The Eucharist in Scripture

Although the New Testament offers several versions of Jesus’ institution of the Lord’s Supper, or Eucharist, common themes emerge. In observing the Lord’s Supper, the church puts the worshiper in contact with the redemptive death of Jesus—the act that has brought the church into being as one body, the eschatological new covenant community.

Eucharist, from the Greek eucharistia, from the verb “to give thanks,” is properly a New Testament term. For though it finds a material equivalent in “songs of thanksgiving” (Jer. 30:19) and “sacrifice of thanksgiving” (Ps. 116:17 rsv) in the Old Testament, eucharistia has no formal equivalent in Hebrew. Its intelligibility, nevertheless, remains contingent on an understanding of such Old Testament and contemporary Jewish institutions as the Passover, the prayer of thanksgiving (todah), and sacrifice. Its ultimate intelligibility, however, whether in the Old Testament or the New Testament, depends on grasping the essential fact that all gratitude is the child of memory, that eucharistia is inseparable from anamnēsis (remembrance), whether of the saving events of the Exodus or of the redemptive death of Christ on the cross “for us and for our sins.”

The Lord’s Supper in the Pauline Literature

From the middle of the first century we have from Paul not only the earliest record of the institution of the Lord’s Supper but also its first interpretation. To commence the examination of the New Testament evidence with Paul is, therefore, to witness the interpretation of a tradition in the very act of its transmission. For, though less influential in shaping subsequent doctrinal developments than either John or the Synoptics, Paul’s account in 1 Corinthians does set the pattern for all future interpretations of the tradition. Indeed, his approach to this tradition, to what he “received” and “passed on” (1 Cor. 11:23) should spare both exegetes and theologians the cul-de-sac of interpreting beyond the sufferance of the text both the Johannine and the synoptic accounts.

Thus, the first statement in 1 Corinthians 11:23, “I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you,” not only puts the risen Lord at the source of the tradition as its author and the abiding guarantor of its authenticity, but also obviates the debates on the “historicity” of the institution accounts themselves. To create a dichotomy between the Jesus of Nazareth and the risen Lord would be to introduce an element alien to Paul’s thought and inimical to Christian faith (cf. 1 Cor. 7:10 with Mark 10:11 and parallels). Therefore, to the question “Who instituted the Eucharist?” the response has to be unequivocally “the Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 11:23), and no “quest of the historical Jesus,” old or new, can alter this fundamental datum.

Similarly, the “on the night he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23) is not a reference to the Passover but a linking of the institution to the Passion. Paul regards the Passover as one key to understanding the Passion (“Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed,” 1 Cor. 5:7), but nowhere does he link the feast itself to the Lord’s Supper. This fact ought to alert us not to assume the existence of such a link elsewhere in the New Testament unless explicitly stated.

It is in Paul’s account that Jesus’ taking of the bread is followed by “when he had given thanks (eucharistēsas).” Of course, this is the verb whence, as early as the Didachē (9.1; 10.7) and Ignatius of Antioch (Philadelphians 4), the substantive eucharistia came to designate what had hitherto been referred to as “the Lord’s Supper” (1 Cor. 11:20).

“This is my body, which is for you” refers to the redemptive death of Christ for us, as is evident from the “for you.” This fact is made explicit in 1 Corinthians 11:26: “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” Furthermore, the reference to the eating and drinking applies the formulae themselves, not to the bread and wine, but to their consumption, that is, not to the elements as such but to the action of eating and drinking (see 1 Cor. 11:27).

The injunction “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:24–25) is—as has often been remarked (P. Benoit, “Le récit de la cène dans Lc. xxii, 15–20. Étude de critique textuelle et littéraire,” Revue biblique, 48 [1939]: 357–393; reprinted in Exégèse et Théologie, vol. 1 [1961])—a rubric rather than a report. But what has not sufficiently been remarked is that the reference to the whole person of Christ, the “me,” is in parallel to “my body.” In the common biblical acceptance of the term, body (sōma) here refers to the whole person seen as the subject of relationships (see, for example, “absent in body,” 1 Cor. 5:3 rsv). Thus “body” underlines further the “for us” aspect of the passion, even as the words over the “cup” stress the covenantal aspect of the new relationship that is now in force.

Paul, unlike Mark and Matthew, identifies the cup as “the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor. 11:25). The fact that, here at least, the reference is not directly to “my blood of the covenant” (as it is in Mark 14:24 and Matt. 26:28) should alert us to the multiplicity of possible interpretations of the Lord’s Supper even within the New Testament.

The transmission of any truly living tradition is, of course, an act of interpretation, as for instance the words over the cup or the injunction to “do this … in remembrance [anamnēsis] of me (1 Cor. 11:24–25), which is more than an exhortation to perpetuate the pious memory of a departing hero. It is rather the essential element in the believer’s response to the proclamation of the good news of salvation in Christ Jesus, whether in baptism (see “baptized into his death” in Rom. 6:3) or in the Eucharist.

The anamnēsis is what places the believer in contact with the abiding redemptive effect of the death of Christ. Thus, when Paul interprets the whole action, he describes, as it were, a full circle: the anamnēsis puts the believer in contact with the efficacy of the gospel proclaimed, even as the eating and drinking proclaim the saving event announced by the gospel. Paul, therefore, provides an interpretation, not just of the Lord’s Supper, but also of the celebration of the rite within the community of believers down the ages.

In his interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, Paul also provides the fundamental clue to this and every other sacrament: “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). Every sacrament is essentially the proclamation of the redemptive work of Christ, and the Eucharist in particular is this proclamation par excellence. All sacraments derive their meaning and significance from the word they proclaim, even as each in its own way proclaims that same word. The sacraments are thus another mode of this proclamation, in their words no less than in their gestures and actions.

Elsewhere in the same letter to the Corinthians we find not so much another version of the institution as another interpretation of its content. In this instance, it is the interpretation that dictates the sequence in 1 Corinthians 10 of “the cup of blessing which we bless” preceding the “bread which we break” (1 Cor. 10:16 rsv). Here “participation/communion” (koinōnia has both senses) is the key to the significance of the action. That the “cup of blessing which we bless” is a “koinōnia in the blood of Christ” makes explicit the function of the “remembrance” in “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:24–25). It makes explicit, that is, the function of the celebration in putting the believer in contact with the redemptive death. But it stresses an aspect of this contact precisely as “koinōnia in the blood of Christ,” that is, in the death of Christ on the cross.

Moreover, in the following statement on the bread, it elaborates the notion further (“Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf,” 1 Cor. 10:17). It was this logical order of argument, and not some echo of a different tradition such as, for instance, in the Didachē, that dictated the cup-bread order in 1 Corinthians 10:16–17.

By introducing the reference to the “body of Christ” in the sense of the community of the redeemed (Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:27), the interpretation of the “bread we break” as a koinōnia in “the body of Christ” underscores two aspects of the Eucharist: it, like baptism (1 Cor. 12:12–13; Rom. 6:3–11), makes the believers beneficiaries of the redemptive act of Christ, at the same time that it incorporates them into this one body. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the church in that it brings the church into being as the body of Christ, but it can take place only as an act of the church as the body of Christ. These two aspects are so inextricably linked that their converse is equally true. The absence of one makes the other impossible: “When you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat” (1 Cor. 11:20). Precisely as, and only insofar as, the community of believers assembles “as a church” (1 Cor. 11:18) can it celebrate the Eucharist and, celebrating it, become the body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:17). “The Lord’s Supper sets us in the Body of Christ, in the presence of the Exalted One who, having passed through death, now reigns: it therefore places us under the lordship of the Kyrios” (E. Käsemann, “The Pauline Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper,” Essays on New Testament Themes [Naperville, Ill: Allenson 1964], 132).

The Didachē echoes this mode of understanding the eucharistic celebrations: “As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains, but was brought together and became one, so let thy church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom” (Didachē 9.4).

The Lord’s Supper in Mark and Matthew

Both in their similarity to one another and in their concordant divergence from the accounts in Luke and in Paul, these two narratives of the institution can be treated simultaneously. The setting of the event in them is unmistakably the eating of the Passover (to pascha) (Mark 14:12–16; Matt. 26:17–20). Therefore, whether or not the Last Supper itself was a Passover meal (see J. Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus [New York: Scribner, 1966], 15–88; V. Taylor, The Gospel According to Mark, 2nd ed. [London: Macmillan, 1966], 664–667), there is no reason for trying to interpret that action and the blessing pronounced (eulogēsas) in Passover categories. But this is not true of the altogether remarkable “this is my body … ; this is my blood … ” For “important though the Passover motif may otherwise be in the Christological ideas of early Christianity, for the words of institution it contributes nothing” (G. Bornkamm, “Lord’s Supper and Church in Paul,” in Early Christian Experience [London: SCM Press, 1969], 134; and see X. Léon-Dufour, Sharing the Eucharistic Bread [Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1987], 189–194).

Jesus “took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them” in Mark 14:22 (rsv); his action is made explicit in Matthew 26:26 as “to the disciples” (rsv). Mark’s “take; this is my body” becomes “take, eat” in Matthew. This latter modification would have been a negligible redactional retouch did it not affect the meaning of the formula. In general, commentators are content to regard the addition as merely stylistic, setting the bread formula in parallel with that of the cup. Nevertheless, a case can be made for taking the neuter touto (this) in “this is my body” as referring, in what is called an ad sensum construction, to the taking and eating rather than to body (soma), which is masculine. Thus, while in Mark the reference is clearly the bread, in Matthew a case can be made for taking it to be the “take, eat.” If this be so, then we have even here, not one but two interpretations of the formula, where Mark’s would lend itself more readily to later disputations on the “substance” than would Matthew’s. While the formula over the bread itself, either in Mark or in Matthew, does not in any way link the “body” to the death of Jesus, the meaning of body in Mark is, and remains, more of a crux for interpreters than in Matthew.

The cup formula, however, evinces a marked difference between the two evangelists. In Mark it is pronounced by Jesus after “they all drank from it” (Mark 14:23). Thus here the question of the referent can and does arise: “this is my blood of the covenant” refers to the cup, since there is no mention of “wine” as there is of “bread” in Mark 14:22. But it refers especially to the drinking, “And he took the cup … offered it to them … and they all drank from it” (Mark 14:23; see 1 Cor. 11:26, where the reference to the eating and the drinking is unequivocal). In Matthew, however, the situation is slightly adjusted by the addition of the imperative “drink from it, all of you. This is my blood” (Matt. 26:27–28).

Any understanding of the Eucharist inevitably hinges on determining what precisely the “this” (touto) refers to. In Mark and Matthew it is the cup formula that really interprets the action as a reference to the redemptive death: “which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:24) and, in Matthew, by “for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). Thus in these two gospels, as in the other accounts of the institution in the New Testament, the narrative and its content are already theologically interpreted, and no amount of exegetical ingenuity can wholly separate the “fact” from that interpretation. Therefore, each account of the Last Supper in the New Testament is a distinct eucharistic theology. [While we may accept the basic fidelity of all the Gospel accounts to the tradition of the Last Supper, Jesus’ original words to his disciples on that occasion would have been in Aramaic. The various nuances of the Greek Gospels may attest to distinct views of the Eucharist in the circles in which they appeared but may not necessarily clarify Jesus’ original intention.]

Luke’s Account of the Lord’s Supper

Of all the accounts of institution, the one in the Gospel of Luke is the most textually vexing. But whether one adopts the shorter version (Luke 22:15–19) or the longer (Luke 22:15–20), the order of cup-bread in the former and cup-bread-cup in the latter requires explanation. Descriptions of the Passover seder, of Jewish celebratory practices, and of their background in the Old Testament, are all called on to provide an explanation. Nevertheless, the mere fact of the cup preceding the bread, if surprising, need not be inexplicable. As indicated in 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, the order of cup first is dictated by Paul’s interpretation of the Lord’s Supper in terms of the bread rather than of the cup. Though both “the cup of blessings which we bless” and “the bread which we break” are interpreted as koinōnia in the blood and the body of Christ respectively, it is the bread/body that provides Paul with the image he needs in order to proceed: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17 rsv). Moreover, since the reference to blood is clearly to the redemptive death, as it is elsewhere in Paul (Rom. 3:25; 5:9), the cup-bread order in 1 Corinthians 10 is dictated by the logic of expository exigence as it is not in, for example, an almost equally ancient, extracanonical work, the Didachē: “And concerning the Eucharist [this is one of the earliest instances of the usage of this term], we hold Eucharist thus: First, concerning the cup, ‘We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David thy child; to thee be glory forever.’ And concerning the broken bread: ‘We give thee thanks, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou didst make known to us through Jesus thy child. To thee be glory forever’ ” (Didachē 9.1–3).

Luke’s text is usually regarded as being closer to that of 1 Corinthians 11 than to Mark and Matthew. For, in addition to “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19; cf. 1 Cor. 11:24–25), it is prefaced by an explicit reference to the coming of the kingdom of God (Luke 22:16; cf. 1 Cor. 11:26). Whether it be taken as integral to the account of the institution or regarded as prefatory to it, the reference indelibly marks the account and its understanding as eschatological, that is, as belonging to the “last times” inaugurated by the coming of the Lord. The Eucharist is an act that proclaims the presence of the last times in our midst. No understanding of “the new covenant in my blood,” in Luke or elsewhere, is possible without the realization that the covenant is both final and definitive (see Heb. 7:27). Thus it is that the church, in celebrating the Eucharist, has with unfailing insight coupled the Lord’s Prayer and the words of the institution; “Your kingdom come … give us our bread” find their true meaning in the “for you” of the bread formula and in the “of the covenant” of the cup formula.

Eucharist in the Fourth Gospel

It is not an unremarked fact that the fourth Gospel has no narrative of the eucharistic institution. If at first baffling, such omission is not the least logical of the Gospel’s qualities. What the prologue climax affirms, “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14), is elaborated throughout both the “book of signs” (John 1–12) and the “book of glory” (John 13–21). To have inserted an institution account in the closing chapters would have been redundant. What the fourth Gospel does, however, is more illuminating. It explains, in the discourse on the bread of life in chapter 6, the meaning of the Eucharist in terms of the prologue. This is why the “sacramental realism” of John 6:53–58 can best be understood in terms of the Word, which “became flesh” for the “life of the world.” Here alone do we have the properly biblical coupling of “flesh and blood” and not, as elsewhere in the institution accounts, “body and blood.”

It is at this point that one can best understand how the Eucharist is, above all else, the “mystery of faith,” faith in the flesh that the Word became. If a proper understanding of John 6:52–59 is to be sought, then it is to be sought not in the abstract theological terminology of later eucharistic debates but in its collocation in the same chapter with two major themes: the banquet of wisdom and the meaning of discipleship. The proper significance of the mystery is given final expression in the Petrine confession, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68–69).