The Jewish Roots of the Eucharist
What if you followed a Catholic teacher, one you had great respect for, and then one day, he said something that completely went against scripture? What if what he said was so offensive to your ears, you could hear the groans of your Catholic ancestors rolling in their graves? What would you do? Would you trust him on it? Or would you turn your back and say, “No. This isn’t tradition. He must be a heretic.”
Pope Benedict XVI says “if you separate the words of Jesus from the faith and hope of the Jewish people, you risk ‘completely misunderstanding’ him.” (Hahn, 9) To understand the significance of the Eucharist, or even understand Jesus at all, we have to understand his Jewish roots, and why his words “Eat my body, drink my blood,” were so jarring to the people who heard it. We tend to think they only thought it was some strange cannibalistic idea they couldn’t accept or that we needed doubters for the sake of a good story, but it goes much deeper than that. And to understand why these words were so unorthodox for a Jewish man to say, we have to understand the faith and scripture of the Jewish people.
Leviticus 17:11 says quite clearly, “You shall not drink the blood,” referring to the Passover lamb. Genesis 9:3-4 says, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you… only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” Multiple times in scripture it is asserted not to drink the blood of an animal. So during the Passover every year, where the Jewish people would celebrate their exodus from Egypt, led by Moses, they would sacrifice a male lamb. You would not break the bones or make it suffer. It was an honorable sacrifice. After the sacrifice, they would discuss the meaning of the flesh and the hope for a new exodus, one where they were promised a Messiah.
Fast-forward to Jesus’s thirty-third year, and we’ve come to that moment. But as the new sacrificial lamb, the bread was broken and he did suffer. And now he said to drink his blood. Talk about a contradiction!
Instead of talking about the meaning of the flesh of the Passover lamb, he “identified the bread and wine of the supper as his own body and blood, and commanded the disciples to eat and drink.” Instead of speaking about the past exodus, he spoke of a future exodus. At this moment, Jesus established a new Passover. By this sacrifice, he initiated the new exodus.
It completely went against the scripture they had studied their entire lives. Who wouldn’t have freaked out? The words were probably extremely offensive to their ears. Jewish scholar Geza Vermes points out, “The imagery of eating a man’s body and especially drinking his blood, even after allowance is made for metaphorical language, strikes a totally foreign note in a Palestinian Jewish cultural setting. With their profoundly rooted blood taboo, Jesus’ listeners would have been overcome with nausea at hearing such words.” (Pitre, 17)
So I wonder, if we were put in that same situation, how different would we be from the ones who gave up on him? He said things that undoubtedly went against the scriptures. If this were in Catholic eyes, we probably would have canceled him real quick, wouldn’t we? To go along with this guy would risk being completely ostracized by your home church.
For thousands of years, the faithful offered sacrifices to the gods, and now God has offered himself as a sacrifice - to become the sacrificial lamb. Way to turn the world upside-down, right? “The Eucharist, therefore, is not only a holy bread and a holy cup, it is a holy moment -- a saving action.” (Dues 151) So what does all of this mean to us now?
The Eucharist ties us to the past but breathes life into our future. The Eucharist itself is made from unleavened bread, the food which Jesus and his ancestors before him ate for every Passover meal. Like the breath from Jesus to Peter to pope, to bishop to priest, we trace our material and physical lineage back to Jesus himself, an unbroken line, a sustained covenant. “Those who share the bread and cup with each other become one with Christ and one with each other, because it is the one Christ whom they share.” (Dues 152).
As we can recognize the true presence of Christ in simple elements of bread and wine, we are one step closer to recognizing Christ in each other. If Christ can permeate and become such simple things, imagine what he can do within us - within these human bodies truly created in his image. The Eucharist is the “source and summit” of our faith, the “perfection of the spiritual life and the end to which all the sacraments tend.” (Saint Thomas Aquinas, CCC 346) Here in simple bread and wine, He is truly and substantially present, with us now and forever. How lonely He must be when we fail to recognize his presence in our very bodies.
The Eucharist “signif[ies] the goodness of creation” (CCC 336) It “does not only ask us to remember Jesus and what he did” (CCC 338) This supper we share is not simply a flashback or a memory to a time gone and passed. It is a sacrifice of love that transcends space and time, giving his body up for us over and over and over again. A saving action, a unifying covenant, Jesus’ blood poured out for us signifies the unity of his Church, his people, our salvation, and the hope of a second coming. The question is, will we know it when we see it?