“On the day which is called Sunday, there is an assembly of all our members, whether they live in the city or in country districts. The records of the Apostles (which are called Gospels) or the writings of the prophets are read as long as we have time. When the reader has finished, the president speaks to us. He instructs us and urges us to imitate the excellent things we have heard in the readings. Then we all stand up together and pray.

On the conclusion of our prayer, bread, wine and water are brought forward. The president offers prayers and gives thanks with all his strength and the people give their assent by saying Amen.  The Eucharist is distributed, everyone present communicates, and the deacons take it to those who are absent.

A collection is taken and placed in the custody of the president who uses it to help orphans and widows and all who, for any reason, are distressed whether because they are sick, in prison or away from home. In a word, he takes care of all who are in need.”

This description of the Church meeting for Eucharist was written by St. Justin Martyr in about 150AD and clearly demonstrates that from its very beginning the Church met to celebrate the Eucharist as we are doing tonight.

 In Acts 2:42, in the famous short passage which lays down the blueprint for the Christian Church we read that the followers of Jesus

devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

The Christian Church has invented all sorts of services, some the creation of pastors and priests and monks; 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 worship God.  Even as we meet there are millions of Christians meeting for Eucharist as we are.  Why is this?  Why does this form of worship hold such an attraction for Christianity?  In a  passage from a classical work on the meaning of the Eucharist, Dom Gregory Dix tells us that:

“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 ampitheatre; 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?  Justin Martyr gives us the reason:

“The Apostles in the records that they have made .. handed down to us what Jesus commanded them to do. They tell us that he took bread, gave thanks and said: Do this in remembrance of me.  This is my Body.  In the same way he took the cup, and blessed it and said, This is my blood.  The Lord gave this command to them..

One of the Apostles Justin refers to is, of course St. Paul whose record we heard as our Epistle tonight.  Paul adds to our understanding because he tells us that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.  Between the Last Supper which we commemorate tonight and the Christian Eucharist which we celebrate as our central act of worship, there is the Cross.  On the night when he was betrayed to death he had his Last meal with his friends. It was close to the Jewish Festival of Passover and, without doubt, in his mind he looked back to the event that Passover commemorated.  The people of Israel, enslaved by the tyranny of Egypt, sought to leave that land and travel to a place where they would be safe to worship God freely.  Pharaoh hardened his heart many times, not wishing, of course, to lose his source of cheap labour.  How often in history has it been the case that tyrants hold people to ransom because of what they can give so cheaply.

In the end, God lost patience with Pharaoh and visited the land with the Angel of Death. Every firstborn in the land would die.  The Israelites were told to daub the two doorposts and the lintel of their doors with the blood of  a year old lamb.  This would be the mark that would be recognised and their homes would be Passed-over and none of them would die.  They were also told to eat the lamb which was to be roasted over a fire and eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.  This was to be the food for their journey out of Egypt to the wilderness and on to the Promised Land.

So the Lamb was sacrificed to save the people from death and was also to provide food for the journey.

The connection Jesus made at that Last Supper and in all the prophecies he had made beforehand, was that he was casting himself in the role of the new Passover Lamb.  By his death he would destroy death and sin and make it possible for the new Israel (the Christian Church he was about to inaugurate) to pass from a life of enslavement to sin and death to the new life of liberation and resurrection.  He would become the new Passover Lamb sacrificed for the freedom of his people – those who would come to believe (as the disciples still had yet to believe) that in Him was life in all its fullness and that our Life is bound up inseparably with His.  By a Paradox so often at the heart of Christianity, Jesus becomes both the Lamb by whom we are delivered and also The promised Land to which we travel.

For that to happen Jesus was prepared to endure the Cross which became the Saving Sign by which we are all set free.  But such freedom requires of us an action of dying too – for we are to die to our old ways and allow Christ to re-form us into the new way of His Love.  Resurrection isn’t just something that happens to us when we die - it is something we experience in our present life.  We die to sin and live for and in Christ.  This is what happens at our Baptism but we all know that it has to go on happening as we live our lives more truly as Christ would have us live them.  We are constantly being called to die to sin and to turn aside from all those unloving actions, words, thoughts, which prevent us from truly embracing the new life in Christ to which we are called and which is, or should be, the aim of our Christian living.

We are not, however, crucified as Jesus was crucified.  We do not have to go through the agony of our Lord’s Passion.  He has done all that for us.  He is truly the Lamb slain on our behalf.  He has made our Passover from the old ways of sin to the new way of righteousness and thus  we are able to see ourselves  as dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

However, it is not by looking on the past event of Christ Crucified that we will succeed in this.  The Crucifixion, whilst an historical event is a continuous part of our Christian story.  At the heart of the eucharist are the words Jesus spoke at the Last Supper – words which he goes on speaking to us about the bread being his body and the wine being his blood.

The action of the Eucharist is of Taking, Blessing, Breaking (of the Bread) and Giving.  This is the language of offering and of sacrifice.  This is the language of The Cross.  It is, for us, not the physical sacrifice that it was for Jesus on Calvary but rather a spiritual sacrifice.  The bread remains bread though it is symbolically broken as Christ’s body was physically broken on Calvary.  The wine, mixed with a little water remains wine but it is a symbol of the water and blood which flowed from Christ’s side at his Crucifixion.  At the heart of the Eucharist, therefore, is a recalling of the sacrifice of Calvary.  Recall is a better word than remembrance.  I remember something from the past but it remains a past event.  If I re-call something I bring it from the past into the present.  At every Eucharist we re-call Christ’s sacrifice from the past and it becomes part of our present as we re-live it.

Paul didn’t say that when we eat the bread and drink the wine we remember Christ’s death on the Cross.  He says that we proclaim it.  It becomes bound up in our mission to proclaim the Gospel or as Paul would have it – to proclaim Christ Crucified -- not as a past event but as something that goes on happening as Christ continues to draw the world to Himself and offers the salvation he bought on Calvary to us here and now.

Celebrating the Eucharist, takes us to the heart of our Lord’s victory on the Cross through which He goes on claiming us – and through our witness – others, as his own. This Witness is not about words but about lifestyle.  How we live – in Christ’s love – speaks far more than volumes of words.  If we are truly Gospel centred people our lives will radiate Christ’s love in such a way that others may well be compelled to ask what makes us different.  That in itself is a witness and a proclamation of the Good News.

The rub is how we become such Gospel-centred people and this brings in another, vital aspect of the Eucharist.  It is the food for our journey through life.  As we encounter Jesus in the sacrament so he feeds us with himself.  Just as the Israelites in Egypt fortified themselves for their journey to the Promised Land, so we, as we participate in the Eucharist are fed for our journey to God, the Promised Land of eternal life – or heaven, if you like.

Every time our body takes in food we draw nutrition from it.  Every time we feed on Christ in the Eucharist we draw spiritual nutrition from Him.  Through the Eucharist we are fed by Christ Himself so the more we receive this sacrament the more we become like Christ.  To become like Christ is the goal of every Christian and in the Eucharist we meet Christ in the special way he chose to come to us. We did not invent the Eucharist – Jesus did. That is why the Eucharist is so important for us and why it is the central act of worship of the Christian Church.

Behind his command what Jesus is saying is Do this and I will feed you for eternal life.  Do this and I will live within  you and give you my life because I am the bread of heaven who has come down from God and gives life to the world.