Tag Archives: Eucharist

A Tale of 4 Banquets (10th Sunday after Pentecost, 8/2/2026)

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Readings (Track 2)

Some verses from today’s psalm:

“The Lord is loving to everyone
and his compassion is over all his works.
He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and helps them.
You open wide your hand
and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”

Matthew had linked Jesus’ birth with a text from Isaiah: “’Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means [Matthew explains], ‘God is with us’” (1:23). And in today’s gospel reading Matthew invites us to watch this play out: Jesus has compassion on the crowd, and “all ate and were filled.”

If Matthew had left it at that, we could all respond with a hearty “Hallelujah” and go on to the Creed. But he didn’t.

There’s that interchange with the disciples:

The disciples: “This is a lonely place, and the day is now over;
send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”
Jesus: “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”

Matthew doesn’t dwell on it, but Jesus seems to think that the crowd’s hunger is the disciples’ problem. If pressed, the disciples might have pointed out that the psalm talks about the Lord satisfying needs, but apparently if you’re a disciple of Jesus a.k.a., God-with-us, it doesn’t work that way. Jesus doesn’t sit back and make them deal with it on their own, although it’s unclear if the story would have gotten anywhere had they not come up with those loaves and fish. Their action opens the door for Jesus’ action. But Jesus’ action doesn’t negate his “you give them something to eat.” We’ll come back to that.

The other thing Matthew does is position and narrate the feeding to evoke three other feedings: Herod’s banquet (the one with that dance and oath that resulted in John the Baptist’s beheading), the Last Supper, and the prophesied end-time banquet to which our first reading from Isaiah may be alluding. Let’s tease these out.

Herod’s banquet and Jesus’ banquet. Don’t blame the preacher; Matthew’s the one who put them back to back. What does Matthew want us to notice? Perhaps the contrast between how Herod uses power and how Jesus uses power. With John’s execution foreshadowing Jesus’ execution, there’s a noticeable difference between Herod serving up John’s head and Jesus offering his own Body and Blood. Perhaps the juxtaposition is a question to his hearers: to which banquet are you trying to get tickets? I’d guess many of us have moments in which an invitation to Herod’s banquet would sound attractive. (That’s one of the ways the seed in Jesus’ parable falls into the thorns.) Matthew would want us to think about that.

The feeding of the 5,000 and the Last Supper. Matthew’s narrated the two episodes so that from “when it was evening” to “all ate,” at multiple points the same words are used in the same order. Perhaps to emphasize the common elements, while Jesus receives the two fish, there’s nothing in the narration about what he does with them. What does Matthew want us to notice? Perhaps that Jesus’ compassion is also in play at the Last Supper. Perhaps that the Last Supper isn’t disconnected from dealing with physical hunger.

That last point is the issue Paul confronts in his first letter to the Corinthians. Recall that the Lord’s Supper hadn’t yet been separated from a parish meal. Here’s Paul: “When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing” (11:20-22a)?

For Paul the Lord’s supper can’t be disconnected from how those gathered deal with physical hunger, with their resources.

What of the prophesied end-time banquet? The classic text is in Isaiah:

“On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken” (25:6-8).

Recall this from the Gospel of John’s account of the feeding: “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.’ When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (6:14-15). So the crowd makes the connection!

The feeding of the 5,000 and the end-time banquet: that may feel like a stretch to us, but not to Matthew. Recall his summary of John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ proclamation: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mat 3:2; 4:17). The New Testament authors assume that we’re in the last days (e.g., Heb 1:2). Were they mistaken? Perhaps. Or perhaps what’s happened is that in response to a significant portion of the Jewish people not acknowledging Jesus as the Messiah (recall today’s reading from Romans), God’s hit the Pause button.

In any case, perhaps a primary point is that Isaiah’s vision underlines an important dimension in our Eucharist: a foretaste, a dress rehearsal if you like, of that banquet. That’s one of the reasons we call it “eucharist,” the word being a simple transcription of the Greek word for thanksgiving. Jesus’ self-offering has secured a better future for this world than any that we deserved. But not, note, a better future than today’s psalm promises:

“The Lord is loving to everyone
and his compassion is over all his works.
He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and helps them.
You open wide your hand
and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”

We might say: the Eucharist is the celebration of the truth, the trustworthiness, of psalms like Psalm 145.

The other thing that happens with Matthew’s palimpsest of this feeding, Eucharist, and end-time banquet is that Eucharist isn’t about my or our needs, if we’re using “our” in any limited sense. But yes, our needs as part of the human family, which brings us back to Jesus’ “you give them something to eat.” Response to human hunger, to human need in its myriad forms, has characteristically been an essential part of Christian mission.

Shortly after Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire, the emperor Julian attempted to turn back the clock, which proved surprisingly difficult. In one of his letters, he complains “Why do we not observe that it is their [the Christians’] benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done the most to increase atheism [Christianity]? … When … the impious Galileans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”[1]

“You give them something to eat.” Today’s gospel reading is an opportunity to wonder about what that means for us today. What doors might our response open for Jesus’ action? How might our response to Jesus’ words let others celebrate the truth, the trustworthiness of those lines from the psalm?

“The Lord is loving to everyone
and his compassion is over all his works.
He fulfills the desire of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and helps them.
You open wide your hand
and satisfy the needs of every living creature.”

[1] Cited in Lohfink, Jesus and Community, p.163.

Bread, Wine, Feet (Maundy Thursday, 4/17/2025)

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Readings

Passover. Our first reading marks its beginning. It celebrates the Lord’s power to save, to make a way where there is no way. It celebrates this God as champion of liberty, enemy of slavery. And here we are tonight, remembering how Jesus observed Passover that night.

Jesus did at least two things. He reinterpreted two of Passover’s symbols, the bread and the wine, to point to his coming death. Liberty, passing from slavery into freedom, demands more than defeating the current human Pharaoh. The underlying problem: our ancestral rebellion and distrust of God, and Jesus’ death deals with that. So, at every Eucharist, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.”

That, it turns out, is the easy part. The harder part: changing our behavior so that we stop acting like little Pharaohs at every opportunity. So Jesus starts washing their feet and caps it with “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

“This is my body that is for you.… This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” “You also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Two sides of the same coin.

What’s going on here? Toward the end of the Gospel reading we heard “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Washing each other’s feet, leaving behind the endless competition for status: that’s finally about love. As is, for that matter, “This is my Body; this is my Blood.” As the Gospel of John says elsewhere “God so loved the world…”

Toward the end of the Song of Songs we hear “Set me as a seal upon your heart, / as a seal upon your arm; / for love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave” (8:6a). Pharaoh’s kingdom is powered by death; only love will defeat it.

Extracting Israel from Egypt and Egypt from Israel (Maundy Thursday, 3/28/2024)

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Readings (With the 1 Corinthians reading extended to this)

Getting Israel out of Egypt is half the battle; the other half is getting Egypt out of Israel. The Maundy Thursday readings, with their Passover setting, invite us to think about that.

Getting Israel out of Egypt: The first reading tells of the institution of the Passover, a feast the Jews have celebrated every year since that night in Egypt.

Each family was to select an unblemished lamb, the Passover lamb, and to kill it at twilight. Some of the blood went on the doorposts and the lintel of the house and the lamb was eaten, with the family prepared to leave at any moment. That very night God would pass through the land, and Pharaoh would finally let the people go.

Until Jesus’ arrival, no other night was of such importance in the world’s history, for it was one of the defining actions of the true God, announcing that God desires not the obedience of slaves, but rather of free sons and daughters. In our country, African American slaves heard in this story God’s passion for their own freedom.

And every year since the Exodus the Jews have continued to celebrate the Passover to remember their liberation and —often— to reaffirm their confidence in God’s power to deliver them again from new enemies.

As the Gospels tell us, Jesus. the night before his death, celebrated the Passover with his disciples and reinterpreted its meaning. The meal had used bread and wine to celebrate the liberation from Egypt; Jesus reinterpreted the bread and wine in terms of his coming self-offering: this is my body; this is my blood.

Every Sunday when we celebrate the Eucharist, when we say “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” we are remembering this definitive reinterpretation. And to say “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us” reminds us of how deeply God desires our liberty, and what God was willing to pay to achieve it. God desires that we be free from both our exterior and interior oppressors, free—in the language of our Gospel reading—to love.

Getting Egypt, that is, getting the enslaving seeking and maintenance of status, out of Israel turns out to be at least as hard. It’s the focus of our New Testament readings. In Luke’s account of the Last Supper even that night the disciples were arguing about who was the greatest. So Jesus tries to get at it by washing the disciples’ feet. It horrifies Peter, not so much (I think) that Jesus is washing his feet, as that Peter has already figured out where Jesus is going to take this: “if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

Our Prayer Book encourages—but does not demand—a reenactment of the foot washing. These days it’s problematic. But the reenactment is less important than its point: a love that is oriented not by my comfort level or preferences, but by the needs of my brother or sister. Love oriented by my comfort level or preferences: that lets Egypt in through the back door. Love oriented by the needs of my brother or sister: that’s the liberty for which Moses struggled and Jesus died.

This business of washing each other’s feet—metaphorically speaking—shows up in that paragraph from Paul’s letter from which our reading was taken. The Lectionary assigns vv.23-26, in which Paul recounts Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist. But why does Paul recount it? For that we need the surrounding context. In those days—also at Corinth—we often celebrated the Eucharist as part of a dinner.

But what happened, what scandalized Paul, was that each family ate and drank from their own basket. The rich, baskets to go from one of the upscale restaurants; the poor, whatever they could find at a local food pantry. Egypt has not only entered through the back door; Egypt is running the place! So Paul recounts the institution to remind them that the Eucharist is about a life given for others, so that celebrating the Eucharist selfishly and as though it’s “business as usual” badly misses the point.

Notice how Paul unpacks this. “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” Notice: “the body” isn’t the Eucharistic bread; it’s the living Body of Christ composed of the brothers and sisters gathered around a common table but not —alas— around a common basket. “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner…” “In an unworthy manner” is not about whether I’ve properly confessed before Mass, or whether I have the right sacramental theology, but about whether I’m showing love to my Christian brothers and sisters.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” Washing each others’ feet, celebrating the Eucharist in a way that takes Jesus’ Body seriously: two first Century examples of where Jesus’ new commandment needs to kick in, given to us to get us wondering where that new commandment needs to kick in here and now.

Getting Israel out of Egypt: that’s God’s “yes” to our freedom, celebrated in the Passover and transposed—put on steroids—for all people in Jesus’ death as celebrated in the Holy Eucharist. Getting Egypt out of Israel, living freely: that turns out to be an ongoing project. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” May some of Jesus’ passion for our freedom rub off on us.

Re the Daily Office Readings 5/1/2020

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The Readings: Exodus 24:1-18; Colossians 2:8-23; Matthew 4:12-17
(For Friday, Week of 3 Easter, not Saint Philip and St James, Apostles)

Exodus 24 narrates the ratifying of the covenant (treaty) announced in Exodus 19 (“if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation”). After God addresses the people directly (the “Ten Commandments”), the people ask that Moses receive subsequent instruction and pass it on. The subsequent instruction occupies Exodus 20:22-23:33; Moses passes it on to the people; the people respond—as they had in 19:8—“All the words that the LORD has spoken we will do;” now the two-part ratification.

All the people participate in the first part, involving pillars, sacrifices, blood, reading, declaration, more blood, ending with Moses’ “See the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” Ritual is language, often—like here—performative language, evocative, more like poetry than prose, only somewhat translatable. Blood, one of our most potent symbols for life, death, identity. The blood of circumcision, the ram’s blood (not Isaac’s!) shed on that other mountain, the lamb’s blood at Passover, this blood… The New Testament references to the blood of Christ draw on all this, and we Gentiles must work backwards, not so much to understand as to get a sense of the mystery to which we’re being pointed.

A representative group participates in the second part: “Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel. Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness. God did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel; also they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”

That may be a scene to let sink deep into our imaginations. The stories Israel’s neighbors told about their gods help us recognize that if it’s treaty-making, it’s also a victory celebration. I wonder how it might have worked in Isaiah’s imagination.

“On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.” (25:6-8a)

How might this (Exodus) scene shape our participation in the Eucharist? The Body of Christ, the Blood of Christ: how like or unlike their beholding God?

Re the Daily Office Readings 4/15/2020

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The Readings: Exodus 12:40-51; 1 Corinthians 15:29-41; Matthew 28:1-16

Exodus, again a careful blend of narration and instruction for remembering, with noticeable emphasis on eating the Passover restricted to the households of circumcised males. Alter comments (note on Exodus 12:48): “Circumcision is the mark of belonging to the covenantal community, as God announced to Abraham when He enjoined the practice (Genesis 17); and so circumcision is a prerequisite to participation in the community-defining Passover ritual. But the mention of circumcision also ties in this law with the Bridegroom of Blood episode [Exodus 4:24-26] that was the prelude to Moses’ mission in Egypt: there is a symbolic overlap between the apotropaic blood of circumcision, the apotropaic blood of the lamb on the doorposts, and God’s saving Israel from the bloodbath of Egypt to make them His people?” Still wondering about that. Also wondering: in the current conversations regarding continuing to restrict the Eucharist to the baptized, is the restriction here an appropriate analogy?

Matthew’s narrative is a delight. One element that always delights me, and two that got me wondering today:

  • Jesus doesn’t seem to be able to stay on script. The script called for a rendezvous in Galilee (vv.7, 10). But Jesus sans SFX intercepts the two Marys. A brief lifting of the curtain on Jesus’ desire (need?) for connection with us?
  • The angel gets the SFX (earthquake, dazzling garments)—for the guards’ benefit? They’ll be given money to spread a different story; did our merciful God arrange for them an unforgettable experience?
  • Pilate had asked (cynically? pensively?) “What is truth?” Vv. 11-15 enact one answer to the question. Most of the time—truth occasionally crashes through—the important thing is what people believe, and money is very useful for shaping belief. Is Matthew warning church leaders to watch how they themselves use money?