Understanding Our Faith

Blessing and Giving Thanks

After Jesus took the bread and then the cup, he said the blessing. Now this prayer of blessing was a very particular prayer in which God was thanked and praised for what he has brought about among human beings. It was particularly significant in the passover meal which Jesus changed to become the meal which was to be celebrated in memory of him.

So, as we celebrate the Eucharist, the priest prays the Eucharistic Prayer which has its origins in the blessing prayers of Jewish sacred meals, among which was the prayer used by the Lord Jesus at the Last Supper.

So, the bread and wine which we have brought to the altar and which the priest has ‘taken’ in imitation of Jesus taking bread and wine at the Last Supper, now have the Eucharistic Prayer prayed over them. At the centre of that prayer are those words which Jesus said over the bread and wine at the Last Supper.

And those words: this is my body given for you, this is the cup of my blood shed for you, related what Jesus was doing at the Last Supper to his death the next day on the cross and the resurrection which comes out of that death. This bread and wine become the means by which Jesus gives to us the life he comes into through his death. He draws us into his passover through death into the life of the resurrection. We begin to passover into that new life.

St John Chrysostom puts it this way: just as when God said to human beings ‘Increase and multiply’ and every time a child is born these words are actuated and have their effect, so every time the words of Jesus over the bread and wine are said again in the Mass, they are actuated and have their effect. And so, we receive the gift of himself as he gives himself to us and for us mas he did on the cross.

It is wonderful that it is the bread and wine which have been brought to the altar as symbolic of ourselves – as we saw last week in this column – now have the words of Jesus said over them. Our presented bread and wine are taken up to become the means by which we receive the life Jesus has gained for us. We enter into the death and resurrection of Jesus by means of this bread which is authentic bread. Again, we saw last week that the bread and wine. That bread which we have presented becomes the Eucharist; it becomes authentic bread, as St John says in chapter six of his gospel, because it has the capacity to give us life which ordinary bread cannot give. It is bread which gives life over which death has no power.

The Lord Jesus takes our bread and our wine and transforms them so that they become the means by which he gives us his new life and draws us into his relationship to the Father.

By:  Fr Frank O’Loughlin