This piece was first published in The Furrow, 2005, pp. 25-36. I prepared it originally as a talk given at Liverpool Hope University as part of a series of lectures on the Church and Violence organised by Professor Nicholas Sagovsky. It is followed by my reaction to Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, which appeared in The Furrow, 2004, pp. 442-443. That is very relevant to the whole theme of this piece.
Violence and the Eucharist seem to be diametrically opposed. The fact that Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot dead at the altar table in the course of celebrating the Eucharist made his murder seem all the more shocking. There were cries of blasphemy some years ago when one of the US nuclear submarines was named ‘Corpus Christi’, the Body of Christ.
I would like to suggest that violence and the Eucharist are not as far removed from each other as we might think – that there is, in fact, an inseparable link between the violence to which Jesus was subjected in his Passion and the Eucharist which is the triumph of love over violence and hatred.
Part 1: ‘Do this in memory of Me’: What is Remembered
‘Do this in memory of me’ commits the Christian Church and every Christian never to forget a horrendous act of violence against the person of the one whom they claim to be the Son of God. However, it is not the violence itself they are focussing on, but Jesus’ response to this violence ‘Greater love has no one …’. It is the violent context which highlights the immensity of his self-giving love.
On the previous night, Jesus commanded his disciples to love each other as he had loved them. ‘Do this in memory of me’, is implicitly saying, ‘Be prepared to lay down your life for others, as I have laid down my life for you – and for all.’
The violent response to the life and preaching of Jesus
In the course of his ministry Jesus increasingly met with opposition from at least some of the leaders of the Jewish establishment and eventually came to be rejected by them. This was because they perceived his life and teaching as a direct threat to their power and authority and to the form of Judaism they stood for. In this they were merely typical of most other forms of establishment before and since. In fact, they represent the ‘establishment’ side of each of us, the shadow side of our human solidarity. That is why Christians believe that we all share corporate responsibility for the death of Christ.
It could be argued that Jesus himself provoked the course of events which ultimately led to his violent death. In being true to his growing consciousness of himself and his mission from his Father, Jesus saw ever more clearly that the path on which he was embarking upon would inevitably lead to confrontation with the Jewish establishment. Jesus trod the road which could end only on Calvary not because he believed that his Father wanted him to die but because, in fidelity to his mission from his Father, he was committed to witness to a God of totally gratuitous, unconditional and all-embracing love. It was in that ultimate witness of love that his Father’s will was to be found, not in any sadistic wish for a violent death. For my own part, I find utterly repugnant and totally unacceptable theologies based on the notion that the violent death of Jesus was demanded by the will of an intransigent Father demanding some kind of retribution or expiation from his Son. The bottom line for me must be that the death of Jesus for us reveals not a violent God but a loving God. That might sound simplistic, but I believe it is fundamental.
At least some of the Jewish establishment found Jesus very threatening. It was not just that he was questioning their basic understanding of God. Rather it was because he was making his challenge in the name of the God of their ancestors, the God revealed in the Law and the Prophets. No wonder they felt that their power and teaching authority over the people were being undermined. Far from rejecting the authentic traditions of Judaism, his whole lifestyle, ministry, preaching and parables developed out of his prayerful reflection on and penetration of these same traditions. It is not surprising that he provoked such strong opposition. Moreover, he did not mince his words. The extreme language of his diatribes against the scribes and Pharisees, as found in chapter twenty-three of Matthew’s gospel, must have roused their fury. And his driving the money changers out of the Temple (Matt 21:12), a violent act in itself, was hardly calculated to win him friends. Jesus’s violent death was the inevitable outcome of the opposition to his mission and ministry..
Jesus own response to the violence inflicted on him was passionate non-violence
It has been customary down through the ages to speak of the ‘Passion’ of Jesus. It is very interesting that the word, ‘passion’, is traditionally used of the sufferings of Jesus. In medieval times the word ‘passion’ was commonly used in the ethical field. It carried a totally different meaning from the word ‘passive’ (or ‘passivity’) which has the same root. While ‘passive’ suggests lack of movement, ‘passion’, on the other hand, means actually being moved – often moved intensely, as in the word ‘passionate’ – but by forces not completely under one’s control.
Jesus was moved by an almost unbearable intensity of suffering, both physical and mental. To call such suffering the ‘Passion’ of Jesus suggests that his response to such intense suffering was far from being passive. Though completely helpless in the hands of his torturers and executioners, his response was one of being prepared to have such violence and suffering inflicted upon him. The ‘Passion’ of Jesus was the ultimate revelation of God’s passionate love in all its unbearable red-hot intensity.
Misunderstood, this could give the impression of a masochistic God, a God whose pleasure lay in experiencing suffering. That is light years away from the truth. In his body and spirit Jesus found such suffering repellent. Jesus did not want to suffer. The agony in the garden brings that out very clearly. Nor did his Father want him to suffer. Those who crucified him were not doing the will of the Father. They were not God’s agents. In their blindness (‘Father, forgive them’) there were actually agents of the forces of evil. They were not performing the will of a masochistic or sadistic God. Rather, they personified evil as it has always manifested itself down through history – as destructive and life-denying.
The suffering of Jesus ended in his death. But in the sense in which I have been using the word, the final act of his ‘Passion’ lay in his resurrection. The Father raised him from the grave and established him in glory, thus giving an even richer meaning to what I said earlier – ‘The “Passion” of Jesus was the ultimate revelation of God’s passionate love in all its unbearable red-hot intensity.
‘Do this in memory of me’ is not just remembering an act of horrendous violence – and the heroic and loving bearing of such violence. ‘Do this in memory of me’ is also remembering the final act of resurrection. As Christians proclaim: ‘Christ has died, Christ is risen.’
Part 2: ‘Do this in memory of Me: The Act of Remembering’
Eucharist is not just about past memory but about living presence
In fulfilling the command ‘Do this in memory of me’ in the Eucharist, Christians remember the violent suffering and death of Jesus not to glory in that violence but to draw life and strength from the spirit of Christ risen and living today. In that spirit is found the ultimate power of non-violence, the victory of love over the very worst that violence can perpetrate. It is the food of that spirit with which Christians believe they are fed at the Eucharistic table. In the power of that spirit, they believe that Christ lives today in and through them. In more corporate language, they believe that they themselves are ‘the body of Christ’.
Thomas Cullinan, in his collection of talks, The Passion of Political Love, London, Sheed & Ward, 1987, has a chapter entitled, ‘Violence Within and Violence Without’. In it he speaks about the need today for a new language to expose and challenge the narrow-mindedness and blinkered vision of the dominant speech of modern society and suggests that this new language may be found in the Eucharist. However, if this new language is to liberate us from that violence ‘without’, it must do the same for the violence ‘within’. This double process will set us on a collision course within and without. Just as there will be violent resistance from the established forces without, there will also be violent resistance from within, as our cherished addictions and enslavements struggle to maintain their stranglehold over us. Cullinan puts it very forcefully, paraphrasing Ghandi, ‘We are our first enemy. Don’t set up the British as the cause of what you are refusing to face yourself’ (p. 24).
If the Eucharist commits Christians to a path which will almost inevitably lead them to face some kind of violent opposition, they can expect to face that opposition as much from within themselves as from outside. As Cullinan puts it very starkly, ‘The latent conflict within each of us and public conflicts of our society are in fact locked on one to another’ (p. 29). I suspect that what the Gospels portray as Jesus’ forty days being tempted in the wilderness was, in fact, his struggling with this violence within, probably including the shadow side of his religious upbringing as a young Jewish man.
If Christians claim to be ‘the body of Christ’ and true to his spirit, it is to be expected that they will provoke violence too
Cullinan insists that when Christians look at the various dimensions of the present-day cultural, social and ecclesial context in which the Eucharist is celebrated, they need to remember that they themselves do not inhabit some world outside of that context. It is part of who they are, their own human reality. Their celebration of Eucharist must necessarily take place within that context. There is nowhere else they can be. If the Eucharist does not speak to and help interpret that context, it can hardly be said to offer a new language. It could even be seen as meaningless and irrelevant.
Part 3: Celebrating the Eucharist in todays world
I have kept insisting that Jesus could be said to have provoked the violence which was inflicted upon him. Yet, that is an over-simplification. Jesus provoked violence because he himself was provoked by violence. Some people seem to be provocative by nature, almost as though they lack any sense of inner security or peace. Such people can sow dissention rather than peace. Jesus was certainly not provocative in that sense. He was provocative only because he himself was provoked. He was provoked by injustice, and especially injustice perpetrated in the name of God. He was provoked when he saw the poor, the sick, the blind, the disabled and lepers labelled sinners and treated as outcasts. He was provoked when religious leaders portrayed God as being more interested in the Sabbath than in relieving suffering and healing sickness. He whom John called the Word made flesh was provoked by religious hypocrisy in which the hollowness of people’s religious words was exposed by their lack of mercy and compassion. He was provoked by the very same things that the prophets said provoked the God of his ancestors.
Using ‘passion’ once again in the sense of being moved by external factors, it could be said that the Passion of Jesus took place throughout all his active ministry. The way whole categories of people were marginalized and despised provoked the passion which filled his whole life and preaching. Jesus was a very passionate person – revealing an extremely passionate God, a compassionate God. Most of the violence Jesus saw around him was systemic and institutional, bound up with religious and social exclusion. We know now how closely all this violence was linked to economic and political factors. Jesus did not operate in a purely religious world.
I was reminded of all this some time ago as I listened to Julian Filochowski preaching at a Mass on the eve of Romero Day. A personal friend of Romero, Julian made it very clear how strongly Romero was provoked by the horrendous injustice and violence of the El Salvador government and its military and political institutions. The God of Romero was the God of Jesus, that same God about whom Sobrino wrote, ‘What is most sacred to God is not himself but human beings’. For Romero, ‘Do this in memory of me’ was intrinsically bound up with being provoked passionately by such violence. It meant being filled with the spirit of the risen and living Christ, and so responding as the body of Christ to the violence and injustice he saw around him. In his preaching at the Eucharist, Romero felt he could not truly interpret the scriptures for his community without at the same time interpreting in the light of those scriptures the social, political and economic reality he saw all around him. For him the Eucharist was intrinsically and profoundly contextualized in the reality of El Salvador, a reality which could itself only be properly understood within the wider economic and political context. In the second paragraph of this article I comment that ‘The fact that Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot dead at the altar table in the course of celebrating the Eucharist made his murder seem all the more shocking.’ On the other hand, maybe there was nowhere more appropriate for his martyrdom to take place!
Christians should be ‘passionate’ in celebrating the Eucharist today in such a provocative context of violence and injustice on a global scale
The language of the Eucharist is the language of communion. If that is truly the language of the Christian community, as they come together to share in the Eucharist, they must surely be provoked by all that is dehumanising, demeaning and destructive of human persons in the current climate in society – the individualism, consumerism and relativism which is in the air we breathe; institutional and social prejudice and discrimination in all forms, whether based on race, ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation; ageism and intolerance of physical or mental disability. Moreover, remembering Cullinan’s words about the enemy within, Christians will expect to be challenged on all these counts in their own personal motivation and lifestyle. And surely that is all the more true with regard to so much which is dysfunctional in the internal life of the Church itself.
Part 4: Other issues linked to ‘Eucharist and Violence’
Using Eucharist as a form of Violence
In Roman Catholic canon law exclusion from the Eucharist would generally be seen as a ‘medicinal’ penalty. Its purpose would be to heal, to lead a person to change their ways and so help to be welcomed back into the community. Cavanagh argues the case for such ‘medicinal’ exclusion as follows:
As an invitation to reconciliation, then, excommunication done well is an act of hospitality, in which the Church does not expel the sinner, but says to her, ‘You are already outside our communion. Here is what you need to do to come back in.’ Excommunication does not abandon the sinner to her fate; in fact, precisely the opposite is the case. It is failure to excommunicate the notorious sinner that leaves her to eat and drink her own condemnation (William Cavanagh, Torture and Eucharist, London, Blackwells, 1998, p. 243).
We need to remember that Cavanagh was writing of his experience in Chile where he saw the torture inflicted by Christians in Chile on their fellow Christians as a deliberate attempt to isolate them from society and depersonalise them. In Christian terms, it was an attempt to ‘dis-member’ the body of Christ and reduce its members to isolated individuals.
If refusal of the Eucharist might possibly be justified on grounds of healing or even safeguarding the unity and integrity of the ‘body of Christ’, what about its refusal for other purposes? For instance, there is a controversy in the US Church at present with regard to one or two bishops who have given instructions that politicians who advocate a pro-abortion stance should be refused communion. It is interesting that the National Catholic Reporter filed this story under the heading, ‘When Communion becomes a Weapon’. Clearly, the headline writer sees such a refusal as a violent mean to enforce an ethical position with political implications.
Or again, what about people involved in a second marriage while the previous partner is still living? The official line, taught by the Pope and the Vatican and upheld, at least in public, by most bishops, is that they should be refused the sacraments, despite strong theological arguments in favour of a more open approach. Many Roman Catholics see this ban as a form of violence perpetrated against people whose lives have been shattered by marriage breakdown and whose second marriage is experienced as a gift of God and an occasion of grace.
My friend, David Morland OSB, whom I quoted in the previous article, puts it even more bluntly:
The idea that a past broken relationship (e.g. divorce-remarriage) should bar a person from the very sacrament whose purpose is to heal wounds and rebuild life seems as perverse and blind as the criticism of Jesus by the Pharisees of a miracle of healing performed on the Sabbath.
Another instance might be the denial of the sacraments to Catholics living publicly in a committed gay relationship. Is that medicinal? Many would regard it, too, as life-denying and destructive.
Doing Violence to the Eucharist
It has struck me more and more over the years that we Catholics cause ourselves problems by isolating the act of ‘receiving Communion’ within the whole integrated action of the Eucharist. So we talk about ‘refusing Communion’ to people, even though we are happy for them to join us in all the other prayers and actions of the Eucharist. ‘Receiving Communion’ thereby becomes a separate entity in its own right.
This is very strange since it is the community’s celebration of the Eucharist as a whole, not some isolated part of it, which constitutes the sacrament of unity and reconciliation. As I mentioned in the previous article, to invite someone to share in the unifying experience round the table and then tell them they cannot share in the community meal seems to be bad manners and totally inhuman. After all, Christ, the host at the table, caused scandal by the kind of the kind of company he shared meals with!
After a recent Saturday Night Mass, a parishioner wanted a word with me – a very down-to-earth and deeply committed Catholic man, with his feet firmly on the ground. In his broad Liverpool accent he said:
You know how you were talking about Jesus being committed to an open table in face of all the complaints of the religious establishment. Well, our Catholic bishops don’t let us keep an open table, do they? I think it is shocking that those who are not Catholic aren’t allowed to share at the table. I know people bring up all sorts of reasons why not. Some even say – you never know what awful things they would do with the host. But aren’t our bishops already doing something awful with it when they refuse it to those wanting to receive?
This is particularly the case when the discipline prevents married couples from receiving Communion together in so-called ‘mixed marriages’. The Anglican bishops highlight the horror of this violence in their trenchant criticism of the discipline of One Bread, One Body on this point: ‘The unity in Christ between husband and wife that is created sacramentally or covenantally through marriage, building on baptism, should not be put asunder at the Eucharist’ (The Eucharist, sacrament of unity, no. 42).
Oliver McTernan in his book, Violence in God’s Name (London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003), argues that violence in the name of God can be nourished by reading sacred texts as giving the disciple an exclusivist religious identity – God is with me and not with you. Restrictive approaches to the Eucharist could work in that way, strengthening an exclusivist identity among members and creating feelings of unwelcome and rejection among those not allowed to participate.
To accept an ‘open table’ approach to the Eucharist would mean moving from an attitude of toleration to one of appreciating the gift of difference: If the Church claims to be a sacrament of the unity of the human family, the Eucharist should not be a meal at which the presence of outsiders is tolerated within certain strict limits, but a meal at which their presence is treasured and accepted as a gift. Communion will be more truly Communion. David Morland OSB makes a similar point:
Perhaps the power and fire the Eucharist contains as the breaking of the Lord’s body has to be thrown open to the world and all Christians so that no one is excluded who does not chose to be. The scene of the Last Supper would be transposed into the feeding of the five thousand with no questions asked about faith, merit or moral practice. Participation in the Eucharist would be rather the sowing of the seed of God’s presence than the affirmation of orthodox membership of the one, true Church. For Christians it would be the bread of pilgrims searching for unity rather than a celebration by the few of a unity they believe they already possess. Perhaps the destruction of the temple of One Bread, One Body is needed if the real Body of the Lord is to be given shape in the world today.
Another instance of this violence against the Eucharist itself might be in the way in which in many parts of the world, people are effectively deprived of the Eucharist for very long periods due to the Catholic Church’s giving higher priority to the ruling on clerical celibacy than to availability of the Eucharist.
Many women – and many men, myself included – regard the so-called theological sign argument that women cannot be ordained priests because the priest acts ‘in the person of Christ’ as doing violence to the human dignity of women. Those who believe this will also regard this teaching as doing violence to the Eucharist itself. A poem quoted by Elizabeth A. Johnson in her book, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York/London, Continuum, 2003) expresses this in a very telling way:
All the way to Elizabeth
and in the months afterward,
“This is my body, my blood.”
Beneath the watching eyes
of donkey, ox, and sheep
she rocked him, crooning,
“This is my body, my blood.”
In the moonless desert flight
and the Egypt-days of his growing
she nourished him, singing,
“This is my body, my blood.”
In the search for her young lost boy
and the foreboding day of his leaving
she let him go, knowing,
“This is my body, my blood.”
Under the blood-smeared cross
she rocked his mangled bones,
remembering him, moaning,
“This is my body, my blood.”
When darkness, stones, and tomb
bloomed to Easter morning,
she ran to him, shouting,
“This is my body, my blood.”
And no one thought to tell her:
“Woman, it is not fitting
for you to say those words.
“You don’t resemble him.”