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Anthony F. McSweeney, SSS. Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving

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Talk 1:

Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving – Expanding Our View of the Eucharist

In this first talk I will offer you some answers to the question: What is

the eucharist about? It will be followed by a second, more practical question to be dealt with in my second talk, namely: How is the eucharist supposed to change us?

Introduction The eucharist is a many-sided mystery.

In the Blessed Sacrament Congregation’s Rule of Life the catholic understanding of the eucharist is set out like a kind of mosaic in which each major component finds its place in a harmonious way. The core element is that the eucharist is the sacrament of the Paschal Mystery; by its means Christ associates his church with his own passing over from death into eternal life.

First of all, N° 24 of our Rule views the eucharist in the setting of salvation history. It describes the sacrament as a celebration in which the assembly proclaims God’s wonders and gives thanks for the new covenant. In this way the community that celebrates is built up in the Spirit.

N° 25 tells us how the work of salvation achieved in Christ is to become operative as transforming power in our lives. Every time we celebrate in faith we are bonded more truly with Christ in his paschal mystery.

In N° 26 what we call the eschatological dimension (a technical term for the mystery of the end of time) comes to the fore. In the eucharist, the end is mysteriously anticipated. We are given the divine Spirit and the


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work of transforming suffering and death into enduring life is being carried out in us according to the measure of our faith.

Finally, N° 27 reminds us of the goal we are called to pursue, namely to become worshippers or adorers in spirit and truth. The sign that this is happening is the practice of humble service of others in daily life.

There is also a whole section of the Rule (Nos 28-31) devoted to our personal prayer which we make in the presence of the consecrated bread that is left over from the eucharistic celebration. First, it is stated that our prayer draws for its inspiration on the prayer of Jesus. In the eucharist, he gave us, on the eve of his death, the sacrament that summed up all the prayers of his own life. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit we are enabled to connect our prayer to his. In the setting of the sacramental presence of Jesus the Lord we enter into his paschal mystery in a deeply personal way, asking him to

shape our lives according to the pattern of his own. The final number (No 32) emphasizes the ecclesial dimension of our

prayer. Our prayer is not a private matter, but something to be shared with the church and lived in such a way as to manifest the communitarian nature of all christian prayer.

Our theme and its development

Since we cannot deal with all of these aspects in an hour, I have chosen to explore one important theme that might offer you some new insights: The Eucharist: Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving. My hope is that it will expand your understanding of this sacrament.

When we, the community of believers, gather for eucharist, we proclaim the wonders that God has realized in history. Specifically, we give thanks for the new covenant sealed in Christ’s blood. In doing this, our life together is sustained and renewed by the mystery we celebrate.

The Blessed Sacrament Rule makes a number of important statements about what this means. It says, for example, that the eucharist is a kind of public announcement or “proclamation” of God’s saving actions in our


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history. It also adds that it is a “thanksgiving” for the new covenant. Let us take these two ideas, but in reverse order.

We can begin, then, with the notion of thanksgiving. This idea plunges its roots deep into the Jewish prayer tradition and at the same time it provides the most common name we have for the sacrament: “eucharist” (from the Greek eucharistein, “to give thanks”).

Our first step will be to gain an understanding of the meaning of thanksgiving in its biblical setting; this done, we can go on to clarify what precisely we are to understand by the term “proclamation.” That means too that we will have to ask what exactly it is that we give thanks for and proclaim. Our Rule sums it up in the following expression: “we give thanks for the new covenant .. in the blood of [God’s] Son.” The mention of the Lord’s blood obliges us to give attention also to the biblical concept of expiation by blood. Exploring this idea will help us to understand why it is always associated with joy.

Christ the main celebrant of the eucharist

Before we enter into our argument, however, there is one truth we would do well to emphasize from the outset. It is this: when we gather for the eucharist we engage in an activity in which we are not the sole agents. In fact, when we gather for liturgy we (including the priest who presides) are not even the principal actors in what goes on. For when we assemble to celebrate the Mass, Christ himself is drawing us into his own eternal thanksgiving.

That does not mean, of course, that we are just passive spectators or that we are not also and truly the subjects of what we are doing. The eucharist really is our act of prayer too. It is important to bear in mind, however, that, thanks to our incorporation into Christ in baptism, whenever we gather to pray to the Father in his name and in obedience to Jesus’ command we are being associated with the risen Jesus’ own prayer.

Christ .. always associates the Church with Himself in this great work wherein God is perfectly glorified and men are sanctified,” we read in the conciliar document on the liturgy. “The church is his beloved bride who calls to her Lord, and through him offers worship to the eternal Father. Rightly, then, the liturgy is considered as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ…. in the liturgy the whole public


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worship is performed by the mystical body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the head and his members. .. every liturgical celebration, because it is an action of Christ the priest and of his body.

(Vatican II, Document on the Holy Liturgy, N° 7)

That is why Saint Augustine loved to speak of our worship as being the prayer of the “whole Christ,” Head and members

In christian liturgical prayer, then, two distinct acts on two different levels are fused into one. By the agency of the Spirit of God who dwells in the gathered community, the prayer of the earthly community is made one with the victorious eternal passover hymn of praise and thanksgiving addressed to the Father of light by the risen Christ and all the heavenly hosts.

I. Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving

1. A sacrifice of thanksgiving Eucharistia, “thanksgiving,” is one of the very earliest names for the

sacrament and it expresses clearly something that is very central to the sacrament. The term is present in all the eucharistic texts, even in the sixth chapter of the fourth gospel (Jn 6,23), where no explicit connection is made between the sacrament and the last supper.

Our first point of interest concerns the prayers Jesus said over the bread and the cup of wine. It might be noted in passing that scholars are agreed today that Jesus did not bless the bread or the wine, but addressed a prayer of praise and thanks to God their creator for these gifts. Jews never blessed things; they blessed God for things. The bread and wine do not need a blessing; they are a blessing. We bless God the creator and provider for his goodness to us.

‘Blessing’ and ‘thanksgiving’

In the version of the last supper common to Mark and Matthew we read that Jesus said a “blessing” over the bread (the word in Greek is eulogia, from which comes our English word “eulogy”). On the other hand, the two evangelists call the prayer pronounced over the cup of wine not a blessing but a “thanksgiving” (eucharistia). In the alternative


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tradition witnessed to by Paul and Luke the opening prayer over the bread is already called a “thanksgiving” while neither word is used in regard to the final blessing, since the authors simply note: “In the same way also the cup, after supper…”

The common Jewish term used for table blessings is always eulogia or blessing, while the term that eventually came to characterize the christian sacrament is “thanksgiving” or eucharistia. It seems that an evolution took place resulting in the eventual dominance of eucharistia.

Before looking more deeply into this matter, it will be well to take note of how the eucharist plunges its roots into the age-old tradition of the Jewish “prayer of blessing” (berakah).

The Jewish prayer of blessing (berakah)

The blessing prayer constituted the basic module of all Jewish prayer. Therefore, we are here at the very heart of Jewish spirituality from old testament times until the time of Jesus and into our own day. Believers were taught from early childhood to respond to the events of life by blessing God, source of every blessing. They blessed God for all that happened to them.

The blessing prayer was essentially very simple in form, as we see in the example that the gospel writers place on the lips of Jesus himself:

I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. (Mt 11,25-26)

The evolution of the Jewish blessing (euologia) tradition into the christian practice of eucharistia is usually explained in terms of the unique experience of the early christians. They were overcome with amazement at God’s “superabounding” graciousness to us in giving us Christ (cf. 2 Cor 9,8). They felt the need to express their sense of wonder at what seemed to them the excess, the sheer exuberant plenitude of God’s mercy.

This feature of God’s action is marvellously illustrated in the various stories of abundance we find in the gospels – the miraculous catch of fish, the wedding banquet of Cana, and the multiplication of the loaves and


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fishes. They are, as it were, enacted parables of the inexhaustible fruitfulness of the divine saving actions.

I might remark in passing that we need to be reminded today that it is not quite accurate to speak of the notion of thanksgiving as though it were equivalent to our modern usage of “saying thank you.” If we place matters in their biblical and liturgical context, thanking God was never simply a “thank you;” it was always and before all an expression of respect and praise for the One being thanked.

In Middle Eastern culture the appropriate response to a gift is to praise the goodness and benevolence of the giver rather than to focus attention on the benefits that accrue to one who receives the gift. This important nuance has been picked up in several of our current Eucharistic Prayers where Jesus’ words of blessing are referred to as “the prayer of thanksgiving and praise.”

If the eucharist is essentially thanksgiving (in the sense just explained) we must next ask: for what do we want above all to give thanks?

For what do we give thanks?

The essential object of our thanksgiving, is undoubtedly the new covenant in the Lord’s blood. It is, in other words, the saving work of God achieved in Jesus’ paschal mystery. When we bring the easter event to mind, how-ever, we do not consider it as an isolated event in itself. We see it rather as the peak or culmination of the long series of saving deeds

spanning centuries that were recorded in the scriptures and celebrated in the Jewish liturgy. Prior to Jesus this long saving history was summed up, above all, in the passover celebration when every family kept the feast of unleavened bread and ate the passover lamb.

Firmly situated in this context, our eucharist is before all else the memorial of Jesus’ own paschal mystery. The eucharistic celebration is the moment in which we contemplate with wonder and gratitude the love that was revealed supremely in Jesus’ passage to the Father. We call to mind in


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thankfulness and praise Jesus’ love for his Father. Under the impulse of that love he was led in obedience to the Father’s will, to complete in his death the consecration of his whole life for his disciples (Jn 17,19) and through them for all who would believe (Jn 17,23).

We give thanks and praise to God, of course, for other things too. For God continues to do good for us as the years go by. So we count our blessings and incorporate them all into the great prayer of Jesus in his church, linking them to his Passover thanksgiving to the Father.

The Eucharistic Prayers we pray today all echo the climate of blessing-thanksgiving in which Jesus himself must have lived his final farewell supper. As biblical scholar Giovanni Odasso puts it:

‘On the night on which he was handed over,’ Jesus not only agreed to carry out the Father’s will, giving himself even to death, to ‘death on a cross,’ but he also anticipated with his disciples on earth the sacrifice of praise that he would inaugurate, with his resurrection, for all eternity. In this perspective, the church that celebrates the eucharist is the community of the Risen One, that unites itself to its Lord in the praise of the living and true God. Odasso is here suggesting that Jesus intended his final supper, with the

prayers accompanying it, to be a thanksgiving sacrifice in which he proclaimed God’s victory, saving him out of death through the mighty deed of the resurrection. He is referring to the thanksgiving sacrifice called todah, a particular communion sacrifice with deep roots in the old testament (cf. Lev 7,11-15) and of great importance in Judaism at the time of Jesus.

The thanksgiving sacrifice (todah)

The todah was a sacrifice offered by a person who had obtained from the Lord liberation from some impending danger of death, whether due to sickness or some other peril. An animal would be offered in sacrifice, together with various kinds of bread, including ordinary leavened bread (this is the only known instance where leavened bread, normally con-sidered unacceptable for sacrifices, was prescribed: cf. Lev 7,12-13).

In this form of sacrifice, in which the offerer fulfilled a vow he had made in time of danger, he and his guests partook of the meat of the victim and the loaves of leavened bread at the “communion” meal that followed


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the sacrifice. Unlike the other loaves, the leavened ones were not burnt; they were consumed in a joyous banquet, together with the meat of the sacrificial victim. Leavened bread at all other times was considered unsuitable for sacrifice because ‘corrupted’ by yeast.

As he raised the cup of blessing in the presence of his family and friends, the person whose life had been, so to say, restored to him would “confess” or proclaim the goodness of God in his regard, recounting how the Lord had saved him. The verb form of todah means to “make known,” and so an essential part of the todah is the public declaration of one’s experience of God’s saving power.

Many psalms owe their origin to this imperative to share with others the wondrous way God has rescued someone from almost certain death. A fine example is provided by Ps 118, with its well-known exultant cry “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad!” This psalm is beloved in christian liturgical tradition where it is known as the “easter psalm.”

The todah enjoyed considerable prominence throughout Jewish history and, according to the rabbis, it was destined to survive even into the life to come when all other sacrifices would cease. With the passing of time its link with temple sacrifice was increasingly attenuated until it achieved complete independence in regard to priesthood and temple. Once the link with the temple had been severed, the todah was adapted to a domestic setting; it was celebrated with ordinary, that is to say, leavened bread and wine. It is striking in this respect how the last supper texts mention only the bread and wine, never the paschal lamb.

Whether Jesus himself really did understand his last supper in this way or not, seeing it in the light of the todah has the merit of providing a fascinating angle from which to contemplate the church’s celebration of the eucharist.

Jesus’ last supper

It is clear enough, in any case, that at the supper Jesus did indeed foreshadow his passage through death into the eternal realm of the Father. Blessing his Father for the bread and wine, he made his prayer into an act of acceptance of all that was to follow.


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Not only did he fully accept his imminent death, but he offered his life as a whole – the life of unflinching dedication to the truth (Jn 18,17) that had brought him to this final moment. He had received his human existence as a gift from the Father and now he made it a return gift, given back to the Father in love. In the same act, he offered his

very being to us as well, as a means of bringing us with him into the new and eternal life he was convinced the Father would grant him on the other side of death.

In commanding us to celebrate his supper, his “eucharist,” in his memory, he wished to involve us in his praise-filled thanksgiving to his Abba for the life that was soon to be restored to him forever. He expressed at the same time his ardent desire to share that life with all who would be willing to accept his gift.

All of this is extremely important for us who celebrate the memorial of Jesus’ passover. The Lord invites us to return each day to this mystery as the measure of our own living. It is a perpetual invitation to allow him to imprint upon our own mind and heart the self-same pattern of attitudes with which he had faced the choices and challenges of his own life, culminating in suffering and death. We learn thereby to offer our lives thankfully to the Lord and affirm our willingness to dedicate our energies to being a source of life and happiness to others.

In his self-emptying Jesus opened a way for us

Not only did Jesus renounce the divine dignity in order to become one of us; he accepted to descend lower still, consenting to his condition as one exposed, without privilege or divine protection, to the harsh injustices and brutalities of life in human society and to its consequent sufferings. He experienced the pain and grief that are our lot. He felt all the hurt of betrayal, he had to bear the brunt of hatred and pay the price for it in a society marked by an unprincipled disregard for law and by rank injustice. Renouncing all recourse to violence, he accepted the abandonment by his most trusted disciples. More mysteriously, he had to accept abandonment by God himself, by his beloved Abba, who chose not to intervene in the


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face of the brutal destruction of his humanity in the form of the cruelly drawn-out death by which his enemies hoped finally to be rid of him (cf. Phil 2,5-11 and Mt 27,46).

In all of this he provided a detailed human pattern for our imitation, a pattern that we are called to transpose creatively into the ordinary circumstances of our lives. He opened the way for all of us, tracing the paschal path through the dark valley of betrayal, violence and death, accomplishing his crossing or passing over from the life of the world as we know it, subject to the oppressive powers of sin, suffering and mortality, into the new world that is the kingdom of the Father.

In response to Jesus’ loving offering, the Father opened for all of us the possibility of breaking the hold of evil over our lives. He endowed us with the means to defeat the enslaving power that death had wielded over us for so long.

As the author of the letter to the Hebrews put it, the fear that the ever-present menace of pain and eventual extinction inevitably provokes in us drives us to a panic reaction. Under pressure of this fear we are all too ready to listen to the insidious promptings of the Evil One who suggests recourse to illusory and wrongful ways of escape and evasion, at the cost of our moral integrity. To the degree that we succumb to his suggestions we become his slaves (cf. Hb 2,14).

The Lord has gone before us along the way into vulnerability, pain and death. Consenting to be plunged himself into a shameful and brutal death, he has unmasked this natural yet fraudulent fear. The importance of the resurrection is that it was the total vindication of Jesus’ trusting abandonment into his Father’s hands. Through it we too can be liberated from the paralyzing grip of the fear of death and enabled to hear God’s call to authenticity in whatever situation of threat we might find ourselves.

Now since the children share in blood and flesh, he likewise shared in them, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life. (Hb 2,14-15)

The eucharist of the church

Whatever Jesus may have had in mind at the last supper, then, it seems clear that the todah does indeed stand in some way behind the


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church’s eucharist as it took shape in the early centuries. As Odasso expresses it,

In Jesus, Messiah and Lord, the Father has truly fulfilled his promise of salvation by inaugurating the world of the resurrection. At the same time, in every eucharist the disciples anticipate, as Jesus had done, their own sacrifice of praise in the certainty that the giving of their lives, for Christ and the gospel, is the way that leads to the resurrection, is the salvific event that fulfills, in the existence of every day, the promise contained in the parable of the grain of wheat that, dying, produces much fruit (cf. Jn 12,24).

In this view, the eucharist is the “sacrifice of praise” of the new humanity, anticipating its own victory in union with Jesus, the “first-born from the dead.”

This approach is also in line with Paul when he calls the cup of wine at the end of the meal, over which the most important blessing prayer of

the meal was pronounced, the “cup of blessing” (1 Cor 10,17). The wine-cup is further emphasized when, in the following chapter, he reminds his hearers of the tradition concerning the Lord’s supper that he himself had received and in turn passed on to them. According to this tradition, the words over the chalice read: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor 11,25). The turn of phrase suggests that, in the eucharistic celebration, the cup was “raised” (as in the todah Psalm

116) to proclaim the salvation achieved in the resurrection of Jesus and thereby communicated to his church in the gift of the new covenant, the outpouring of the Spirit.

“How can I repay the Lord for all the good done for me? I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people” (Ps 116,12-14).

2. Proclaiming God’s marvels The eucharist is above all, then, a song of victory; it is indeed and

most truly eucharistia, a prayer of thanksgiving-and-praise.


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That also explains why the last supper narratives do not speak of unleavened bread (azymos), the bread of affliction of the Jewish Passover. They use instead the word artos, a term that denotes ordinary leavened

bread. During the entire first millennium, in fact, it was normal custom for christians of both east and west alike to celebrate the eucharist with common leavened bread. It was not until the ninth-tenth century of our era that the Latin church began to impose the exclusive use of unleavened bread in its eucharistic celebrations.

A further link with the todah tradition emerges in the passage cited earlier, where Paul speaks of the eucharist (and specifically of the act of eating and drinking) as a “proclamation” of the saving mystery. Paul sums up the contents of what we proclaim in the phrase “the death of the

Lord” (1 Cor 11,26). It is clear from the use of the term “Lord” (applied in the new testament to the risen and glorified Jesus) that he means the whole paschal mystery of death and resurrection. We may ask, then, why it is that he seems to want to emphasize the death rather than the resurrection. After all, is it not the resurrection that for him is the source of our hope (cf. 1 Cor 15,16-19)?

Jesus’ death: culmination of a life given for others

A first approach to answering this question is to consider the setting of the Corinthian community to which Paul was addressing his remarks. The reason why he cites the eucharistic tradition is in order to help the wealthy members of the community grasp that they had unwittingly turned the very celebration they were engaged in, eating and drinking “in remembrance of” Jesus, into a condemnation of their selfish behaviour (the richer members were consuming all the food and drink before the poor who were obliged to work late arrived). Instead of bringing them life, their “meeting” was threatening them with judgment. Rather than doing them good, it was causing them harm.

It is in any case altogether typical of Paul to focus attention on the death of Jesus. For he generally shows surprisingly little interest in the life and teaching of Jesus. His whole focus is on the Lord’s dying.


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For him, the whole mystery was concentrated in that moment. He discovered in it the secret of Jesus’ whole existence. Jesus’ death discloses to us, Paul realized, what his whole life had been really about. It was a life lived in God and for others. In proclaiming his death, then, the community proclaims the love that moved him in everything he did. In the final act of his life was laid bare the very inner nature of his personal existence; it was one of unrestricted self-giving. The life that he had received from the Father as a gift he returned to the divine Giver, making it an answering gift that he wanted to offer for the life and flourishing of the whole of humanity.

In this way, the cross is also the strangest of windows into the very inner mystery of the triune God. For it manifests God’s own inner life as one of continuous self-giving in love between the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

The love that shone through the darkness of the cross was a triumphant, not a defeated love. In the resurrection, it was shown to be stronger than death. For Jesus’ death was not, as it might have appeared to a sympathetic onlooker, some noble but futile gesture. To ordinary appearances it was no different from the death of other decent and gifted human beings uselessly sacrificed to the greed and ambitions of the powerful. In the light of faith in the resurrection, however, his brutal death on the cross was something radically different.

Thanks to the attitude of unwavering love with which he underwent it, his was a truly victorious death. God would not allow such love to be extinguished forever by human malice or the force of death. It was the love of the Son, of the One whom God would make Lord or Ruler of the universe. It was a love that would make it possible for human beings to live in a radically new and supremely fruitful way in the face of human evil and violence.

Giving thanks for his death, then, we also express gratitude for the new and everlasting covenant that was sealed in his blood. What does that mean?


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II. We Give thanks for the New Covenant in Christ’s Blood A “new covenant”

For most of us, the term “covenant” is not one we use a lot. We probably think of it as more at home in referring to Israel than to us. This sense of remoteness is abetted by the centuries-long habit of replacing the term “covenant” with “testament,” even to the point of calling the scriptures by this name: the old and new testaments.

The covenant, however, was of the very first importance for Israel. It was the ultimate source of its identity as a people and it gave shape to daily life. In the ancient world, the idea of a covenant referred to a bilateral treaty (even when it was between unequal partners). An agreement was drawn up, stipulating the conditions for its validity together with the benefits hoped for by each party. Sanctions for infractions were also determined.

When the pact had been drawn up it was sealed by rites involving blood. Usually an animal was sacrificed. That is how Israel sealed its election by the Lord. The event was regularly celebrated in ritual form in order to keep the memory of the pact with God alive. The intention was to remind the people what it meant to hear from God the affirmation: “I am your God and you are my people.”

Once christianity’s connection with its Jewish roots had been severed, reference to the “covenant” became less frequent. We find it mentioned far less often in the new testament writings (only 33 times) than in those of the old testament (285 occurrences). As more and more pagans entered the christian community, the sense of the compact ethnic and cultural unity so tied up with the notion of being God’s chosen covenant people was obviously weakened.

Nonetheless, the covenant idea is quite present in the new testament too. It is present, above all, in very important places, notably in the eucharistic texts.

It is hardly surprising, of course, that mention of the covenant should feature in such a crucial meal context as that of the last supper of Jesus. For from its very inception the Mosaic covenant was celebrated in a meal.


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After sealing the Sinai covenant in blood, “Moses then went up [on the mountain] with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel, and they beheld the God of Israel.” What they beheld was not, of course, God’s own countenance in itself, as the author hastens to make clear. The writer says that what they gazed upon was rather the pedestal of his throne: “Under his feet there appeared to be sapphire tilework, as clear as the sky itself.” At that moment these men experienced a powerful sense of awe at the nearness of the divine: “Yet he did not smite these chosen Israelites. After gazing on God, they could still eat and drink” (Ex 24,10-12).

The new covenant sealed in Christ’s blood

In the last supper setting, the covenant references are always found in connection with the cup. Jesus, who had come as “a covenant of the people, a light for the nations” (cf. Is 42,6) and had received the mission to “make all things new” (cf. Rev 21,5), took in his own hands, as it were, the covenant that his people had shown themselves to be incapable of honouring. He raised the cup towards his Abba and announced, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor 11,26). Sealing in anticipation the “new and everlasting covenant” in his own blood, he invited us all, like Moses and his companions of old, to eat his bread and drink from his cup in the presence of the All-Holy One until the end of time.

In this version of what Jesus said over the cup, as found in both Paul and Luke, the wording is strikingly different from what we find in Mark and Matthew. The difference stands out starkly when we put the two versions side by side.

Mark 14,24 / Matthew 26,28 Paul 1 Cor 11,20 / Luke 24,20

This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many. [for the forgiveness of sins (Mt)]

This cup is the new covenant in my blood [which will be shed for you (Lk)]

In Mark’s account Jesus’ words clearly direct us to the scene at the foot of Sinai when Moses presented the blood of the covenant to the people before sprinkling them with it (cf. Mk 14,24; Mt 26,28.). The scene evoked by these words is described in the book of Exodus.

Moses took half of the blood and put it in large bowls; the other half he splashed on the altar. Taking the book of the covenant, he read it


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aloud to the people, who answered, ‘All that the LORD has said, we will heed and do.’ Then he took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant which the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words of his.’ (Ex 24,6-8) With this text in mind, Mark has Jesus say: “This is the blood of me of

the covenant, which will be shed for many.” It is a perfect echo of Moses’ words with the addition of just one element. The words “of me” (that is, “my”) have been inserted after “blood.” We are being told what is the contents of the cup Jesus was passing to the disciples. It is his blood which will seal God’s covenant with us when it flows on Calvary. Matthew wants us to be sure that we understand the full significance of this offering of Jesus’ blood, so he adds to Mark’s text the words “for the forgiveness of sins.” From this we can see that while Mark and Matthew want us to think of the Sinai covenant, Paul and Luke have something else in mind. They are not so interested in highlighting the blood because they want to turn our attention in another direction, namely to the prophecies of a “new covenant” found in the writings of two great prophets of the exilic period, Jeremiah and Ezekiel (see especially Jer 31,31-34; Ez 36,24-28).

What is meant by the “new covenant”?

The prophetic promise of a new covenant found in Jeremiah and Ezekiel has a very important place in the new testament. Though Paul does not mention these prophecies explicitly, he does allude to them, for example, in another context where he speaks of the “new” and “spiritual” covenant of which he is called to be a minister (2 Cor 3,6).

What, then, is this “new” covenant all about? In what way is it “new”? In these two great prophetic authors the expression “new covenant”

refers to a future experience of the God of the covenant. It is pictured by them as the attainment of a new level of interiority in the people’s relations with God. This much is crystal clear from the kind of metaphors they use.

Jeremiah speaks of God writing the law in the “heart” of the people (“heart” being a well-known biblical expression designating the deepest or innermost dimension of a person, the place of knowledge and decision). They both refer to a gift of God’s “spirit;” Ezekiel says that the people are to be given a “new heart.” Because their old heart has become hardened,


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turned, so to speak, into stone, God will replace it by a new one of living tissue, of “flesh.”

How do they envisage such a change as coming about? Is there going to be some miraculous divine intervention? No, both prophets speak rather of a manifestation of forgiveness. The interior transformation will take place when the people have a new experience of divine forgiveness: “I will remember their sins no more” (Jer 31,34).

A new quality of interiority in their religious consciousness will be attained since there will be an opening of the personality to the gift and power of love. This will be accompanied by a surge of gratitude and an intensification of the experience of mutual belonging: “They will be my people and I will be their God” (Ez 36,38). In other words, they will know God in a quite new way.

Prophetic hope arising out of disaster

We can appreciate better the bearing of these ancient prophecies we are discussing if we recall the historical setting in which they were pronounced.

It was the time of the exile when foreign armies had demolished the temple and razed the city of Jerusalem to the ground. It was an epoch of unmitigated disaster for Israel. The tragic collapse appeared to signal the definitive failure of the covenant. What had always been understood as the two great signs of God’s covenant fidelity, a land of their own and the temple, were no more.

Jeremiah’s writings reflect the deep pessimism of the moment. Convinced that the spiritual condition of the people as a whole was desperate, he was heart-broken. He despaired of any possibility of change for the better. “My grief is incurable,” he lamented, “my heart within me is faint” (Jer 8,18). His sensitive nature was revolted and he longed to be far away. “Would that I had in the desert a travellers’ lodge! That I might leave my people and depart from them. […] Violence upon violence, deceit upon deceit” (Jer 9,1.5). Appalled at what he saw, he felt a shiver of terrible dread, haunted by premonitions of the horrors to come.

Death has come up through our windows, has entered our palaces; it cuts down the children in the street, young people in the squares. The corpses of the slain lie like dung on a field,


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like sheaves behind the harvester, with no one to gather them.” (Jer 9,20-21)

The people were, he believed, incurably closed to God’s will. It was as though sin had been inscribed in their very hearts – written indelibly, he moaned, with “an iron stylus,” a “diamond point” (Jer 17,1). Israel was as incapable of reform as a leopard of changing its spots (cf. Jer 13,23). Though many of his fellow countrymen were claiming that it was God who had failed them, Jeremiah strove with all his might to bring home the truth to them. The failure was on the human side, not the divine. It was they who had so tragically fallen short of the covenant obligations.

The birth of hope out of despair

It was in this context of total failure and collapse, of baffled despondency, doubt and apostasy, that Jeremiah received the oracle commanding him to announce a “new” covenant. Because the people had proven again and again their incapacity to live according to their covenant with God, this new covenant would be different. It would no longer be, like the one of old, a bilateral pact. This time God would assume all the obligations. He would intervene himself, and unilaterally. He promised to transform the very hearts of the people by “writing” his law in their inmost being.

But how was he to do this? Had not sin been indelibly inscribed in their hearts? Then it would have to be erased; he would first wipe away their sin. “I will forgive their evildoing,” God assured the people, “and remember their sin no more” (Jer 31,34).

Such totally unmerited divine goodness would break through the hard shell of human resistance. It would flood their consciousness with an intense awareness of a God who is truly indeed “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love” (Ps 145,8). The revelation of such love would be offered, astoundingly, at the very moment when the attitude of his people was one of “enmity” rather than openness (cf. Rom 5,10). It is this that would bring about the change within. After that “all, from least to greatest, shall know me” (Jer 31,34).

They would know him, that is, in the overwhelming experience of being undeservedly offered unconditional forgiveness. To this picture, some twenty years later, Ezekiel would add several precious traits. He


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would speak of the outpouring of the eschatological “spirit,” of a totally “new heart,” a heart of flesh in place of the heart of stone (cf. Ez 36,24-28 and 47,1-12) – all themes destined to become prominent in the new testament writings.

Light in darkness

Centuries were to pass without any sign of the promise being kept until “the night when [Jesus] was betrayed.” Finally, the moment of fulfilment arrived. The setting was once again one overshadowed by failure and betrayal. Not only was Jesus shortly to be executed as a blasphemer and a criminal – his ministry brought to an abrupt end, his mission to all appearances an abject and total failure. Even the bond that united his disciples to him was to be brutally shattered. One of them was to betray him. The leader he had personally appointed was soon to deny that he even knew him. The rest under the pressure of craven fear would desert him, leaving him to his lonely death.

The gloom of a tragic end threatened to engulf them. Jesus was undaunted. On taking first the bread and then the cup of the festive supper, his words kindled a blaze of hope in the gathering darkness. They would illuminate all the centuries to come, like a flame never to be spent. He did this by announcing “the remission of sins” (Mt 26,28).

That is Matthew’s way of communicating the fruitfulness of Jesus’ death. Paul and Luke, as we have seen, have another way. For them, Jesus speaks of the “new covenant.” This is their way of prophesying the same thing: forgiveness. They thought of it as being made palpable in the outpouring of the healing and renewing power of spirit upon a guilty world.

Just as the former covenant had been inaugurated by a meal, designed to provide the pattern for an everlasting memorial, so Jesus charged his disciples to eat and drink in his memory until the end of time (1 Cor 11,24.25; Lk 22,19.).

Importance of the blood

Neither Jeremiah nor Ezekiel make reference to blood in relation to the new covenant, though it is a prominent feature in all the last supper texts. In Paul and Luke (as we have seen) Jesus’ words concerning the cup


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read: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” while in the Markan-Matthean tradition we have: “This is my blood of the covenant.”

Because they thought of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, they understood it to be God’s way of ratifying the covenant. What helped them reach this understanding was their meditation on the fourth servant song of Second Isaiah, which Jesus himself seems to have had in mind:

We had all gone astray like sheep, each following his own way; But the LORD laid upon him the guilt of us all. Though he was harshly treated, he submitted and opened not his mouth; Like a lamb led to the slaughter or a sheep before the shearers, he was silent and opened not his mouth. … If he gives his life as an offering for sin, he shall see his descendants in a long life, and the will of the LORD shall be accomplished through him. (Is 53,6..10)

The new and truly surprising thing about the last supper, however, is that Jesus should have offered his disciples his blood to drink. This was something deeply abhorrent especially to Jewish people for whom blood was sacred and could never be touched without defilement.

What, then, was the significance of blood? What was its relation to the covenant? And what could it mean to drink Jesus’ blood?

“This cup is the new covenant in my blood” The Sinai covenant was sealed in blood, because the covenant was

understood to be a gift of life. For the bible, blood is a prime symbol of life. As we read in the book of Leviticus, “life is in the blood” (17,11). To choose fidelity to the covenant is, for Moses, to opt for life; to reject God’s offer of the covenant was to choose death.


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If .. you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray.., I tell you now that you will certainly perish … I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. (Dt 30,17-20) The blood unites the covenant partners in a

lifetime bond of loving mutual commitment. The bible repeatedly sees this bond in marital terms, speaking of the Lord as “your husband.” For the source of the covenant is in God’s free choice motivated by love, just as a man and woman choose to love each other for the rest of their lives.

Jesus’ death witnessed to the length that love was prepared to go in overcoming sin, that is, in vanquishing human resistance to the covenant. In fact, the terrible testing of Calvary showed the new covenant to be irrevocable and indestructible in God’s eyes. Even in the face of an atrocious crime, God was undeterred. He continued to offer his covenant of forgiveness.

Expiation by blood

Blood was believed in the biblical world to have expiatory value because it was held to contain the mysterious and God-given life of a living creature. Life is God’s essential gift. Human beings have no ultimate control over it. For the bible, when a life is taken, people are obliged to give the life of the living creature they have killed back to God. For it belongs to him. After every killing of an animal, every drop of the blood was to be removed from the animal before its meat could be eaten. Meanwhile the blood was offered to God in a religious ritual. In this way, every act of taking life was to be a sacrificial act; it was a formal recognition of God as sovereign giver of life.

Precisely because it is life, blood was deemed apt to annul the effect of sin. The reason is that sin alienates us from God who is life. It is, as the bible tirelessly repeats, the choice of death. In returning the blood to God, the people expressed their desire to renounce sin, that is, their choice of


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death, and be united with God, the source of life. They thus thought of the blood as wiping their sins away.

Expiation of sin, it should be noted, must be carefully distinguished from “propitiation;” they are two different things.

When people speak of propitiation they are supposing that God is angry and has to be pacified. The object of propitiation, in other words, is to change God’s dispositions towards us. It expresses a desire to placate his anger, to satisfy his demand for reparation and so render him propitious. It is hoped that he will return to being benevolent rather than punitive towards us.

Let us look at this a little more closely for a moment, since it has often been misunderstood.

Expiation of sin not propitiation of an angry God

The idea that by their sacrifices the people propitiate an angry God is not the biblical view of things. This might well surprise us, since there is so much talk in the scriptures of God’s “anger.”

It is crucially important for us to understand that, for the bible, it is God who offers human beings the means of counteracting sin. He wants to enable them to remove, annul, or expunge it. That is why God is said to give his people the sacrifices of expiation. By offering the sacrifice, the people express the desire for God to remove the state of sin that separates them from him. This removal of sin is what expiation is about.

Propitiation, as I have said, is something quite different; there is a radical difference between the two attitudes. What propitiation seeks to do is to act, not upon the sin that separates us from God, but upon God himself. It starts from the belief that God is angry and condemnatory towards us. It expresses the anxious desire of the people to change his attitude in their regard.

The purpose of expiation, by contrast, is to act not upon God but upon sin. Its aim is to abolish all that stands between God and us, all that has been creating enmity, bringing about a state of alienation. When biblical authors speak of God’s “anger,” it is not a question of an emotion in God, as we might be inclined to think. It refers rather to an objective state or situation of alienation between human beings and the all-holy God. The


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sacrifices were understood to be God’s freely given means for removing the cause of his “anger;” and this is something that only God can do. The cause of the state of enmity between humanity and God is not in God; it is something within human beings, namely sin!

When human beings become aware of this state of hostility, however, they tend to feel afraid. Their fear drives them to strive by every means in their power to change the situation. They feel that they have to try to modify what their fear tells them is the punitive attitude God has adopted in their regard.

The remarkable thing about the biblical God, then, is that the sacrifice of expiation was thought of as a fruit of God’s mercy, not of his punitive justice. In no way did it take its rise from human fear of God’s wrath. Israel experienced it rather as God’s free gift, a gift that flowed from his compassionate love for his sinful people. It was his way of providing them with a means for dealing with the sin that was blocking the relationship.

In summary, God wants to remove everything in us that makes us his enemies. God does not have to be placated. It was never a matter of appeasing his supposed fury.1

The new testament authors saw in the bloody death of Christ an image of the perfect expiatory sacrifice that alone was able to overcome all previous attempts at dealing with sin. His was a perfect offering because it transcended the limitations that flow from all the other offerings that human beings make. However we try to offer ourselves to God we must do so necessarily by the mediation of something outside of ourselves; we are constrained, by the limitations of our nature, to have recourse to ritual-symbolical ways of communicating our desire to be one with God.

In many ancient cultures, people were accustomed to make God or the gods a present; often it consisted of a living creature, frequently of an animal’s blood. It was not necessarily because they thought God was blood-thirsty but was their attempt rather to express to him their desire to give him their own hearts, their very life. The problem is that we are strictly incapable of giving ourselves wholly to God by means of a truly 1 Many biblical texts do indeed speak about God’s terrifying anger, but this is anthropomorphic language that has to be correctly interpreted, just as talk of God sitting on his throne or other such statements need to be correctly understood. A correct interpretation takes as its starting point the core-statements of biblical revelation, both in the old testament and above all in the revelation of Jesus Christ as it is presented to us in the new testament.


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good and holy life totally open and responsive to God’s will. So we perform religious acts that try to express this desire at least.

God himself provides the means of expiation

Just as God himself, in the old testament, gave Israel its sacrifices, so now “in the fullness of time” God would once again provide the means – but now the definitive means – of dealing with human guilt. The new testament tells us that God justifies (that is, makes “just” or acceptable to him) every person who is willing to accept his gift. He does this freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ. Christ is the perfect offering because he is the one who was truly capable of definitively cancelling sin. As Paul once put it, in his rather tortuous way:

Jesus, whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, .. [for] the forgiveness of sins .. through the forbearance of God – to prove his righteousness in the present time, that he might be righteous and justify the one who has faith in Jesus. Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, … God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. …we are now justified by his blood . … Indeed, if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son. (Rom 3,24-26; 4,2.9.11) Jesus’ death was unique. On the one hand, as a violent and bloody

execution, it resembled the familiar animal sacrifices of the time and so could bring to mind the sin-offering or sacrifice of expiation. As such it too was, like all the earlier biblical sacrifices, so Paul tells us, given to the people by God to enable them to be freed from the weight of sin. To the eyes of faith, “God set forth” or displayed not an animal but the man Jesus fixed to the Cross “as [a sacrifice of] expiation.”

What was unique about this death, on the other hand, was that the one who transformed it from being a crime, a brutal miscarriage of justice, into an act of religious worship was the victim himself.

Jesus’ love transformed his dying into a prayer of offering of his life to God and of intercession on our behalf. The self he offered was the completed expression of a life of unblemished purity and holiness. In consequence, our race for the first time could be represented before God by One in whom no barrier existed to block God’s desire to communicate


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the plenitude of his holiness. In this he fulfilled the prophecy contained in the second Servant song: “I set you as a covenant of the people” (Is 42,6).

The covenant is no longer an institution but a person in whom God and humanity are perfectly joined and irrevocably united.

We have in Christ a new and eternal covenant

Here, by the same token, the puzzle of the bilateral-unilateral covenant is resolved.

On the one hand, in response to the proven impossibility of God’s representatively chosen people to live in fidelity to the covenant, God had promised through Jeremiah and Ezekiel to institute a unilateral “new” covenant. But he did not make clear how this could possibly work.

Now we can see how. For, in the act of reconciling an alienated humanity and establishing a new covenant, through Jesus, God’s Son, the initiative was wholly God’s. It was a unilateral action on God’s part. It was in no way dependent upon the will of sinful human beings.

Yet, on the other hand, it was carried out by Jesus, a man like us. Hence, for the first time in history a truly unrestricted act of consent was given to the covenant by a human being like ourselves. The man Jesus of Nazareth, alone among human beings, was without sin. His Yes to the covenant was total, given without reservation. In this way, then, the new covenant was also bilateral, as at Sinai.

An important consequence follows from this. For the first time in human history, unequivocal assent to the covenant was realized in a fully human way. Jesus’ Yes became the prototype for all of us. It serves as a matrix or pattern for a human response to God for the rest of time.

This pattern is now fully inserted into the processes of our human history through the lived experience of christians, whose lives and behaviour are shaped and sustained by the gospel and the sacraments, but especially the eucharist. If Jesus asked us to drink his blood, it was so that we might share in his very life – and in its supreme act of love: the shedding of his blood to bring us to God. His blood stands for what made up his life as a person - his attitudes, the inner dispositions that shaped and explained his whole existence.


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Jesus is eager for us to allow him to re-fashion our hearts and our lives according to the model of his own life. He wants to reproduce in us the same attitude of loving obedience that guided him. Every time we take his chalice and drink from it, we are invited to say Yes to him just as he had said Yes to his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.

We can conclude, then, by saying that at every celebration of the eucharist we proclaim the reassuring truth that God is on our side. We affirm our conviction that the covenant is truly unbreakable. We acknowledge that it can never be imperilled by human frailty and inconstancy. God’s will to save us is irrevocable.

The sacramental presence of the sacrifice of expiation

We celebrate this all-conquering, purifying love in the eucharist. We re-affirm that this same love is made available to us as a spiritual force capable of dealing with sin. We know that sin is an inescapable part of our

daily experience, but we believe that God nourishes us with a power of life stronger than sin. This is what Matthew wanted to emphasize when he transmitted to us Jesus’ eucharistic words: “This is the cup of my blood of the covenant poured out for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26,28).

The offering of Jesus’ life took place only once; as the author of the Letter to the Hebrews insists, it was achieved “once for all” (Hb 9,15). Through it, the covenant

was sealed forever. Yet thanks to the eucharist, we can experience the power of his covenant love again and again. So as we said at the outset, in the words of the Rule of the Blessed Sacrament Congregation, “we give thanks for the new covenant… which he renews in his ever faithful love.”

The eucharistic cup (always understood, of course, as filled with wine) is essentially linked to the forgiveness of sins. It is the great sign of our purification in the context of the outpouring of the divine Spirit of the “last times.”

Even this, however, does not exhaust the meaning of the eucharistic cup. For the scriptural significance of the cup is many-sided.


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The cup has many meanings

The cup can stand for a person’s life, as when an unknown levite cries out, in Psalm 16, “Lord, my heritage, my cup, you, and you only, hold my lot secure” (Ps 16,5) – God, in other words, is his very life. Every person has a cup, large for some, smaller for others.

When a life is rich and fulfilled, brimming with happiness, it is as though the cup cannot contain the life that is poured into it. “You set a table before me as my enemies watch,” declares the psalmist (Ps 23,5), going on to add: “you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.”

And in the thanksgiving or todah celebration, as we have seen, the cup is raised as the story of God’s wonderful deliverance is gratefully proclaimed for all to hear: it is then the “cup of salvation” (Ps 116,13).

But the cup can also stand for suffering, as when Jesus pleads with his Father, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet, not as I will, but as you will” (Mt 26,42).

All of these meanings can contribute to our understanding of the eucharistic cup. It is good to keep them in mind when we receive the covenant cup in the liturgy. We do well too to recall from time to time, as we take the cup in our hands, the question put by Jesus to James and John: “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” (Mt 20,22) Though there may be times when we feel not a little reluctant to take up the cup of our own life and join it to that of Jesus, the Spirit urges us nonetheless to reply with an unconditional ‘Yes’ that will spur us forward on the paschal journey of our own life.

Jesus, we are told, had to “learn obedience from what he suffered” and so be made “perfect” in order to “become the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Hb 5,8). The word “perfect” here does not refer to Jesus’ level of moral achievement, but to his completing of the historical trajectory of his life. Jesus lived his life in history as we do. He had to learn in each situation what faithful obedience to his Father meant for him, and that did not achieve its completeness until his final breath. It was only in responding to the immediacy of death that his life of faithfulness achieved its final goal; he had become “perfect” or complete.

If the Father wanted Jesus to go through the normal stages of a human life that was because he wished to provide us with a sure guide, a


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“pioneer” (cf. Hb 12,2). He wanted to give us a means of directing our faltering steps along the path that Jesus has opened up for us, the way that would lead us to share one day in his glory.

That is the cause of our joy. The final stage of our journey, God’s kingdom, is in fact anticipated and made really present in every eucharist, as Jesus had foreshadowed at the supper: “I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (Lk 22,18).

So the Blessed Sacrament Rule states that “the celebration of the eucharist joyfully proclaims the marvels God has accomplished in our history” and, as a result, we are filled with the joy Christ promised when he prayed in presence of the disciples seated with him at the supper, “I speak this in the world so that they may share my joy completely.” (Jn. 17,13).

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