Sarx

We continue with the serialised posting of Rick Fabian’s Worship at St Gregory’s, with the permission of the author and the publisher.

Editor’s Note: In the print version of Worship at St Gregory’s, the following text appears between the passages discussing the Preface and the Great Thanksgiving. I Have moved it forward one step, as it were, so that the theology of the act is presented here, before the discussion of the liturgical action begins. For the reader, Fabian’s discussion of our evolving understanding of Jesus’ life and death may be present strong challenges to deeply-held assumptions about Christianity, but it is important to know the ideas from which the actions flow. I find it interesting that, in this theory, it is our pagan ideas of sacrifice, outside of Jesus’ Jewish context, that have influenced our understanding Jesus’ actions.

We normally speak of Sacrifice as an exchange, whereby we give up something we have and value, to get something we value more — as a baseball player does, for example, in a “sacrifice play.” In such a play, a batter aims the ball to the nearest waiting opponent, ensuring that the batter will be put “out,” while his better-placed teammates have extra time to score runs. The batter forfeits his own chance to score, and his career record suffers; but his team wins. (Our diocese sponsors annual excursions to professional baseball games where worshippers can reflect on this noble pagan spectacle, and aid the Episcopal Charities Drive with part of their ticket money.) That is the classical pagan sense of sacrifice, expressed in the Roman maxim do ut des: “I give to you [god], so that you will give to me.”

Pagan Assumptions The Hellenistic world which received the gospel of Jesus’ sacrificial death assumed that was what it meant: Jesus gave up his life, destroying himself on the Cross, in order to get something from God; and in the eucharistic meal, which Christians call a sacrifice, they offer him to God again and again, getting more and more of what he died for. This interpretation has dominated debates about the eucharist ever since, as medieval western clergy multiplied their celebrations to fill the world with Christ’s winnings, as disgusted Reformers purged all such “superstitious” behavior — and all sacrificial language too — and as modern apologists struggle to make acceptable sense of our tradition for an era that finds blood sacrifice hideous and cruel. (The same interpretation lends western literature a neurotic focus on Christian suffering and self-immolation.)

Apologies by Jungmann and others may soften some of the worst implications; but in fact they miss the mark when explaining the New Testament picture of Jesus’ sacrificial death, and even the sacrificial eucharistic meal, because the Old Testament thought underlying these differs radically from pagan logic. I am indebted here to R. Dentan, Lectures in Old Testament Theology (1970). Research progresses everywhere, multiplying exponentially, so that no scholar can keep abreast of it all. Modern liturgical revision began in close concert with modern scriptural criticism, but must struggle to stay in touch with recent developments in Old Testament and even New Testament research. Some of these developments now undermine assumptions by mainline liturgical reformers. At the scholarly conferences for liturgists which have contributed much to this pamphlet, discussion of these challenges is long overdue.

Jewish Sacrifice The earliest Hebrew offerings were cereal offerings, basically feasts which happy harvesters shared with the God who had blessed them.(*) Only one offering, the Sin Offering, worked otherwise. This animal sacrifice, rare in the confident Davidic kingdom, grew dominant after deportations had gutted that kingdom and left Judah a subject state. Because its ritual imitates the ancient Thank Offering or “Sacrifice of Praise (tôdah),” differing only in the disposition of the sacrificial remains, some infer that the Sin Offering (chattath) may even have originated after the exile. In any case this standardized ritual helped standardize sacrificial thinking, with the Sin Offering as the new model.

Priests now added the Sin Offering to each cereal offering and to many other rites, hoping to cover the sins that had caused the exile and that still blocked a return to Davidic glory. By Jesus’ time the Jerusalem temple had become a slaughterhouse, piling on Sin Offerings three times a day — a timetable which synchronized worship in many town synagogues as well, so that everyone had it in mind. (*) P. Bradshaw, witing in Daily Prayer in the Early Church, (1981), establishes that not all synagogues operated the same way. Nevertheless, caricatures of pharisees in Matthew’s gospel show that synchronicity with the sacrificial schedule was a widely recognized standard of piety, and possibly the dominant standard. Here is the sacrifice and the thinking that underpin New Testament talk of Jesus’ death, and especially talk of the eucharistic bread and wine as his body and blood.

In the eyes of Old Testament writers (Psalms 50, 104, 146) all life belongs forever to God, who created it and can never lose it. Humans and other animals enjoy filling up with life (or breath) for a while; then when they die it flows back to God like water (or blood) running back into a sea, leaving the once lively creature empty and weak (that is, dead). A sinner cut off from God, and so from the sea of life that filled her at birth, can only lose that life and die. But God mercifully offers a way out: if the sinner will bring a ram to the temple, and instead of killing it to eat it, kill it prayerfully and leave it for the priests to eat, God will not take that ram’s life back, but will give it to the sinner as a sort of life-transplant. (The sinner does not exactly receive the ram’s life, because there is no such thing; there is only life, some of which was in the sinner, and some in the ram, until both lost what life they had.)

This transaction is the opposite of the pagan do ut des.

Post-exilic Thank Offering texts indeed promise a reward: do this and you will dwell long in the land your God is giving you, and prosper there. (Deuteronomy 28, etc.) Like the ascendant chattath Sin Offering, these texts reflect the pain of exile, and the desire not to repeat it. But remarkably enough, the thank offerers are not told to give up something of their own; instead, they are to feast on the food they have brought to the temple, and bless God who has so blessed their fields, their flocks and their table. (Deuteronomy 26, etc.) This is hardly do ut des!

That the Sin Offering is nowhere explained as a payment in kind for restoring God’s favor, is even more remarkable. By comparison, ancient Greek and Indian religion abounded in such transactions. In this transaction God gains and loses nothing, because God already has everything (Psalm 50), and the sinner has already lost all she has, and has nothing left to give God. As for the ram, it would be killed and eaten in any case. All that happens differently, as the Psalmists see it, is that the sinner gets new life for free. Thus in Old Testament thought, “sacrificial” means “life-giving,” not “self-destroying.” (Only sin is self-destroying.)

Two Models or Three Stages? Recent Jewish scholarship has resolved a half century’s debate over the ritual context of this meal. Because the Gospels fix Jesus’ death at Passover time, many have assumed that his Last Supper was a Passover meal, or Seder. Yet the Christian eucharist shows no trace of Seder ritual before the ninth century, when Alcuin and others “restored” (in fact, introduced) such Passover elements as unleavened bread, which they assumed had got lost.

In The Shape of the Liturgy (1945) Dom Gregory Dix argued that the Last Supper could not have been a Seder, since Jesus died before Passover; instead, the eucharist derived from the Chabûrah, or Feast of Friends, which rabbis kept regularly with their close disciples. C. Kucharek’s The Byzantine-Slav Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, (1971) and L. Mitchell’s The Meaning of Ritual, (1977) match Chabûrah procedure with the early Christian liturgy described in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, or Didachê.

Yet Dix’s argument drew opposition, notably from J. Jeremias in his The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (1966) who conjectured a different Palestinian calendar for Passover; and indeed Jewish scholars have established that Passover calendars varied then. Moreover, our sources for Jewish Chabûrah ritual date from Christian times, and likely reflect Christian influence.

Now Jewish research shows that these models are not alternatives, but only chronological stages in the history of the same meal. This was no Jewish ritual at all, but rather the Hellenistic Symposium: originally a banquet eaten without alcohol, followed by a drinking bout with philosophical discussion. Among Jews and Christians it evolved as the formal discussion gradually invaded the dinner, and focussed on the symbolic meaning of the foods eaten. The Last Supper story portrays an early stage in this evolution; the Didachê and Chabûrah, intermediate stages; and the modern Seder, the final term. J. Tabory’s Towards a history of the paschal meal (NAAL paper 1998), cites many publications from 1907 to the present in this regard. A companion paper The Last Supper and the anti-chavurah meal by A. Rosenberg shows early Chabûrah rules required exclusive purity — but of the diners, not of the ceremony or the food, where rabbinical legislation focussed later.

Which came first? The same research resolves another debate about the chief blessing prayer used, from which our Great Thanksgiving prayer descends. Though Paul refers to “the cup after supper,” and the prayer appears at the end of the meal in Jewish documents, this was not a final cup of blessing, but rather the first blessing of wine for the discussion, which originally followed a meal where no wine had yet been drunk. When the discussion entered the meal itself, the cup and cup blessing moved too.

Such a continuum makes it all the harder to say precisely what happened at Jesus’ Last Supper itself. The gospel accounts depend on Paul’s earlier account in 1 Corinthians 11, of what Christians told him at Antioch; yet Paul’s informants there presumably describing the evolved ritual by which they themselves remembered Jesus. The relation of their rite to Jesus’ own is tantalizing but indefinable.

The Last Supper story appears first in 1 Corinthians 11, and is later repeated in the synoptic passions. New Testament critics point out that Paul describes the story as hearsay, and that it may represent the Antiochene Christians’ own meal customs, and their sacrificial understanding of these, rather than a historical quotation from Jesus himself. For our purpose here, however, the scriptural writers’ thought is precisely the issue.

The contemporary Jewish meaning of the language, “this is my body….this is my blood….shed for many,” has lately been debated; but scholars agree that Jews who heard it would have understood it as sacrificial talk.

Hence Jesus’ words in the Last Supper story say nothing about self-destruction on the Cross. Instead, they promise life.

The Prophetic Sign By welcoming unready sinners to his table as a prophetic sign of God’s reign, Jesus had long outraged contemporary standards and courted death. Now, knowing death was near, he ate the hallowed rabbinical Feast of Friends (Chabûrah) with his disciples again and told them that this —his deadly dining with them—would now become life-giving, because God would make his death a sacrifice, benefitting humankind. On account of Jesus’ faithfulness in teaching the truth by word and deed, God would not take Jesus’ life back into the sea of life, but would give it to the world. “Take; eat: this is my body; do this in memory of me. Drink this, all of you: this is my blood, shed for all, and the result will be that the sins of all will be forgiven; do this in memory of me.”

When Jesus’ followers met to eat the Chabûrah in his memory, they encountered him alive (most gospel resurrection stories are mealtime scenes) and they knew God had indeed given Jesus’ life to them — to sinners whom Jesus had welcomed to his table, to companions who had abandoned him when he died. Whereas other Jews orientated their synagogues toward the Jerusalem temple, where sacrifices were offered daily, and all hoped the messiah would one day appear, these now focussed their buildings on a dinner table. Jesus’ table, not the temple, had turned out to be the true place of sacrifice, the place where God gave new life to the world.