Bread and Wine

It is no accident that we celebrate the Eucharist in bread and wine.  The Eucharist takes them over from Jewish religious meals but in both cases there are reasons for their use which are tied into their very nature as human food.

Bread is a staple food.  Bread is often used as a way of speaking about all food such as when we say “we earn our bread by the sweat of our brow”.  It was even more important in ancient times than it is now, as for many people it was the food that kept them alive day by day.  It formed the bulk of their diet.

And bread was already seen as having a certain sacredness in the Old Testament because it was God’s means of giving us life.  God the life-giver did his life-giving in and through bread.  And so it was important in the religious meals of the Old Testament.

So bread was seen as that which enabled people to keep living.  It gives life; without it people die.  This was a much more realistic and acute perception for people who had to struggle to get food to keep alive; it is not so acute for us who live in abundance.

What we use in the Eucharist already has a deep significance before it is taken up into the Eucharist.  Bread’s nature as giver of life is significant because it is used in the Eucharist to convey to us the ultimate bread of life – Jesus in his death and resurrection.  Jesus giving us life in the bread of the Eucharist is, St John tells us in chapter six of his gospel, authentic bread.  It feeds into us not just this passing life as does ordinary bread, but It is the bread of everlasting life.  So the fact that we celebrate the Eucharist in bread is in itself directing us into the meaning of the Eucharist.  

In bread Jesus takes something from our human world and takes it up into the Last Supper.  He draws together his death and bread in saying over bread “This is my body given for you” to indicate that his death is the source of new and greater life for us as bread is a source of our present life.

Next week we will have something to say about wine and the Eucharist.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin