Of Wormholes and Memorials

In a post-Liturgy Q & A held by a wonderful and learned priest, Fr. Justin Hewlett, someone present (a Baptist, if memory serves) asked a question about the Eucharist.  He had been reading some anti-Catholic literature which had denounced the supposedly Catholic teaching that Christ was re-sacrificed at every Mass and he wondered, since the Orthodox use the same kind of sacrificial language about the Eucharist that the Catholics do, if we also believe that Christ is re-sacrificed at every Divine Liturgy.  He pointed out that Bible texts like Hebrews 9:25-28 make the notion of Christ being re-sacrificed every week untenable.

       The controversy is an old one, going back to the Reformation.  The question is made all the sharper by the fact that the Church has always used sacrificial language to describe the Eucharist, as early as St. Paul.  

In his first letter to the Corinthians he wrote to dissuade them from eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols, saying that they should not “partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons” (i.e. of the pagan gods to whom sacrifice was made).  The word rendered “table” is the Greek τράπεζα/ trapeza, here referring to an altar.  Note: the same word (“altar”) is used to describe the sacrifices of the pagans to their gods and the Eucharist of the Christians.  Indeed, Paul explicitly compares the union with Christ brought about by the Eucharist to the union with Yahweh brought about by the Jewish sacrifices.  In both cases one is a “partner of the altar”.  (The whole discussion is in 1 Corinthians 10:14f.)

In the Didache, a church handbook of sorts dating to about 100 A.D., the Eucharist is described in chapter 14 as “your sacrifice” (Greek thusia) and as the fulfillment of the prophecy in Malachi 1:11- 14 which speaks of a “pure sacrifice” (Greek thusia) offered “among the nations”. 

Also, St. Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians in about 96 A.D. to rebuke the unjust deposition of their presbyters, also uses sacrificial language. Presbyters were those who “offered the gifts” (1 Clement 44:4) and Clement said that to fire them without cause as the Corinthians did was “no small sin”.  Note again: in the Eucharist the celebrants “offered the gifts” just as the priests in the Jewish Temple offered sacrificial gifts to God.

Furthermore, St. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch who was martyred in about 107 A.D., also spoke of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. In his Letter to the Ephesians (5.2) he warned against heretics and schismatics, reminding his hearers that “if anyone is not within the sanctuary, he lacks the bread of God, “the sanctuary” being a reference to the Temple and the Church, the place of sacrifice.  The Church was a sanctuary, because in it the sacrifice of the Eucharist was offered.

In his Letter to the Philadelphians, Ignatius exhorted them, “Take care to participate in one Eucharist, for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup that leads to unity through His Blood; there is one altar, just as there is one bishop” (4.1).  The reference to an altar reveals that he understood the Eucharist to be a sacrifice.

So, we ask, given all these apostolic and early references to the Eucharist as a sacrifice, how are we to understand the teaching of the Letter to the Hebrews which spoke of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross as unique and unrepeatable?

At the time of the Reformation, there were two options, two ways of understanding the Eucharist:  as mental recollection and as repeated immolation/ sacrifice, corresponding roughly to the Protestant view and the (supposed) Catholic one.  The Protestants, taking their stand on the teaching of Hebrews 9:25-28, denied that Christ was re-sacrificed in the Eucharist and so they taught that the Eucharist was simply a liturgical and mental recollection of His one unrepeatable sacrifice on Calvary.  Protestants differed in their understandings of whether or not the true Body and Blood of Christ were present under the forms of bread and wine, but all agreed that the Eucharist was not a true sacrifice. The sacrifice of the cross was present in the Eucharist only in the human memory of those receiving the bread and wine.  As Dix said in his The Shape of the Liturgy, for the Reformers “since the Passion is wholly in the past, the church now can only enter into it purely mentally, by remembering and imagining it. There is for them, therefore, no real sacrifice whatever in the Eucharist.”  In this debate the Reformers minimized the teaching of the Fathers as the debate grew louder and even at times violent. 

We ask again: how do Orthodox understand the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist?  How can the sacrifice on the cross that occurred in the first century be present on our altars today?

The learned priest mentioned in the first paragraph had a brilliant image to explain how something could be present both in the first century and also in our worship today: that of wormholes.  For those not conversant with science-fiction and fantasy literature, a wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel through spacetime that connects two distant points, acting as a kind of shortcut through space— or through time. The Eucharistic prayer functions as a wormhole.

A Bible-loving Baptist may want to ask, “Where in the Good Book does it say anything about wormholes?”  The answer: Numbers 10:1f.

In that passage God commanded Moses to make two silver trumpets.  These were to be blown when the camp was to gather and to set out.  They were also to be blown “when you go to war in your land against the adversary who attacks you, that you may be remembered before Yahweh your God and be saved from your enemies” (Numbers 10:9).  They were also to be blown over their sacrifices “and they shall be as a memorial of you before your God” (verse 10).  The Hebrew for “remember” and “memorial” is zakar and its cognate zikaron.

Here the act of “remembering” and of making a “memorial” refers to doing something so that God may remember you— for when God remembers, He always takes action.  When He remembered Israel when they made a memorial by blowing the trumpets in a time of war, He took action by saving them from their enemies.

We see this concept of remembrance working negatively in 1 Kings 17:18. Elijah had come to stay with a woman who had given him shelter.  When her young son suddenly died, she rounded on him and demanded, “Have you come to bring my iniquity to remembrance [Hebrew zakar] and slay my son?”  When God remembers iniquity, He does not simply recall it in His head, but takes action and brings judgment.  Remembrance always involves action.  (In this case, however, her son’s death was not the result of God remembering her iniquity.)

We see the concept of remembering/ memorial in Isaiah 62:6-7: God is asked to remember Zion.  That is, He is not asked simply to recollect what a nice town Zion was but to take action to save and restore her.

This understanding of remembrance is also found in the New Testament.  In Acts 10:4 Cornelius was told by an angel that his prayers and alms have ascended “as a memorial [Greek εἰς μνηόσυνον/ eis mneosunon] before God”— i.e. it functioned as would a memorial offering.  The meaning is same as the Greek ἀνάμνησις/ anamnesis, the word used in the Septuagint of Leviticus 24:7 where it described a memorial portion of the Shewbread.  Here in Acts 10:4 the angel told Cornelius that his acts of piety functioned the same way as a memorial offering would have functioned, so that God has now remembered him and was sending Peter to him with a divine message.  Once again, a memorial (Hebrew zakar, zikaron; Greek mneosunon, anamnesis) refers to something done so that God may remember and take action.

This is what our Lord established at the Last Supper:  eating bread and drinking wine at the gathering of His people served as an anamnesis of Him and His sacrifice.  In Luke 22:19 He says that His disciples should do this εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν/ eis ten emen anamnesin— “for My memorial” (see Jeremias’ The Eucharistic Words of Jesus for the scholarly details).  It was this action that would cause God to remember Him and His sacrifice and bring it into their midst— not by way of repetition of the sacrifice, but through anamnesis.  That was why the bread and wine which they consumed were also His Body and Blood.

The sacrifice of the Cross is therefore present in our Eucharists not simply as an act of mental remembrance or recollection, much less as a repetition or fresh sacrifice but through anamnesis, through making the commanded memorial, a sacramental wormhole connecting past to present through which the one and unrepeatable Sacrifice is once again present on our altars.  Though it doesn’t use the term “wormhole”, that is what the Good Book says.