C4CC(15): The New Covenant (1)

Part one of the book was essentially a secular argument as to why we are in the mess that we are in, that we have become ‘blind to wisdom’ (asophic) as a society. Part two of the book, beginning here, is an account of my own wisdom tradition seeking to show how it can engage with our present crisis creatively: we need to rediscover what it means to worship.

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“I firmly believe that when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.” (Tom Wright)

The heart of what the Church is about is worship, because worship is where we learn to be different. Worship is the primary means of making disciples. This is why worship and getting worship right is so important, because worship is where we come into the presence of God, formatively, and we are formed differently. We hear the word, we share the sacrament and that changes us. This is what worship achieves. The Church is not primarily a campaigning group nor is it primarily a social club. The church is formed and constituted and renewed when it gathers for worship. That is why worship is so important.

Moreover, we are to be accountable to our worship. We are accountable to what we say on a Sunday morning. When we say we repent of our sins and all the things that divide us and all the ways in which we are destroying God's creation, we are accountable to what we say, and if the rest of our week does not reflect that then we will be judged by our own words. Jesus says at one point, “Your own words condemn you.” We are here to witness to something different, and that is crucially what is going on in worship, that in worship we are precisely forming ourselves differently. If we cannot see on the Sunday morning that we are being informed about something different, that we worship a different God from the gods of the culture, then we have lost the point of what we are there for.

Most of all, worship is where we are distinctively Christian over against the world. Our worship will not make sense to the world, and cannot be justified in terms of what the world values because Christianity is a challenge to the world. We cannot justify ourselves to the world and to try to do so is a mistake. It will lead us into the wrong path. We are called to obey primarily Christ's commands to us. The claim is not that Christianity “makes sense”, the claim is that Christianity is true: that God really is the one that is revealed in Jesus, that in Jesus God shows us who He is and who we are called to be. We claim that this is the truth, and we live by that truth. We allow that truth to shape us, to control our choices: therefore we live differently, as salt and light in the world.

What then is at the centre of the on-going worshipping life of the Christian community. The Church Fathers commonly used an expression: the Eucharist makes the Church. What is the Eucharist? The word refers to the giving thanks of the community. 'Eucharist' is a Greek word meaning thanksgiving. The name given to the meal is freighted with all sorts of church politics, whether it is called it the Lord’s Supper, or the Mass or Holy Communion – what is being described is the act of breaking bread and wine and sharing it as the community of the faithful telling the story of Jesus. That is what we are talking about. It is when we share this meal and take part in this process that we start to understand what our faith is all about. Doing this is what teaches us our faith and forms us in our discipleship. The earliest description we have comes in 1 Corinthians 11 and Paul says:

'For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.'

This is the heart of what a priest says every time there is communion. In some churches it is exactly St Paul’s passage which is used, in some churches it is slightly rephrased, but that is the earliest text we have referring to it. We do not know exactly which year it was when Jesus died, but it is not unreasonable to think it being from early to mid-30s AD and that Paul’s letter is early to mid-50s AD, some 20 years after the event. In other words, this was written down within living memory of the events being described. Moreover, Paul is referring to something which is already going on, which means that the Eucharist, as an ongoing practice within the church community, was established before Paul is writing his letters. We can therefore have great confidence that the heart of the Eucharist goes back to Christ himself, and that it is not something invented out of whole cloth by the later church.

What did Jesus mean by it? What was going on when Jesus initiated this feast? The background traditions that Jesus is drawing on as He shares this supper are primarily two: the temple ritual from the Day of Atonement, discussed earlier in Chapter Four, and Passover.

Passover is described in the story of Exodus, when the Hebrews were taken out of the land of slavery – the ten plagues, Pharaoh refusing to let his people go, and the people of Egypt suffering. In the end was the slaughter of the first-born: God says to Moses, “Tell the people of Israel to slaughter a lamb without a spot or blemish and to daub the blood of the lamb on the lintels and mantels of the doors of their house.” Then, when the Angel of Death comes, who is going to kill all the first-born in the area, the Angel of Death will pass over those houses which have been daubed with the blood of the lamb, so those who have identified themselves by this marker, become exempt from the death which is coming. That is the core symbolism of Passover: the lamb is slaughtered and those who identify by the blood of the lamb do not then share in the death.

There are other aspects to this feast: it is meant to be eaten standing up, the meat is meant to be roasted, it is meant to be done with bitter herbs, it is meant to be done in haste because it happened to the people just before they were about to escape. This story of Exodus, of the people being led out of slavery into freedom into the Promised Land, captures the moment of God’s activity, when God acts to redeem the people. Passover, even now in the Hebrew faith, is crucial; this is very much the marker for the community.

For our purposes an important element is that this meal begins as the literal marker so the Angel of Death passes by, but it is maintained and renewed by the community over time. When the Hebrews come together for their Passover, it is one of the principal ways in which their community is maintained as they keep telling the story. It is a memorial of the salvation and also an expression of identity with those who are saved. In other words, it is not just past tense. It is not simply, “We are the people and God acted a long time ago,” it is a re-enactment: “we are the people today whom God is redeeming”. It is a present tense process, not just telling and remembering a good story. When Scripture describes how to celebrate the Passover there is a role for the youngest child who can speak in the service, and the youngest child says, “Why is this night different from any other night?” The answer is “This is the night when we were freed”. The child then asks, “what is the meaning of this service?” The answer is, “It is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord.” Not, this was the Passover, it is the Passover.

So Jesus, drawing on the language of the Atonement ritual in the Temple, and on the imagery and meaning of the Passover ritual, establishes a new pattern of behaviour which His disciples are to repeat in order to remember Him, celebrate Him, and make Him present. This is a celebration. As St Paul writes, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us, so let us celebrate the feast.”