The longest section of the Didache, apart from the Two Ways, deals with what happens when the followers of Jesus gather together and eat. This is the meal which in the second century would get the name ‘the Eucharist’ but which in the Didache is still referred to more generically with the phrase: ‘now with regard to the Eucharist you should eucharistize in this way’ (Did. 9.1). The awkwardness of the phrase shows that they did not yet think of ‘the Eucharist’ as the title of a distinct event, but as an action of the community; and so we should translate it as ‘now this is how you should engage in giving thanks, bless God in this way . . .’. There is a difficulty in translating the related verbs ‘eucharisteō’ and eulogeō in the first century because to ‘bless God’ and ‘to thank God’ are in effect a single reality: to say in prayer ‘blessed are you for your goodness towards us’ is to say ‘thank you for your goodness to us’ (> Audet, 1959). We need to keep this combination of meanings in mind whenever we look at first-century texts relating to the Christian meal. For example, in reading the account of the Last Supper in Luke (24.30): ‘When he was at table with them, he took the loaf and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them’ – for Luke, when Jesus blessed God he was offering thanks to God. In the Didache we have the word eucharisteō pointing to both thanking and blessing (though we usually translate it as ‘thanking’) while in Luke’s Gospel we have eulogeō pointing to both thanking and blessing (though we usually translate it as ‘blessing’).
Reading about the eucharistic meal in the Didache is, for many, a most troubling experience. For some Christians today the notion that there was a formal regular meeting involving bread and wine is enough to make the whole text suspect: this is a ritual-using community that is far too ‘Catholic’ in its approach! For others, and these are very often Catholics, the informality of the event – clearly involving a party, with no clear directions on who presided, and, most worryingly, the absence of ‘the formulae of consecration’ (i.e. the phrases ‘this is my body’ and ‘this is my blood’), have led them to assert that these chapters do not even refer to the Eucharist but to a parallel event called a ‘love feast’, borrowing a phrase (agapē) from Jude 12 where a community is chastised for ‘blemishes’ at its agapē meetings because some men are looking after themselves and not caring for others.
It is best to face these difficulties head on. First, the notion that the early communities were a ‘ritual free zone’ when it came to prayer ignores what we see in Judaism in the time of Jesus. Meals were times of prayer (> Finkelstein, 1929) and regular special meals, not just the Passover, were a key part of the religious tradition. No community formed from within Judaism would abandon that legacy of offering thanks to God, especially when Jesus had come proclaiming the goodness of the Father and offering thanks to the Father. Second, the notion that the Eucharist burst onto the scene at the Last Supper with a formal priesthood, specific words and a fixed theology does not allow for the fact that all religious structures change over time, evolving with some aspects becoming clearer and others more obscure. For instance, it was several centuries before the words of Jesus at the Last Supper became a standard element in a Eucharistic Prayer (> Ligier, 1973). Indeed, it would be an indication of the late date of the Didache if we found them there! Third, we need to recognize synonyms: the words ‘agape’ and ‘eucharist’ and ‘the breaking of the loaf’ (an event referred to twice in Luke’s Gospel and four times in the Acts of the Apostles) all refer to the same event in the early churches. We cannot have the ‘bits we like’ called ‘the Eucharist’, while the ‘bits we do not like’ are all lumped together as referring to some other kind of meeting or meal (> McGowan, 1999, p. 22). We need to be open to be surprised about what all these references to the event of the Eucharist can tell us about its original significance (> Daly-Denton, 2008).
It is also worth bearing in mind two ‘default settings’ of human beings when it comes to religious actions. The first is this: imagining that what we saw as a child is identical with what is traditional. We have often a great fondness or a great loathing for our earliest experience of anything, and subsequently remember that as the norm from time immemorial. So if you went to church as a child and hated the ritual as long and boring, then any reference to the Eucharist in the early Church can easily provoke an allergic reaction. Likewise, if you see your first experience as basic to your faith, then you can easily imagine that that experience, with all its memories and explanations, is a norm of excellence against which every other experience is evaluated. We need to remind ourselves that religious expression is always changing even within the most rigid of traditions: new generations bring new experiences, new values and new explanations.
The second default setting is that we tend to project our concerns and debates about religious practices back to the time of the documents we use in arguments today. Thus we imagine that what worries us is what worried people 2,000 years ago. For example, for five centuries there has been a dispute among Christians over the meaning of the notion of ‘grace’ in St Paul. So we often read the whole of Paul as if it revolves around this sixteenth-century problem: but that is our problem, not his. It is worth remembering that people have read, and can read, Paul without even seeing this as a problem! Likewise, for 500 years there have been major divisions among Western Christians about what is the bread and wine eaten and drunk at the Eucharist and who can preside at it: but these are problems that arose from specific ways of looking at the Eucharist at specific times. They are not issues that have always been important – though those who worry about these issues find that hard to imagine – and, therefore, we should not try to answer our questions with what was said about the Eucharist by people who never thought about the Eucharist as we do. Projecting our concerns into the past as if they are absolutely essential not only twists what the past can tell us but also can blind us to how it can offer us solutions by setting our problems in perspective.
A great deal of research has taken place in recent years about the importance of meals for the early community (> Smith, 2003; or Taussig, 2009) and how those meals gave them their sense of unity with one another and with the Christ. In the meal they celebrated who they were, rejoiced in the fact that the Father loved them, and by having a meal as their basic form of gathering stressed Jesus’ view of God as the loving Father who was beckoning them to the heavenly banquet. Now if we want to see how they imagined these meals together we need to look at how they remembered Jesus as the one who called people to his table and joined the tables of others, and there celebrated the Father’s love. Christians have had a practice of only thinking about the Last Supper in the Synoptics (Mark 14.17–25; Matt. 26.20–29; Luke 22.14–38) as having relevance to the Eucharist, but if we want to understand the significance of the meal of the Christians (rather than one interpretation of it that later became dominant), then we need to recall just how often we see Jesus involved in dining with his disciples.
Let us look at the sequence of meals in just one Gospel: that of Luke (> Smith, 1987). Jesus dined with his disciples at Simon’s house in Capernaum; his presence brought healing to Simon’s mother-in-law (Luke 4.38–39). Clearly, the group around Jesus took sharing meals with him for granted: the table seems to have been his classroom in discipleship. However, dining with the tax-collector Levi when he called him to be a follower was an expression that the new kingdom would break the boundaries of existing societies (Luke 5.27–32). Part of the memory was that Jesus was prepared to keep dangerous company, and make a place for that person at his table. Jesus remained seated at table with Levi despite murmurs that he ate and drank with tax-collectors and sinners. Staying there at table is a crucial insight into the identity of Jesus.
That the kingdom of Jesus was the arrival of the great feast – the beginning of the never-ending banquet of the all-generous Father – rather than the arrival of divine punishment for sinners can also be seen in a meal (Luke 5.33–39). Jesus ate and drank with his disciples even when it scandalized the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist who fasted often and offered frequent prayers. The coming of the Son of Man is not the horror of divine retribution, but begins with him eating and drinking, and inviting everyone, even the sinners, to the table (Luke 7.24–35). The theme of Jesus’ shocking welcome continued when he accepted a Pharisee’s hospitality and ate at his table. Then a woman from the city, a sinner, anointed his feet and wept – breaking even more boundaries – while Jesus, sitting there amid his followers, forgave her sins (Luke 7.36–50). The meal of memories was not only a place of open welcome; it was to be a place of forgiveness and reconciliation. Not only did Jesus eat at table in houses, he ate with the multitude in the wilderness. This eating showed his followers his miraculous abundance: he satisfied all with five loaves and two fish (Luke 9.10–17). Remembering the meals of the Christ meant there had to be care for all the hungry and the poor – a concern of Paul in 1 Corinthians and of the letter of Jude.
We next find Jesus sitting at table in Martha’s house while her sister Mary listened to his words: once again, the teacher doing his teaching to those who sit with him – and the very act of sitting together shows the kernel of his news about a loving, welcoming Father (Luke 10.38–42). But all this teaching about table fellowship is dangerous: he dined with another Pharisee who was shocked that he did not first wash: the meal and not the law was the important thing. In the kefuffle Jesus taught them that what disqualified someone from the table of the Lord was the neglect of justice and the love of God (Luke 11.37—12.1). And he seems to have gone out of his way to share his table with those who might disapprove of him: he dined one sabbath with a ruler who was a Pharisee; then healed a man with dropsy at that meal and said, ‘Blessed is the one who shall eat bread in the Kingdom of God’ (Luke 14.1–24). When the good news came to Zacchaeus it came in the form of Jesus inviting himself to dinner at the man’s house: it was remembered in Luke’s preaching as a dinner that changed Zacchaeus’ life, and brought salvation to his whole household (Luke 19.1–10).
Only when we know the story of all this eating and drinking, showing disciples, friends and even enemies the new banquet paradigm of God’s love, can we start remembering when Jesus sat at table for the Passover meal, and his command to those at table to gather at a meal of a loaf and a cup in his memory (Luke 22.15–20). From the perspective of all these meals we can understand why Luke expects his hearers to understand that the disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of the loaf at the table in Emmaus (24.13–35); and to understand that people could come from North, South, East and West to sit at table in the kingdom of God (13.29).
We have to imagine that meal in the Didache against the sort of background we have sketched out from just one Gospel. They gathered and shared food and taking a cup of wine – though water was used sometimes – they offered a prayer of thanks to the Father, and then taking a loaf of bread they did likewise. What set this community apart was that this sharing of food cut right across the social stratifications of the ancient world and indeed its dining practice. The poor and the rich ate together, the slaves shared a table with their masters, women ate with men, the outcasts with the religiously pure, the gentile sat next to the Jew, and all prayed to the Father and thanked him for sending his Son. Eventually this social mixing was too much for many people to take – we see the difficulties already in Corinth in the late forties (> Murphy-O’Connor, 1976 and 1977) where the rich did not want to have to share with the poor (> Theissen, 1982) – and eventually the meal would become a token affair that was wholly ritualized. Then real eating together disappeared, although the memory of that new community of love that Jesus proclaimed would always be held, at least in the imagination, by subsequent generations.
Having dealt with fasting and prayer, the Didache announces its next topic:
Now this is how you should engage in giving thanks, bless God in this way.
First, at the cup, say:
We give thanks to you, our Father,
for the holy vine of David, your servant, which you have made known to us.
Through Jesus, your servant, to you be glory for ever.
(Did. 9.1–2)
It is worth noting that Jesus is referred to as pais which means both ‘servant’ and ‘son’ – and we need to keep the full range of the word in mind when reading the prayer. It is rendered here as ‘servant’ because there is an obvious parallel being drawn between David as God’s servant and Jesus as the Father’s servant; and we see this also in Matthew 12.18. The Didache continues:
Then when it comes to the broken [loaf] say:
We give thanks to you, our Father,
for the life and knowledge which you have made known to us.
Through Jesus, your servant, to you be glory for ever.
For as the broken loaf was once scattered over the mountains and then was gathered in and became one, so may your church be gathered together into your kingdom from the very ends of the earth.
Yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever.
Only let those who have been baptized in the name of the Lord eat and drink at your eucharists. And remember what the Lord has said about this: do not give to dogs what is holy.
After you all have had enough to eat, give thanks in this way:
We give you thanks, holy Father, for your holy name which you have made to dwell in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality which you have made known to us.
Through Jesus, your servant, to you be glory for ever.
You are the mighty ruler of all who has created all for your name’s sake, and you have given food and drink to human beings for their enjoyment so that they might give thanks to you. But to us, from your generosity, you have given spiritual food and drink, and life eternal, through your servant.
Above all things we give thanks to you because you are mighty: to you be glory for ever.
Remember, Lord, your church, deliver her from evil, make her complete in your love, and gather her from the four winds into your kingdom you have prepared for her, for yours is the power and the glory for ever.
May grace come and may this world pass away.
Hosanna to the God of David.
If anyone is holy, let him advance; if anyone is not, let him be converted.
Maranatha. Amen.
However, permit the prophets to give thanks in whatever manner they wish.
(Did. 9.3—10.7)
Then, slightly later, we are told a few other details about the Eucharist:
On the day which is the Day of the Lord gather together for the breaking of the loaf and giving thanks. However, you should first confess your sins so that your sacrifice may be a pure one; and do not let anyone who is having a dispute with a neighbour join until they are reconciled so that your sacrifice may not be impure.
For this is the sacrifice about which the Lord has said [Mal. 1.11 and 14]: ‘In every place and time let a pure sacrifice be offered to me, for I am the great king, says the Lord, and my name is feared among the nations.’
(Did. 14)
Christians who today read these prayers, whatever tradition they come from, can find points of recognition but also items that surprise, some because of their inclusion and some because they are not included. When we look at it as a single piece of teaching rather than as bits, however, it has the ability to generate some fundamental questions for every Christian assembly today.
The Didache gave the person who committed it to memory the basic forms for prayers needed for the Christian meal. It does not give a narrator’s description such as we might get if there had been someone at such a meal acting as a reporter. Nor does it give a normative format for the meal as if this was the one-and-only way to have such a meal. If there is a prophet present (important people in the world of the early Christians) then he was to say whatever prayers he thought best (Did. 10.7). This means that trying to fit the pattern of what we find in the Didache into patterns relating to later practice is always difficult: they did not write for us but for themselves and they assumed familiarity with the actual practice. So, on many topics that interest us, they simply took practice for granted. Therefore, rather than trying to link what we think was the actual practice with what developed later in details (> Stewart-Sykes, 2004, for example), let us note some of the most prominent assumptions and understandings.
The most striking feature is that the Eucharist is part of a real meal. This was a continuation of the meal practice of Jesus: the disciples become the assembly around the table and there bless the Father in the way that they believed Jesus did. We are given no details about who brought the food, where the meal took place, whether it was an evening meal or at some other time. We are given simply a set of sample prayers for blessing the Father, that offer thanks in the midst of celebrating his goodness, and we can assume, thereby, the fact that the new community gathered for this meal. This gathering cannot have been easy for them. While banquets were part of ancient culture, these were very stratified affairs where social relationships were clearly maintained and, indeed, reaffirmed. Here we have just the instruction that the meal is confined to those who have entered the community of Jesus through baptism. All that we saw the Didache saying of baptism now becomes practice. Baptism marked the boundary of the community. The Eucharist shows the community assembled and becomes the practice that maintains the community. In short, if you are a follower of Jesus on the Way, then you have a place at this table. At this table, the good things of earth are shared by all, and the Father is thanked for his heavenly goodness, his supreme gift, the Christ.
The name Christians give to their celebration is ‘eucharist’ – thanksgiving – and this was equivalent to ‘blessing God’ – which we see Jesus doing – which is declaring how great and good God is for all his wonderful gifts to us. This aspect of praising God for his goodness is often just one theme among many in later practice, but here it is clearly to the fore. God, now understood as the Father who has sent his servant/child among us, is thanked for all the goodness of the creation, and then thanked for the gift beyond all that is in the creation. Thankful for the food and drink that give human joy, Christians are distinctly grateful for the food and drink of eternal life (Did. 10.3). This is the food and drink that is given through Jesus. This notion that Jesus gives eternal life through a gift we eat and drink finds echoes in John’s preaching: to the woman of Samaria Jesus offers the water of eternal life (John 4.14) and his Father gives the true manna that gives immortality (John 6.31–33). To share in the meal was to receive the greatest gift of the Father – to have a share in eternal life, through Jesus. So, at this meal there was food for the body and earthly enjoyment and there was food for eternal life and the enjoyment of the life of heaven – and all because of the life and knowledge that came through Jesus. No fewer than four times (Did. 9.2, 3, 4, 10.2) do we find this refrain: what we do in thanking, that we are able to thank the Father and that we are able to rejoice in the Father’s goodness, is because we are praying ‘through Jesus, your servant/child’.
One of the distinguishing features of the meals of Jesus was that he took a cup and, having blessed the Father, shared it with his disciples. This is a ritual without parallel in the ancient world: it is one thing to offer a thanksgiving over a cup – and by extension over all the cups of the participants of the meal – but quite another to pass a single cup from one to another. Yet here we find this practice: to share a cup is to assert an intimate unity and a common purpose. The disciples have to be prepared to drink from the cup of Jesus (> Mark 10.38–39) and thereby they share in his destiny. At the meal in the Didache one of the rituals is that the single cup of the Lord is shared by all those at the meal. One cup is unity, and it cuts across every human boundary and division – it is not accidental that Christians have always tried to find ways around sharing the cup in their celebrations! Likewise, they offered thanks over a broken loaf. The loaf that is shared is a basic symbol of togetherness around a table. We still eat shares of a birthday cake – and so celebrate with the person whose birthday is being celebrated. We share a wedding cake to celebrate with the couple – even sending little portions to those who cannot get to the wedding so that they can be linked with the party. And Jesus is remembered as having broken and shared a loaf with his disciples. The loaf broken into pieces allows each to have a piece, and eating shares of the single loaf makes each person at table a part of that one loaf. This sharing of a cup and a loaf is the basic ritual that underlies all the ways that early Christians sought to explain what the meal meant for them (> Nodet and Taylor, 1998, pp. 88–126).
This aspect of the Eucharist, that it involved sharing a single cup and breaking a loaf so that each has a share, has been obscured for us by our fascination with what it is we receive in ‘holy communion’: and so endless debates over bread and wine and whether they are or become the body and blood of Christ. But this later debate focuses on a type of food, bread, whereas the early concern was with the actual object one takes in one’s hands: a loaf of bread. Likewise, there was so little concern with ‘what one drinks’ that many early communities used water (> McGowan, 1999): the key concern was with how one drinks from a single cup passed from one to another. However, we can see the power of later ideas in the fact that most translators of the Didache, as indeed of the New Testament books, still translate what Jesus took in his hands as ‘bread’ (i.e. thinking in the medieval categories of what it is) rather than as ‘loaf’ (i.e. thinking in terms of what the action of sharing it among those at the table means). The Didache forcefully reminds us that when we read any early account of the Christian meal, the focus is on many sharing a single cup and eating shares of a single loaf (> O’Loughlin 2003b, and 2004).
So how did they draw out further meanings from this practice? Let us begin with how Paul interpreted sharing a loaf and cup in 1 Corinthians before looking at the different take we find in the Didache’s prayers.
Paul writes:
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The loaf that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread… You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.
(1 Cor. 10.16–17 and 21 [NRSV, adapted])
Here, the fact of one cup and one loaf is above all pointing to unity and union. To share the cup and loaf means that the community are one body; they are united by this eating and drinking. Moreover, to share this cup and loaf brings about union with the Lord, in just the same way that sharing in food offered to the demons would link the participants with them. Those who gather for the Christian meal are made into one body and that is the body of Christ. In the Didache we see a different take on the ritual. Israel saw itself as having been scattered and one of the actions of the Anointed One would be to gather all these scattered individuals and reunite them as one people. We see it in texts like these from the prophets:
Hear the word of the LORD , O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, ‘He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock’.
(Jer. 31.10 [NRSV]);
or:
Thus says the Lord GOD : When I gather the house of Israel from the peoples among whom they are scattered, and manifest my holiness in them in the sight of the nations, then they shall settle on their own soil that I gave to my servant Jacob.
(Ezek. 28.25 [NRSV])
Now the community believed that this process of gathering was taking place through Jesus the good shepherd – and it was taking place in their meal. The loaf was itself a symbol of gathering: it started off as seeds that were scattered, then they were gathered and transformed into the unity that is the loaf – and now each is sharing in that unity at the meal that anticipates the heavenly banquet. For Paul the meal’s ritual shows that we are one, new people; for the Didache it shows that we have been gathered up by the Messiah to become the new people. Scattered to the four winds, they are now gathered, transformed into a holy people, and made part of the kingdom (Did. 10.5).
And when the gathered people bless the Father and offer thanks ‘through Jesus’ they are offering the sacrifice that is pure and holy: the praise and thanksgiving of the Messiah’s people. So sharing in the meal requires that they acknowledge their sins and in that act of acknowledging their sinfulness is the acceptance of the Father’s forgiveness; and so there must be a concurrent acknowledgement of quarrels and a seeking of reconciliation. Just as a difficulty with God makes sharing the meal inappropriate so does a difficulty with a neighbour. So both vertical and horizontal relationships need to be repaired and then the sacrifice is worthy. There is a linking of the need to be reconciled with God (Did. 14.1) and to be reconciled with neighbour (Did. 14.2) that is exactly parallel to the prayer for forgiveness in the Lord’s Prayer where we ask to be forgiven by God for our trespasses against him just as we forgive the neighbours who trespass against us. The meal in its totality is, therefore, a sacrifice of praise to the Father. Moreover, as the perfect sacrifice, made in union with Jesus, it fulfils the prophecy of perfect sacrifice, that one, perfect sacrifice that would be offered from the rising of the sun to its setting (Mal. 1.11–14/Did. 14.3).
Therefore, we can say that the Christian meal:
We often use the phrase ‘holy communion’ for the Eucharist. In the Didache we see the full range of meanings that should come to mind: the meal celebrates the communion of the gathering with one another, communion with all Christians, communion with Christ and communion with the Father.
We have seen that the Didache took over the liturgical week from Judaism and transformed it (> ch. 4); we see here that the sabbath’s eve was replaced by a gathering on ‘the Day of the Lord’ (Sunday). So the meal took place at least weekly, but it may have been more frequent in that there is no hint in the Didache that every meal of Christians could not have been considered eucharistic. If all knew the prayers of thanks (think of the parallel with ‘grace’ before and after meals) then at each meal a cup could have been blessed and a loaf broken. Certainly, we should not just think of elaborate banquets: many poor communities would have had difficulties having even a weekly festive meal, and wine was not ubiquitous but a drink that required some wealth. We can imagine communities where the majority were slaves or poor people and the cup and loaf of the Eucharist were combined with a very ordinary meal indeed. It is in this context that we have to recall that while we think of the cup as filled with wine, with all its rich symbolism, this only became a standard element when the Eucharist had become a ritual distinct from the common meal of the new people. Jesus had welcomed all to his table, so every table of Christians could have held the promise of the kingdom (> Jewett, 1994).
One of the most troubling questions for many modern Christians concerns who can lead the Eucharist; and then this becomes questions about who has the ‘power to consecrate’ and whether or not there is a Eucharist if there is no one who is ordained. All such questions assume that the Eucharist is an event one attends rather than an activity engaged in by Christians when they gather. Alas for those looking for neat confirmations of their doctrinal positions from history, the Didache does not oblige and it provides no clear answers to the burning questions of later times. The Didache, as we shall see in the next chapter, does show us that the communities that used it had leaders, but the only comment about who offers the blessing at the meal is that a ‘prophet’ can use whatever formula he wishes. There is simply no indication that the one who said the prayers was a presbyter – the word that gives us the word ‘priest’ – or a bishop. Now, immediately some either jump to the conclusion that it must have been only priests – because in later times a priest was a ‘must’ for a Eucharist – or jump even further beyond the evidence and suggest that if there was no mention of a priest then this is not a description of a ‘real’ Eucharist! These sorts of argument all share a common element: they assume that what is declared to be doctrinally necessary at a later date must also be in historical continuity with the earliest practice. However, it is actually a rare event when doctrinal ‘musts’ match historical ‘facts’ exactly (> Frend, 2003) – this is a mismatch that Christians today taking ‘all-or-nothing’ positions on many aspects of Church practice might keep in mind.
We can imagine a situation like this in those early decades. At the Sunday gathering whoever was considered one of the leaders of the community – and remember this took place in a house so it would not have been a large gathering – took the lead in making the thanksgiving at the meal. But at other times, whoever was the head of the table – the householder – took the lead. So when one Christian hosted a meal for other Christians, that person took the lead. The assumption of the Didache is that every Christian should know these prayers for celebrating a eucharistic meal – perhaps the ideal it aspired to was that no meal would be shared without the Father being thanked for his gifts and his gift of Jesus – and so we can assume that every Christian was expected to have use of this skill from time to time. Indeed, if the ‘prophets’ – who seem to have been the experts in the Way (> ch. 6) – are allowed to use whatever form of prayer they wish, then the fact that these prayers are laid out in full presumes that everyone else needed a learned formula; this in turn presumes that every Christian may have use for such a formula.
One other issue needs to be raised: when most Christians think of the origins of the Eucharist they think of the scene of the final dinner in three of the Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) and this often prompts the question as to why there is no mention of the Last Supper in the Didache. While we should note that this is an anachronistic question – it was several centuries before a reference to the Last Supper became a standard part of eucharistic prayers – it is still worth noting the question as it can throw additional light on the practices of the earliest churches. In Mark’s Gospel, the Eucharist is presented as being given to the disciples at a Passover meal (Mark 14.12) – and such a meal was an annual event. However, the general Christian practice has been to celebrate the eucharistic meal at least weekly – and the Didache is our earliest witness to this practice. Indeed, those churches today that hold the Eucharist less frequently than once a week are inheriting a sixteenth-century practice which argued that if the Eucharist began at the Passover then it should be an annual event or, at least, an infrequent event. So we have a strange situation: the communities to which Mark, Matthew and Luke were preaching were gathering weekly (and it was probably at these weekly gatherings that these men were preaching their Gospels), yet when it came to the part of the kerugma that dealt with the meal for which they were gathered they heard about it in terms of an annual celebration. How can this situation be accounted for?
We have seen that the meal practice of the churches is not some formal obedience to a command, ‘do this’, but emerged out of continuity with the meal practice of Jesus. It is this continuity of practice that is at the core of the Eucharist: they thanked the Father, they shared a cup, they shared a loaf, they rejoiced at who they had been called to become. It is within this continuity of practice that all the explanations of the Eucharist emerged. We have seen how one such explanation can be found in Paul, another in the Didache, and yet another can be found in Mark when he places the Eucharist within the context of the climax of his Gospel. For Mark the meal reminds us that Jesus is our passover lamb, and the meal is a sharing in his life, death and resurrection.
The meal with its blessing and special forms of sharing is the continuity: the explanations – whether in Paul, the Didache or the Gospel – are all building up and drawing out the implications of that meal. We can see these various explanations as ‘theologies’: expressions of what it means to share this meal. Each draws out from experience a different aspect, and the well of such explanations seems to be inexhaustible! So we should look on Mark’s story of the Last Supper as a way of linking a basic fact of his audience’s experience into the Gospel’s story. It is repeated, but with different emphases, in the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke. While John in his Gospel has a Last Supper, he has no mention of the Eucharist on that evening: but rather locates the Eucharist experience of his audience in a series of signs and stories in Galilee (John 6—7) and after the resurrection (John 20—21) – this is something we also find in Luke (Luke 24.28–35) and in a few other stories that have survived from early Church circles (> O’Loughlin, 2009). As we saw in Chapter 3 when looking at baptism, it is the event – the actual baptism, the actual eating of the meal at table – that formed the basis of Christian practice. Explanations came afterwards and can be seen as providing a range of answers to the question: why do we do this?
Nothing bonds us as human beings like sharing a meal: we are the only animals who cook our food – and this indicates that eating is always something more significant to us than just inputting nourishment. Around the table we become families, friends and communities. Meals mark what is significant in life: a life without festive meals marking the events of our lives would point to a very dull life indeed. Meals make us human.
Meals also are at the heart of many religions: the harvest is celebrated because working together we have ensured the continuity of life and that famine will not overtake us. Eating together we recall all that is most important to us and celebrate it: the banquet is a basic form of ritual when we affirm who we are, recall our stories and set out our hopes and desires. The People of Israel had a rich inheritance of such special meals: celebrating the various moments of the harvest and linking to them the mighty works of God that made them his people. Whether it was the great annual meal of the Passover or the meal on the eve of the sabbath, on each occasion God was blessed: praised and thanked for his goodness using a pattern of prayers. Jesus took over these practices, while also transforming them. The table would be inclusive – the welcome he extended would be as open as that extended by the Father to humanity – and would be a place to discover the goodness and generosity of the Father. There he would show his followers a new way of blessing the Father and of demonstrating their communion. This meal practice was continued by the disciples, and around the table they discovered that in this meal they were united with one another and with Jesus, the servant of the Father, and through him they were offering in their meal the perfect sacrifice. This meal not only echoes with the new vision of God and his relationship to his people that Jesus preached, but it demonstrated in the intimacy of sharing a cup and loaf the new structures of humanity: poor eating with rich, slaves with slave owners, men with women, gentiles with Jews. The breaching of the boundaries of Graeco-Roman society at this Christian meal is one of the miracles of the early Church. Later, it would all seem too much and the meal would be replaced with a token eating and drinking, it would become obscured under competing explanations – and eventually we would end up with the irony that the meal that is intended to unite Christians has become one of their main points of argument and division. But dating from before all those later changes we have the Didache, offering us a precious insight into the meal in the earliest communities and reminding us how it was a central event in shaping disciples.