regardless of who they are, together with the poor and the oppressed, in solidarity with beaten and crucified people, “what has happened to Christ is happening to us.” Just as Israel took the passover meal as a way of entering into solidarity with the liberated slaves of Egypt, the church which is the new Israel takes Christ’s body and blood, consuming and being consumed, as a way of entering into solidarity with the crucified Christ who shared and shares his identity with the “least of these.”

At the same time that we are calling the past out and into the present we also call the future into the present. After serving the cup Jesus said, “I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” As we eat and drink in solidarity with the crucified Christ saying, “what has happened to Christ is happening to us,” we are not only calling the past into the present but we are calling the future into the present–anticipating the day, as though it were now, that Christ drinks with us. We are calling the future into the present, insisting on a future when all will eat, drink, and live while denying a future–the Empire’s future–where death and decay are the inevitable and unavoidable end. We call Christ’s future into our present, with feet grounded in the suffering of Christ, proclaiming and anticipating with our hands the day when Christ will drink again from the fruit of the vine in his father’s kingdom, when “new wine will drip from the mountains” (Amos 9), when all will eat and bread will not be withheld. We become, in our freedom and in our openness in the body of Christ, the future here and now. We become the foretaste of God’s kingdom. in the Eucharist, we are now what we imagine the world can be.

The great and profound claim about time, which the Eucharist makes yet which so many Christian traditions miss, is that waiting is not on the agenda. Time is not governed by what must be but in the Eucharist it is governed by what can be. We do not have to wait for eternal life to happen in the future, giving in to cynicism and despair in our waiting. Instead we can call both future and past into the present, making this place the thin space in which heaven meets earth.