The second set of reflections I've been ruminating on have to do with the Eucharist (that is, communion). If I had to look back and say which experiences most captivated me and produced the most profound spiritual effects in my interior life during the trip, they were all centered on the Eucharist. While I attended nearly as many church services as it is possible to attend while in England (many churches, following a pattern set down in the English Reformation, hold twice-daily prayer services and offer communion several times a week), three such experiences stood out to me: a communion service in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral at the end of my walking journey across Kent, another at the high altar of Lichfield Cathedral on the Feast of the Transfiguration, and a third in the nave of Southwark Cathedral on my final day in England. In each case, the moments of consecration and reception in the communion liturgy struck me with raw and unexpected emotional power, in a way that has stuck with me over the succeeding weeks.
My own Baptist tradition celebrates communion on a monthly basis (which is itself a far more frequent schedule than some earlier Baptist groups would have offered), but I'm also connected with a few groups that make it the central feature of the church's weekly worship. The latter position, in my opinion, tends to accord best with the earliest practice of the Christian church, as witnessed in both the New Testament and the apostolic fathers. Most of the churches which now hold a weekly Eucharist tend to hew to a high-church, sacramental position, while those that offer communion more infrequently generally hold a low-church, symbolic view of the rite. And while many of the debates between these two wings of the church rotate around the question of whether communion represents the real presence of Christ (and if so, in what way), I'd like to draw attention to a different feature of the early Christian practice with regard to the Eucharist.
One of the curious features of the earliest post-NT accounts of communion liturgies is that none of them put significant stress on the institution narrative or the question of body/blood relative to the presence of Christ. That is, none of the mentions of Eucharistic celebrations from the late first, second, or early third centuries delves deep into the words of Christ at his Last Supper with his disciples, beyond the observation that he commanded this ritual. This is something of a surprise, since nearly all modern liturgies place their greatest attention on this aspect, and the interconnectedness of Communion and the Last Supper is clearly visible in both the gospels and the letters of Paul. So why the strange absence of a historical reference to Jesus's passion?
As I was looking over the earliest sources at the patristics conference, something struck me. When the Didache and Justin Martyr and Irenaeus speak about communion--all while strangely omitting the sort of body/blood reflections on the Last Supper which we would have expected--they all nevertheless do have a shared theme in common. Each of them connects the celebration of communion with the idea of creation, and often with a secondary connection to the idea of the New Covenant. The idea being presented, then, is this: that just as the Old Testament covenants with Noah and Moses were oriented around the presentation of sacrifices that represented the gift of created things being offered back to God, so the New Testament covenant is oriented around these symbols of New Creation: bread and wine, drawn from the stuff of creation but mystically representing the body and blood of Christ, who is himself the first instantiation of the New Creation. To eat the offerings of the Old Covenant (as was part of the ritual practice) was to gratefully accept the goodness of God's creation as our sustenance. Now, however, as human beings who have entered the New Creation through Christ's death and resurrection, we must be fed and sustained by the stuff of the New Creation--Christ himself. Since we belong to a new and different world, our spiritual sustenance comes from that world, from the work of God in New Creation, offered to us through Christ our Lord. As Irenaeus puts it, communion is "the new oblation of the new covenant" and "the means of subsistence, the first-fruits of his own gifts" (Adv. Haer. 4.17.5). This perspective undergirds the early Christian sensibility about the necessity of communion as a continuing part of Christian worship: we offer back to God the goodness of what he has given to us in a pure sacrifice (Mal. 1:11), and we then receive it as our food, the food of the New Covenant and the New Creation. Since Jesus himself is the first-fruits of that New Creation in a way that nothing else in creation is, it necessarily must be a representation of his own flesh which we consume. His body is so far the only physical element of the New Creation which has sprung forth into the world, and so if we are to offer and eat the fruits of New Creation (just like the old sacrifices offered the fruits of created things), it must be his body which is offered in the rite. We are being re-made as creatures of the New Creation, looking forward to the eschatological fulfillment of all things, and so we eat the bread of the New Creation in expectation of the fullness that is to come.
I'm not sure this particular perspective in early Eucharistic theology has really been properly considered by contemporary scholars, so it's something I'm continuing to think about. It may have further ramifications for our life in Christ, or it may not, but at the very least, it's certainly a point of interest. To receive communion is to take part in an eschatological sacrifice, a foretaste of the New Creation that is to come, and the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. And that is something worth reflecting on.