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I am re-reading a short book about the life of Bishop Leonard Wilson, who was Bishop of Birmingham. Few of you here will not have seen him. For years he led the religious part of the Annual Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall. He could claim the right to be there because, as Bishop of Singapore, he had been arrested and tortured by the Japanese in the 2nd World War and had suffered internment at the notorious Changai prison.
A section of his biography tells of life in that camp including how, in an hostile atmosphere Bishop Wilson managed, each Sunday, to celebrate the Eucharist. Those who gathered with him received not consecrated bread but a little rice. On one occasion, a Christian missionary teacher was sweeping the corridor outside the cell and noticed what the Bishop was doing. In great danger if found out, she knelt outside the cell and received the sacrament through the bars. This story is one amongst many, many others concerning how the Eucharist has been seen by a lot of Christians as the most important thing they do.
In his classic and rather lengthy book about the Eucharist, the monk Dom Gregory Dix, there is a rather beautiful passage which bears witness to this importance. I quote it in part : -
“For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action [of the Eucharist] has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, from every conceivable human need….
Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church… for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father didn’t die of pneumonia… for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike… for Captain so and so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk…by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously for the canonization of Joan of Arc…. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across the Parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make – the holy common people of God.
What is its pull? Why is it so important for Christians to gather, as we are gathering, around the altar of this Church tonight and in the knowledge that everywhere, in Christendom our fellow Christians are doing the same especially tonight of all nights when millions and millions of Christians praying this Eucharist at whose climax a sliver of bread is put into our hands and a sip of wine will pass over our lips and in faith we touch and are touched by God.
There are many different Christian services we could be taking part into tonight – some inventions of the Church, some the creation of pastors and priests; some the joint efforts of groups of lay folk but nothing can compare to what we are doing tonight and nothing will draw so many Christians to their knees before an altar as this act of worship is doing.
What is it that compels us to this and what is it that will lead people to take the most incredible risks – as Bishop Wilson did – to be part of it?
There is a simple answer and it is to be found in the name by which today is known – Maundy - from the Latin, Mandatum – which in English is ‘Command’
St.Paul tells us this command in the portion of the 1st Letter to the Corinthians that we have just heard: DO THIS… No other command has been so carefully obeyed.
DO THIS in remembrance of me – Do This and I will be there, amongst you. I will feed you with my life – my shortly to be Crucified and Resurrected life. We celebrate the Eucharist because Jesus chose this as the way he would be always with us.
In a remarkable book on the Gospels by an Italian writer, Luigi Santucci, he explains what happened as only a novelist can: at that Last Supper with his friends Jesus wanted to find a way by which he would remain with them for ever and by which he would always be found in the Church they would go on to found.
At this point says Santucci, I see his eyes wandering around over the remains of the bread on the table cloth, and then shining with an ineffable inspiration: this, this would be his hiding place. That’s where he would take refuge. That night they wouldn’t capture him in his entirety; they’d think they’d done so, they’d think they’d dragged him away from his companions, yet really they would scourge and crucify a ghost. Rather as in Galilee, when they wanted to seize him and kill him or make him king, he had the knack of hiding himself and disappearing from sight. So he stretched out his hand over the already broken bread, broke it into smaller bits and, raising it into the air, pronounced the words of the magic transition – ‘This is my body, it’s been given for you.’..
This was the way that Christ had chosen to be always with us.
Santucci’s description of the institution of the Eucharist may at one level seem simplistic. Far more weighty deliberations have been made as to the Eucharist’s meaning and purpose. Dom Gregory Dix’s 764 pages pale into insignificance against the libraries of theological thinking about the Eucharist – but, to my mind, Santucci takes us very close to the heart of its meaning. Jesus looked for a way to be with us for ever not simply as a future Resurrection hope but as something tangible, touchable, available here and now.
Of course, to really understand the meaning of what he did that night and what he goes on doing through the Eucharist we have to take our part in it. Jesus can only offer himself to us. It is we who have to receive him not just into our hands or across our lips but really receive him in the depths of our heart.
The Eucharist can be just plain bread and ordinary wine or it can be the life-giving force by which Jesus enters our own lives and transforms them from within.
We can Do this in Remembrance of Him as we might remember a past event, a long-dead hero. That would be to reduce the Eucharist to nothing more than a memento. A bit like remembering a dead relative on their birthday by cooking a meal of their favourite dishes. The problem is that meaning always loses something in translation and the Greek word we translate as ‘remembrance’ is anamnesis which has a much more dynamic meaning. It is about re-calling some past event into the present and in so doing to make it as real for us now as it was in the past. In other words, whenever we ‘Do This’ we are drawing the Risen Christ into our lives and He is truly, if mysteriously present under the form of bread and wine.
In Anglican thinking, this is known as the ‘Real Presence’ – Jesus Christ is truly in this bread and this wine. Theologians have argued in what way this is so but I have always found the words of Queen Elizabeth the First to be the profoundest and most simple explanation.
His was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and brake it,
And what that word doth make it,
I do believe and take it.
She was her father’s daughter in the sense that, like Henry VIII she deserved the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ because she lived by faith - and that is the clue about understanding, if we can really ever understand, the mystery of the Eucharist. It needs faith.
Carlo Caretto, a little brother of Jesus who wrote much about the spiritual experience said that to place oneself before what seems to be bread and say ‘Christ is there, living and true’ is pure faith. But if understanding the Eucharist requires faith, it also requires love.
One of my most vivid experiences happened when, after a number of years of absence, I returned to Church at the age of eighteen. That first morning, at an 8 o’clock BCP Communion Service I hadn’t really got a clue about what was going on. I had been ill prepared in my Confirmation classes five years previously. Yet, when I moved forward towards the altar on a dull rainy morning which cast the vast church into gloom, I was transfixed by the golden light of the Sanctuary. When I knelt and held out my hands – a little furtively – and the old priest placed the wafer into my hands, I knew that something very special was happening. I did not have then either the theology or spirituality to put it into words but I sort of knew that Jesus had come to me in a very particular way. I’m not sure I can fully explain it even now but Santucci gets very close to what I sensed was happening.
Out of sheer love for me – Jesus was drawing me close to his life. And the way he found to do that was in the Eucharist – in the bread and the wine. This was his act of love by which he was claiming my heart. And that is how he has gone on doing it ever since. Oh yes, there are other ways – sometimes simple, sometimes profound. God’s word through the Bible in particular and in the depths of prayer – especially those times when he really gets through to me – but the Eucharist is still at the heart of it all because in it the Word of God comes through this sign. Santucci calls it our Lord’s ‘hiding place’ but it is also his ‘revealing place’ – he slips into my life and yours in the hiddeness of bread but then he reveals himself in the heart. And the message he brings is – I love you. So much, in fact that I want to be with you always and every time you receive this sacrament – you receive me. And you receive my love which is so strong that I accepted death on a cross to prove it to you.
Faith and Love – I receive Christ by faith and I know His love. It’s all there in the Eucharist – which is why, for me, it is so important and why, today, Maundy Thursday is so special.