The Lord of Spirits

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick: Good evening, giant-killers, demon-banes, and gigantomachs! You are listening to The Lord of Spirits podcast. My co-host, Fr. Stephen De Young, is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I am Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. This is a pre-recorded episode, so we’re not going to be taking any live calls for this one, but we do have some voicemails from you that we’re going to be including.

Fr. Stephen De Young: Well, now, if someone does, through some kind of clairvoyant connection, realize that we’re recording it, and call the studio right now, as we’re recording…

Fr. Andrew: I don’t know what would happen.

Fr. Stephen: …and someone is there to pick it up, there is a chance… So I’m just going to put this vibe out into the universe…

Fr. Andrew: So you’re saying there’s a chance!

Fr. Stephen: You could make a live call right now and be the only one, if you somehow become aware of what I’m saying.

Fr. Andrew: Should we— How long should we wait on that?

Fr. Stephen: Oh, not wait, just as we’re going, if it happens.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] All right! So, yeah, well, here in the United States, it’s Thanksgiving, or, as the late Archbichop of our Archdiocese, Metropolitan Philip, is said to have called it: “the only American holiday they haven’t ruined yet.” So if you are one of our American listeners, I hope that it’s truly a day of thanks for you and yours.

Fr. Stephen: The Detroit Lions ruin it every year by losing.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m sorry about your sports teams.

Fr. Stephen: Shots fired, eastern Michigan! Eastern Michiganders, shots fired.

Fr. Andrew: I wouldn’t have taken you for a sportsball fan, but I learn new things about you every day.

Fr. Stephen: Well, how can you be a fan of the Detroit Lions is what I’m saying.

Fr. Andrew: I…

Fr. Stephen: Anyway, go ahead.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] As many of you listeners probably know, the word “eucharist,” which is from the Greek efcharistia, means thanksgiving. And you can still hear it in the modern Greek efcharisto, which simply means “thank you.” That’s how they say thank you. It’s the Eucharist we’re discussing on this Thanksgiving episode of Lord of Spirits.

This is the second installment in our series on the holy Mysteries of the Orthodox Church. Next to baptism, no sacrament of Christianity is probably more debated than the Eucharist. But what are its ancient roots, as witnessed to in the holy Scriptures? Why is it so important for most Christians? Is it a sacrifice or a meal? How does it relate to the Jewish Passover seder? So this is some of what we’re going to be discussing.

So my first question for you, Fr. Stephen, is this: Isn’t it all just a symbol?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: No. [Laughter] I mean, you could have also said yes.

Fr. Stephen: Well, every time someone says the phrase, “just a symbol,” I think Pageau, wherever he is, gets triggered.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, I was trying to work that into an “angel gains its wings” thing, but it wasn’t working; that joke wasn’t working out for me.

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s just the opposite: somewhere he just snapped a pencil in half, because he sensed that someone had gone that way.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] He just knew. Okay, well, if it’s not just a symbol, then where do we begin? Where do we begin?

Fr. Stephen: Well, as usual, we go way back in time.

Fr. Andrew: Is this a Çatalhöyük moment, or…?

Fr. Stephen: Well, not that far back.

Fr. Andrew: Oh, okay, okay.

Fr. Stephen: We don’t always go that far back, but eventually we’ll get to actually talking about the Eucharist. So we have to start with sacrifice and priesthood as such.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, because these things have something to do with each other.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and we’re not going to go all the way back, because we already did an episode on priesthood as such. So we’re not going all the way back to Adam, as we did in that episode; we’re just going to talk here about the beginnings of the Christian priesthood. And I know to some of our listeners—we know whom we’re talking about—the idea of a Christian priesthood is not an idea that they like. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’ve got— There’s the notion that priesthood is an Old Testament thing, and now we don’t have that any more.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So what does it mean to talk about a Christian priesthood? Are we just saying that the priests you find in Orthodox churches today are just sort of a direct continuation of the priesthood of the tabernacle and the Jerusalem Temple, for example?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, Aaron and all of them.

Fr. Stephen: The Levitic priesthood, the Aaronic priesthood. Answer: no. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: No.

Fr. Stephen: And in parallel to what we talked about last time when we talked about baptism and the relationship between circumcision and baptism, it’s also not just this sort of simple thing, like: “Well, there was that old priesthood, and now there’s this new priesthood that replaced it.”

Fr. Andrew: Yes, there’s continuities and discontinuities, as you are wont to say.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. [Laughter] So there’s a more complicated relationship there, and that relationship is actually very much parallel to what we said last time, but we will further elaborate on that. But the place that we have to start is that, again, the Christian priesthood, the priesthood of the Christian Church is not the Levitical priesthood. They are not the same thing; these are two different things. But in a similar way to the way that we talked about last time that St. Paul saw Gentile Christians as receiving the benefits of Christ’s circumcision through baptism, we understand the Christian priesthood—this is based on Hebrews in particular—as being a participation in Christ’s priesthood, so the Christian priesthood is really Christ’s priesthood, which is participated in by human people who play a certain role within the Christian community.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so there’s not this sense that individual people have their own priesthood, that they are priests in themselves. Christ is the priest.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And this is reflected in a lot of little ways, actually, in Orthodox practice. To give you one very everyday example, that priests are all intimately familiar with but maybe other folks haven’t noticed: when the bishop is around, is around your parish, the priest doesn’t use his hand to bless anything.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because he’s just the stand-in.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right, but it’s not just because he’s just the stand-in. It’s not just because of that; it’s not just because the bishop outranks him. It’s because the blessing is Christ’s blessing.

Fr. Andrew: Right, so it’s already available through the bishop.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s one blessing, and since it’s Christ’s blessing, the highest ranking clergyman gives Christ’s blessing. But there’s no need, for example, for—even though I’ve seen some people do this—go around and get five different blessings from five different priests who are standing around in a room.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and which is kind of an informal thing to do, but if you think, for instance, in actual divine services, while you might, for instance, as some Russian liturgical practices want to do, send out a couple of deacons, both with censers, to do that synchronized censing thing, there is not synchronized blessings given. Like, you don’t have a couple of priests or a couple of bishops all stand out there and say, “Peace be to all,” with their hands moving at the same time. That’s not a thing. It’s just one.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and in the Orthodox Church the hand position is actually based on a weird anagram, if you do it properly, which I can’t, because I have Nintendo thumb. [Laughter] But it’s actually based on Christ’s name, to emphasize that it’s Christ’s blessing. This is what’s going on with the cuffs in Orthodox vestments. We’re going to talk about vestments more when we get to the ordination episode in this series on sacraments. But the cuffs sort of isolating your hands because they’re not the priest’s hand while he’s serving. So this is indicated in these sort of practical ways.

Before we get to our participation in Christ’s priesthood, we need to talk a little more about what Christ’s priesthood is, because we’re talking about Christ’s priesthood, but Jesus of Nazareth was not a priest on this earth in the sense of being part of the Levitical priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you don’t see him going into the Temple and putting sacrifices on the altar and doing those things.

Fr. Stephen: Right. [Laughter] So he was not— He had not a lot to do with the Sadducees, in fact.

Fr. Andrew: Huh.

Fr. Stephen: At least not positive interactions.

Fr. Andrew: Right. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So he was not a priest in that sense. So with priesthood, every priesthood is constructed around a sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s a priest is, is someone who offers a sacrifice.

Fr. Stephen: For example, in the episode where we talked about priesthood and we talked about, for example, the priesthood being taken away from the elders of the people and being given to the Levites after the golden calf, what was taken away and given to the Levites was the authority to offer sacrifices. As we said then, I think we have this very modern view that the priests of the Old Testament were, like, leading worship. [Laughter] Which of course is not the case, because they were in the tabernacle offering incense. The people didn’t go in there.

Fr. Andrew: You mean they’re not standing up there with a worship team and saying, “Okay, everybody, sing!”?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] They were not invited into the inside of the tabernacle where they had a service every week. Not how that worked. The job of the priest, the thing that the priest is designated for is to be the one who makes these sacrifices and offers these offerings. What makes the high priest the high priest is not just that he’s, like, the boss of everybody, it’s that he is responsible for fulfilling the particular role in the holy of holies on the Day of Atonement. So it’s [that] they’re designated for this task, and this task revolves around the offering of a sacrifice.

If we’re going to talk about Christ’s priesthood and we want to understand it, what we have to do is identify: what is the sacrifice that Christ offers. Simply put, it’s himself.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, he’s not putting anything else on the altar.

Fr. Stephen: His priesthood is about his voluntary self-offering.

Fr. Andrew: Which, that’s a new thing. You don’t get that in the old covenant.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you sort of do.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, not in the sense of you get priests putting themselves or… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, not literally. You don’t have priests setting themselves on fire as a burnt-offering. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: I don’t think there’s even, within that Levitical priesthood… I don’t recall any language in the Old Testament talking about those priests as offering themselves, even in a kind of analogous, metaphorical way.

Fr. Stephen: No… There’s offering themselves as servants—you can get to that—but not in a sacrificial self-offering sense, for a priest. Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: But there’s something else!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, so he’s not… He’s not a priest in terms of… like, the functional act of butchering an animal, but he is a priest in making the offering; the offering is himself. So he’s the one who offers, the one who is offered, at the same time. I did not make that up. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that is almost an actual quote directly from the Divine Liturgy.

Fr. Stephen: But we find this not just liturgically but this, for example, is one of the major themes of St. John’s gospel, that sort of nobody can kill Jesus. People keep trying to kill Jesus, but he just slips away, he walks through the crowd, and sometimes it just literally says that it wasn’t his time yet, so they couldn’t. And Christ himself says eventually, “No one takes my life from me. I lay it down, and I can take it up again.” St. John is really emphasizing this sacrificial element and that it’s a voluntary self-offering, that he’s not an innocent victim but that he is offering himself actively.

As I alluded to, while there isn’t precedent for a priest offering himself, there is precedent, once we get into the Second Temple period of, when you come to Jewish martyrs—which is a thing. I think a lot of people associate martyrdom being this Christian phenomenon that starts with Christianity. It’s not. There were Jewish martyrs before that. When you get to that phase, you start seeing the beginning of this idea. We talked last time about how, from a Christian perspective, the things that we have in the old covenant are part of how that—part of that—part of what that’s doing is preparing Israel and then Judah, Judea, to receive the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so it’s beginning to form them to be able to do this.

Fr. Stephen: Right, to be able to receive it and understand who he is and what he’s doing.

Fr. Andrew: So they’ll have a framework in mind already so that they can interpret what they’re seeing through.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so part of that—and you find this in 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees—

Fr. Andrew: There’s a 4 Maccabees? [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Everybody’s favorite books of the Bible, if they’re even in your Bible. And 4 Maccabees, that’s a rare set of Bibles there. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Whose canon is that in?

Fr. Stephen: It’s in sort of an appendix in the Slavonic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, okay. Which—that’s an interesting idea: What does it mean to be in a canonical appendix? But that’s not what this episode is about.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s kind of at the edge of the canon. Somebody will write a book about that eventually.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, yes.

Fr. Stephen: But 2 Maccabees is a little more common. 2 Maccabees you’ll find in Roman Catholic Bibles, in the Orthodox Study Bible, in Bibles produced in the UK that have “the Apocrypha” in them, the deutero-canonicals, whatever they’re called. So that’s a little more findable. And both 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees are from different perspectives talking about the same group of martyrs in this case. What happens is this is… 1 Maccabees is sort of the history of the Maccabean revolt and the beginning of the Hasmonean dynasty, sort of in history form, so it looks like 1-4 Kingdoms (or 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings): it’s that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Sort of chronicle style.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So 2 Maccabees then sort of zooms in to tell sort of particular stories during that period. The most popular and most major story in 2 Maccabees is about the Maccabean martyrs who—it’s an elderly man, a mother, and her seven sons, who fall victim to the persecution of the Jewish people by the Seleucid monarchs who were trying to stamp out Judaism. In particular, what they were doing was threatening people with torture and death if they weren’t willing to violate the Torah and specifically to violate those parts of the Torah that marked them out as Jewish, that separated a Jewish person from a Greek person.

Fr. Andrew: And one of the big things that it ends up focusing on is eating pork or not.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There’s a little added layer to that beyond just eating pork, because the pork they’re trying to get them to eat is not just, like, farm-fresh bacon. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Wait, was it sacrificed to idols?

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Because pretty much meat in a pagan context is pretty much always sacrificed to idols.

Fr. Stephen: The pig was the primary sacrificial animal in Greek circles. That’s where the pork that was in the meat market, etc., came from, was from these pagan temples. But either way, right, this is something that a faithful Jewish person was not going to do. And so people like the Maccabean martyrs were willing to literally be tortured and die rather than violate the commandments of God. And this is part of why— We talked a little bit last time about the circumcision issue that St. Paul faced.

This is why the charges against St. Paul by his opponents were so serious in the book of Acts. They were accusing him of telling Jewish people to violate commandments that people in their collective memory had literally died rather than violate. And he’s now acting like they’re not important, from their perspective. That’s why there’s this animosity and great repentance. The final accusation against him in the book of Acts actually is that he brought Greeks into the Temple, and it’s specifically Greeks. So it’s playing into this, too: it’s not Romans or Gentiles; it’s specifically Greeks.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the people that had been martyring them not that long before.

Fr. Stephen: So this is very much in the mind of people, in the mind of the Jewish people, the people of Judea, in the first century, in the background of what’s going on in the gospels and Acts. So when they were condemning the Romans, they were comparing the Romans to the Seleucid Greeks.

But what you find in 2 and 4 Maccabees—4 Maccabees tells the same story, but 4 Maccabees is really kind of wisdom literature, so it’s really reflecting on the virtues of these martyrs and that kind of thing, but it tells the same story. And what you find in both of them is that when the time comes for these people to give up their lives, and they offer their final statements and their final prayers to God before being killed, that they use the language of offering themselves as a sacrifice, as an atoning sacrifice, as a sin-offering, on the behalf of the Jewish people, on behalf of their people. And so the idea of martyrdom and the idea of this kind of self-offering and this sacrifice is there, sort of in the background—and continues to be.

When you get to the book of the Revelation, the souls of the martyrs are under the altar in heaven. There’s still that kind of connection with martyrdom. So we, of course, see Christ’s voluntary self-offering as the fulfillment, the filling full of that idea.

Fr. Andrew: And you see in the liturgical texts for martyrs in the Orthodox Church—this idea is repeated over and over; it’s really a trope, liturgically, that that’s what they do: they offer themselves as sacrifices.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And our hymnography, it emphasizes—although sometimes in weird, archaic English—but emphasizes over and over again—

Fr. Andrew: What? No such thing!

Fr. Stephen: —the voluntary nature. I’m thinking of one hymn in particular, that Christ took pleasure in ascending the cross.

Fr. Andrew: He took pleasure in ascending the cross, which makes it sound like he was like: “Yes! This is going to be so great!”

Fr. Stephen: Like he was having a great time.

Fr. Andrew: But, no, it just meant that he was happy to do it. He was doing it voluntarily.

Fr. Stephen: He was willing. [Laughter] “According to his good pleasure” means according to his will, as every Calvinist listener knows—and we must still have one or two, even though I’ve off-put all of them many times. [Laughter]

So this idea that this is a voluntary thing that Christ does—an offering of himself, life, everything, to his Father: this is Christ’s priesthood. If the Christian priesthood is going to be a priesthood, it has to be oriented around a sacrifice also, and if it’s a participation in Christ’s priesthood, then the sacrifice that’s offered by the Christian priesthood has to be itself—the sacrifice has to be a participation in Christ’s self-offering.

Fr. Andrew: It’s not just an imitation of Christ’s offering, because, again, the priesthood is not something that people hold in and of themselves, so it’s not like a Christian priest is someone who also sacrifices himself on the altar, in any literal sense. I mean, metaphorically, okay, but the One who is offered is Christ, because he’s the offerer.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or does a separate, unrelated sacrifice…

Fr. Andrew: Right, there’s just one.

Fr. Stephen: ...because then it would be a different priesthood than Christ’s priesthood, because it would be centered on a different sacrifice. So this is sort of our first point here about the Eucharist, is that the Eucharist is not this sort of independent ritual thing, disconnected from Christ’s sacrifice, Christ’s voluntary self-offering.

I think, for example, the book of Hebrews makes this pretty clear. This is the whole idea of Christ as the High Priest. You don’t have a high priest with no priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like being God of gods without any other gods or Lord of lords without any other lords.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] It really doesn’t make sense. I think many folks, some of whom may be in our listening audience, make the mistake, when they understand that in Hebrews, of assuming that the sacrifice that Hebrews talks about, Christ’s offering in the heavenly places—which is himself; they’d agree with us there—but the idea that that now sort of obviates and removes any kind of participation in it, any actual sacrifice, any other priesthood on earth, as if sort of… Well, it’s really read this way. It’s read this way that Christ sort of abolished the sacrificial system by taking it up into heaven with him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s sort of one and done, that it’s over now. He did what was needed. And I think that that stems out of satisfaction theology: “Well, God is now satisfied. So. Well, now that’s done. Thanks!”

Fr. Stephen: Well, just about any atonement theory you can get that out of. You really can. Even a Christus victor type of thing, you can say Christ won; he’s victorious: done now. [Laughter] And that then breaks this connection. So you have a high priest with no priesthood underneath. You have no longer any sacrifice, and that would mean then that there’s not a direct way for humans living in the world now to participate in that sacrifice. It’s now a historical and/or heavenly thing with no material connector except in the past. We’ll get more into that in a little bit here, in the second half, actually.

But for now, the point we’re making is that the Eucharist, as the sacrifice around which the Christian priesthood centers, participates in Christ’s self-offering, which is a single event, which is both an eternal, heavenly event that Hebrews talks about, and an event that happens on earth at a particular point in time, in the realm of human experience. The Eucharist participates in that just as the Christian priesthood participates in Christ’s priesthood, that those are linked directly.

Now, that said, as we talked about in the priesthood episode, within Christian communities, priesthood and eldership, you could say, or the presbyterate, are reunited. So when, as we just referred to again, after the incident with the golden calf, the priesthood is taken away from the elders of the people, the presbyters of the people in the Greek translation, and given to the Levites, the elders of the people remain the elders of the people, but they lose the priesthood, the offering of the sacrifices.

Fr. Andrew: So it got split out, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: And as we talked about, that gets reunified in Christ. So that means the Christian priesthood, the priest, while his role as priest centers around the Eucharist, he also has the role of presbyter in the community. And that’s our primary title, actually, although “priest” in English is derived from that.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a weird thing in English that both “presbyter” and “priest” derive from the ancient Greek word presvyteros, but it is the case.

Fr. Stephen: So this elder role is still there; that’s part of where the “Father” title comes from. We talked about that more in that other episode.

What more can we sort of say about Christ’s priesthood? Well, the elephant in the room on Christ’s priesthood… The elephant in the room in terms of the entire New Testament standing in the background—and I know we’ve said this on this show before—is Psalm 110 (or 109 in the Greek), which is the most-cited text in the New Testament.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is where we get that line, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit thou at my right hand until I make thine enemies the footstool of thy feet.’ ”

Fr. Stephen: Right, that’s verse one. That gets quoted a lot. If you’re familiar with the New Testament, you can probably think of examples. But the next verse is important, too, which is: “You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.” And the “you”—the Lord, Yahweh the God of Israel, is still the one talking, and he’s still talking to the Person whom David calls “my Lord,” and not just from the New Testament but from other Second Temple literature, we can tell that pretty much everybody understood the “my Lord” in Psalm 110 was the Messiah.

Fr. Andrew: The Messiah is not only Lord but also a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and Melchizedek—see our Melchizedek episode—was both the king and high priest of Jerusalem. The order or the pattern, the mode of Melchizedek is referring to this: that he is the messiah—by being the messiah, is the king—and he’s also a priest; he’s also a high priest. This is what Hebrews does in terms of Christ’s priesthood and his high priesthood.

The major disjunction between this kind of priesthood and the Levitical priesthood, as Hebrews points out, is not it being reunified with kingship. That’s not the major disjunction. I mean, that’s true. These were split with Moses and Aaron as we’ve talked about, and they’re recombined in Christ as we’ve talked about, but the major disjunction is the priesthood of Melchizedek is not a hereditary priesthood.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we don’t see the sons of Melchizedek… We just see Melchizedek as priest.

Fr. Stephen: There aren’t any. This is why Hebrews talks about him. He doesn’t have a father, he doesn’t have a genealogy, he doesn’t have a… So you look at Chronicles. You look at Ezra and these huge genealogies of all the priests and Levites and the different groups who did different things in and around the Temple. Hebrews is pointing: Melchizedek doesn’t have a genealogy at all! He sort of comes from nowhere, disappears to nowhere. So this lack of a hereditary link is the major disjunction.

What does that mean? How does this priesthood, then, get handed down? This is why the concept of apostolic succession becomes so important within the Orthodox Church. Well, within the Christian Church in general. It’s because, just like in the old covenant, no one can sort of take the role or title of priest upon themselves voluntarily…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, no one’s self-ordained.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, we don’t get self-ordained people. We don’t have a guy just decide to go start a church and make himself a pastor of the church. This doesn’t happen— Well, it does happen. Those are called heretics in the early Church! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think in some ways it’s kind of a confusion of the role of priest and prophet, too. Prophets are called directly by God. But it’s interesting God doesn’t do that—with priests, there’s always a line.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this line is not hereditary, despite what happens in some Greek villages.

Fr. Andrew: I mean, you know, sure, there are fathers and sons who are priests—I actually know a priest who’s a 13th or 14th generation priest, which is amazing—but that’s not… It’s not a given.

Fr. Stephen: Right. But what we see is Christ chooses his apostles, his disciples and apostles. He makes them apostles by sending them out. And then they choose the deacons in Acts. They choose presbyters as they go out and form these Christian communities. They choose the next generation of bishops, which we see with, for example, St. Paul and St. Timothy. And then that next generation of bishops chooses the next generation of presbyters and deacons, and then they consecrate the next generation of bishops, and so on and so on, down to the present day. So you do have a line; you do have a tree, but it’s a tree formed by the laying-on of hands, not by biological descent. And it goes, ultimately, back to Christ choosing the apostles.

That’s how you have that kind of tree without it being hereditary and without it being people arrogating titles to themselves. We can’t stop people from doing that, but we can not recognize it. [Laughter] You can call yourself the Grand Mufti if you want to. I can’t stop you, but no one else will recognize that claim.

Fr. Andrew: Are you saying an ordination to the Universal Life Church doesn’t count?

Fr. Stephen: Not according to the State of Pennsylvania if you want to marry somebody.

Fr. Andrew: Oh really? I actually have never even looked into that! [Laughter] That’s pretty fun.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, First Church of the Light of Elvis, I think they can only practice in Vegas. All that said, we do have to spend at least a little bit of time on this idea that the Eucharist even is a sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because this is a big point of contention, especially around the Reformation.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. In the 16th century, this becomes a big deal. But, biblically, there’s not really a way around this.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: There just isn’t.

Fr. Andrew: It turns out that St. Paul explicitly makes this linkage.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so I had a journal article on this published by Rule of Faith that you can go look at online. I’m not going to rehearse all that here, especially the footnotes, but if you’re a fan of footnotes, that’s the place to go.

Fr. Andrew: Wait, you have footnotes!? [Laughter] I was told that you don’t do—

Fr. Stephen: I have more than 600 footnotes in my dissertation, full of excitement!

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Whew!

Fr. Stephen: But when we read 1 Corinthians 10:14-22, this is part of, in 1 Corinthians, St. Paul’s discussion of the Eucharist. 1 Corinthians is the major place where he discusses the Eucharist. And because this was written before the gospels were written, this is actually the earliest discussion of the Eucharist as such that we have in the New Testament in terms of when it was written. In chapter 10, verses 14-22, he’s… Actually, at this point, he segues back and forth between a couple of topics in this whole section of 1 Corinthians, those two main topics being “hey, don’t eat food offered to idols and here’s 18 reasons why” on the one hand, and on the other hand, talking about the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because these things are linked.

Fr. Stephen: Because they’re linked, and he makes that link explicit here.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you’re either on Team God or Team Demons. [Laughter] 1 Corinthians 10:14-22.

Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to sensible people. Judge for yourselves what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, it is not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

Consider the people of Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar? What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?

A little threat there at the end! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, good luck. You want to fight it out with God, good luck!

Fr. Andrew: Especially verse 18 there: “Consider the people of Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar?” It’s not a non-sequitur.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and he’s using that same word—it’s participation in the blood of Christ, participation in the body of Christ, partake of the one bread, participants in the altar—it’s the same word. It’s koinonia in Greek, various forms. And the same thing with participants with demons, later on.

St. Paul here very clearly, when he’s trying to describe sort of how the Eucharist works or what it does, his immediate comparisons, to teach them— Because what they don’t know about is the Eucharist. They know about “oh, there’s sacrifices that go on at the Temple at Jerusalem.” They know about pagan sacrifices: they live in Corinth, for Pete’s sake! [Laughter] They know what goes on there. So he’s saying this works just like that. St. Paul is very clearly and directly saying the Eucharist is a sacrifice. Like the sacrifice that happens on the altar at the Temple in Jerusalem, which was still in operation at this point, like the sacrifices to demons that go on in those pagan temples, in the same way the Eucharist is a sacrifice, and in the same sense. Not in a metaphorical sense: he’s not making a metaphorical comparison. It’s a direct comparison. This is, again, the earliest written thing about the Eucharist. It’s from that letter.

So there are a bunch of distinctions that have come up since the 16th century, trying to dissociate. And the reason, for the record, that we’re saying Reformation and that kind of thing is that this isn’t a Protestant thing, per se, because our Lutheran friends have priests, have an altar, see the Eucharist as a sacrifice. At least some number of our Anglican friends do. [Laughter] There’s a lot of diversity in the Anglican Communion, shall we say? But at least— There is at least a strong tradition there of seeing things that way. So this isn’t just Protestantism; this is really a particular thread of Protestantism that really, frankly, kind of gets started with John Calvin. But since, in the United States, the United States is just Protestant—the culture is deeply Protestant, and not just Protestant but Puritan, and insofar as Puritan, Calvinist—this is a very common thread in American Evangelical Protestantism, shall we say?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is why I started out with my half-joking question: Isn’t it just a symbol? Doesn’t this just stand for something else?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, and so to try to get away from the idea of sacrifice-altar-priesthood with the Eucharist there are a number of distinctions that get made that are, frankly, not distinctions you can make biblically. Like, they’re not there in the Bible. I mean, you can certainly make distinctions in speech, theologically, but sola scriptura, you know. If you’re not there, impossible—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say, the question is: Is the distinction you’re making consistent with what’s in the Scripture even if it’s not found in the Scripture?

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so, for example, you get: “Well, when Christ institutes the Eucharist, as he says”—as it’s usually translated in English, not coincidentally—” ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ See, he calls it a remembrance or a memorial. And, see, that’s not a sacrifice; it’s a memorial.” But, as is my wont, I refer people to Numbers 10:10 in the Septuagint, where the same Greek word, memorial, is used to refer to the sacrifices on the Feast of Trumpets.

Fr. Andrew: So sacrifices are then, by definition, memorials. There’s not one thing is a sacrifice and another is a “this will help you to think about this.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, so calling it a memorial does not mean “not a sacrifice.” In fact, it may very well mean sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and thus you get all this language in there of remembering someone before God. That doesn’t mean just standing before God and saying, “Yeah, I remember him.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] A bit nostalgic.

Fr. Andrew: Or like: “God, let me remind you about Brother Robert.”

Fr. Stephen: “In case you forgot.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s not what that is. It’s really about a sacrifice on behalf of someone else.

Fr. Stephen: An offering, yeah. So you also get this distinction made between an altar and a table. A lot of churches, they don’t want to call it an altar; they’ll have a table where, however often they do the Eucharist—we’ll get to not wanting to call it the Eucharist here in a minute—they’ll call it a table instead of an altar. The problem is, this is literally the same word in most ancient languages, up to and including Latin: ara means both table and altar. And you can just look back at 1 Corinthians 10:14-22 that we just read. “You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” What’s the table of demons he’s referring to? Well, clearly a pagan altar. So he can switch back and forth between altar and table. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s the same.

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul’s doing it.

Fr. Andrew: There’s an altar to God and an altar to demons; don’t worship at the wrong one.

Fr. Stephen: And the altar to God can also be called the table of the Lord, and the altar to demons can also be called the table of demons. So there’s not a distinction there. Relatedly, you get—and we did our three-part thing on sacrifice where we kind of took this apart—this distinction between a sacrifice and a meal. Sacrifices were meals for the most part.

Fr. Andrew: Right, that’s what they are.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So, again, that’s a non-starter in terms of saying, “It’s a meal, not a sacrifice.” That literally would not make sense to any ancient person.

Fr. Andrew: It’s like saying, “It’s Thanksgiving dinner, not a meal!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: That’s what I’m saying. That’s a type of meal. So these distinctions aren’t really supportable, and what caused them really… There are things… When you look at the Protestant Reformation, there are a lot of things that make sense in the 16th century.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and that, as Orthodox Christians, we can have a certain level of empathy with.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so if you’re in the 16th century and the Church of Rome has supposed writings of Church Fathers and things like the Donation of Constantine that are forgeries, but nobody is sure and nobody can prove what’s real and what’s a forgery from the Church Fathers, and the Latin Vulgate has, over time, changed in various ways, and Latin words have changed their meanings in various ways.

Fr. Andrew: As all languages do.

Fr. Stephen: And Martin Luther comes along and says, “Hey, you know what? We can’t be sure about any of this stuff, how far back it goes. The only thing we can be sure about is, hey, we’ve got this Greek New Testament that we got from refugees from Constantinople, and we’ve got the Hebrew Old Testament that we got from the local Jewish community, and we know that Rome hasn’t messed with either of those, because they haven’t had access to it to mess with it. So that’s the only thing we can trust, and we need to base all our theology on that.” You can kind of understand that in the 16th century!

But when we get to the 21st century and we know which of those documents are fake and which ones aren’t, and we can look at the textual history of not only the Latin Vulgate but of the Greek, of the Hebrew, and we have all this available to us, there’s no reason for us to sort of be stuck in the 16th century, and not just say, “Hey, the 16th century got it right for the 16th century, but they got it right for all time. There will never be a point in the future where we’re ever able to do any better than the 16th century. We’ll never be able to have a better biblical translation than the 1611 King James…” [Laughter] Anyway. “That no knowledge will ever surpass or move us past these sort of scholarly consensus of the 17th century Reform Scholastics—they nailed it perfectly.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s a kind of arbitrary thing to pick.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right. And when it comes, narrowing back in on our topic from those other examples, what you really find here is this kind of reactionary position against abuses that were going on in the Mass in the 16th century in the West.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, like the idea, for instance, built upon that whole system of purgatory and indulgences and merits and so forth, the idea that offering the Mass can give a certain number of indulgences to people in purgatory—that was one of the things that was the practice and was the understanding.

Fr. Stephen: And some of these sort of weird eucharistic miracles to emphasize transubstantiation, where you have Eucharistic hosts turning into human flesh, and turning invisibly, and to taste and everything turning into blood, or bleeding hosts, or some of these kind of things, or any number of other sort of excesses, just the whole idea of the Mass as a repeated propitiatory sacrifice. There are things there going on where you could understand why you’d want to correct them, from an Orthodox perspective. And the counter-Reformation corrected some of them within the Roman Church, but this reactionary position was assumed. So not only is this not a repeated propitiatory sacrifice, this isn’t a sacrifice at all!

Fr. Andrew: Insert baby and bathwater comment.

Fr. Stephen: On and on and on. And so this reactionary position was assumed that, for the sake of debate, for the sake of working toward correction of abuses, you can understand someone taking a more extreme stance—but again, that stance then being set in stone for all time doesn’t make sense. Still having that reactionary stance in the 21st century, when there are much older understandings of the Eucharist, much more biblical understandings of the Eucharist, that are neither that reactionary position nor the abuse you were worried about…

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, a lot of this was founded on the idea that they had discovered—they had rediscovered the biblical Christianity. And so when you believe that you’ve found it again, then it makes sense then: “Okay, we’re back!” Like this is it. So I get it. On the one hand, I get it, but a lot of that stuff becomes untenable, especially when so many of those reactions are based on the limited information simply available at the time.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And speaking from personal experience as a kid, the warning sign of this that you might still be holding to an old reactionary position is if part of your Christian identity as a Protestant is being not-Catholic.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which is totally a thing still for a lot of Protestants.

Fr. Stephen: That’s a warning sign, because our identity as Christians should never be based on what we’re not. It should be based positively on what and who we are and whom we worship and whom we follow. It’s always a sign. I’m not just picking on Protestants here. If you’re a Roman Catholic listener and part of your identity is that you’re not Protestant, that’s equally problematic. If you’re an Orthodox listener and part of your sense of yourself as an Orthodox Christian is “I’m not a Protestant,” that’s also a problem.

Fr. Andrew: Or not a Catholic or not a whatever.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, or not a Roman Catholic or whatever, right. You’re in a reactionary position, that’s by definition not balanced and not healthy.

So! Now that I’ve bashed everyone…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] “I thank thee, Lord, that I am not like those other Orthodox who say that they’re grateful they’re not Protestants or Catholics.”

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] I define myself entirely on not being Fr. Andrew, which is why it galls me so much when people online think we’re the same person.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right! I mean, we covered this in episode one, literally within the first five minutes, if I recall correctly!

Fr. Stephen: In terms of, then, the Eucharist as a sacrifice, we talked about how it’s a participation in Christ’s sacrifice, but along with that we see within the Eucharist a certain gathering up of the regular Old Testament sacrifices.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which has this whole system of different kinds of sacrifices for different purposes and so forth.

Fr. Stephen: Right. See our episodes on sacrifices. And also read Fr. Jeremy Davis’s excellent book, Welcoming Gifts, from Ancient Faith.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. This may be one of the most referential episodes we’ve ever done.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. All we’re going to do is reference past episodes and future episodes.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s right! Just a big bibliography episode.

Fr. Stephen: It’s purely a transitional… three-to-five hours. Now people are going to check the timestamp and seem to get worried! [Laughter]

So two of these types of offerings are part of that participation in Christ’s sacrifice. We have the regular cycle of sin-offerings, sometimes translated guilt-offerings.

Fr. Andrew: Which is for forgiving sins.

Fr. Stephen: In the Old Testament. And we need to be clear, as we were in that episode: There is no substitution, let alone penal substitution, going on in sin-offerings.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if there were, that would mean that God is taking out his wrath on wheat-cakes instead of on you.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, right. [Laughter] Often it was wheat-cakes and no animal died in the making of this sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, that’s the problem. If you’re going to make it about penal substitution and that it’s the death of an animal, then that means you have to have an animal dying every time—which you don’t—and it also means that the killing should be ritualized, because if it’s the critical part then it should be a ritual killing, but it’s kind of just a… like, “make sure you take it out of the package” kind of thing. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right, you’re not going to eat it without killing it first. But also—and this is important for the “penal” part of the penal substitution—the “penal” part involves suffering, and the animals were never made to suffer in this process.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there’s not a ritual beating up of the animal or strangling it or blinding it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. This element, this is something we see in Christ’s voluntary self-offering, and so the Eucharist is a participation in that. The next one is also taken with Christ’s offering; that’s what’s called the peace-offering, and those are… We talk about that much more in those previous episodes, but this is a sacrifice that’s offered after estrangement. Humans have become estranged from God, and they make this offering and eat this meal to restore a peaceful relationship.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Let’s get together and reconcile.

Fr. Stephen: And this is not an offering that represents the end of God being mad at them for the bad things they did.

Fr. Andrew: Right, because God does not “lose it.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: This is the end of their rebellion. So this is: your kid has been a bunch of stuff that’s been ticking you off all day, and they kind of feel bad about it, and so they draw you a picture and come and present it to you with a big smile, as an offering. [Laughter] You are not going to, like, kill your kid if he didn’t do that, but it is good.

Fr. Andrew: Although you might say that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, you know, I don’t personally have kids, so maybe you guys do fly into murderous rages over ungrateful brats, but I don’t have that experience.

Fr. Andrew: I have not killed any of my children.

Fr. Stephen: Yet. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Not ever.

Fr. Stephen: The threat has always been there…

And then the other major category of offering—and this is the category into which the Eucharist itself falls…

Fr. Andrew: Literally. Literally true.

Fr. Stephen: The Eucharist as such, as opposed to by participation. The Eucharist literally is a thank-offering. That’s why it’s called the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Right. As they started off, that’s what the name means.

Fr. Stephen: And within thank-offerings in the Old Testament, the two basic ones are grain offerings and drink offerings.

Fr. Andrew: How about that.

Fr. Stephen: You can kind of see how that works, how that fits! And this is why, especially in the past… Well, still with the bread today, often in Orthodox churches, but in the past with the bread and the wine and even the water that was used, those were brought to the church by people—often bread still is in Orthodox churches—but all those things were brought every time by the people as an offering to use in the Eucharist.

So as we said, Christ’s self-offering sort of fulfills, fills full, is the ultimate example of all of these sacrifices, the Eucharist participates in it, and through the Eucharist we then participate in it. This is why we’ve used the phrase before that in the Eucharist we come and we offer bread and wine that we’ve brought—we offer this thank-offering, this grain offering and drink offering—and we receive Christ in return. Christ not only offers himself to the Father, but he offers himself to us, which brings us peace and reconciliation, and brings to us the remission of sins.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s all brought together in Christ, in every direction. That’s really… It’s a little mind-bending, that he’s the Offerer and the Offering. I can’t remember the exactly line now from the Liturgy, but that he’s the One who…

Fr. Stephen: The offerer, the offering, the acceptor or recipient…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. He accepts the offering, he gives the offering, he is the offering. He’s the one being distributed.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Right.

Fr. Andrew: Everything is Christ, within this context. All right, well, that’s our first half. We’re going to go ahead and take a short break, and we will be right back!

Fr. Andrew: Welcome to the second half of the show. Thank you very much, Voice of Steve, but this is not a live show; this is a pre-recorded episode, but we do have some calls that we have received, some voicemails, and we’re going to make use of those, starting in this part of the show.

Fr. Stephen: Unless our vibes have reached you, and you somehow know to call in as we’re recording… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. This is where we get accused of being New Agers. I’m told “vibes” is a New Age word. I don’t know.

Fr. Stephen: Is it? I’m from southern California, so it’s hard to discern.

Fr. Andrew: Everything’s vibes there?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: Actual vibrations?

Fr. Stephen: Dude! Quit harshing my mellow!

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I remember the Beach Boys’ song, “Good Vibrations,” which suggests that there are evil vibrations as well.

Fr. Stephen: Oh, there are bad vibes, dude.

Fr. Andrew: Oh! [Laughter] I walked into that one. Yeah. All right, well, we’re talking— On this Thanksgiving episode, we’re talking about the holy Eucharist. We discussed the question of sacrifice and the priesthood in our first half, and now we’re going to continue talking about the Eucharist and continue, of course, talking about the Old Testament and how all these things kind of are related to each other. Let’s roll! Let’s talk about the Passover. That’s related, right?

Fr. Stephen: Transform and roll out! [Laughter]

Right, so we talked— In the first half we were talking about the relationship between the Eucharist as sacrifice and the priesthood and the sacrifices of the old covenant. So this half, this second half, we want to talk about the relationship—the special relationship the Eucharist has with the Passover directly, because this… In addition to sort of, as we mentioned, taking up all of those earlier sacrifices, being a participation in Christ’s sacrifice, which itself is the fulfillment of those things in being the fullness of the patterns established there, there’s a direct and special connection to the eating of the Passover, “Pascha” being the Greek word for “Passover,” so we’ll probably use those interchangeably.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, in Greek they literally are interchangeable.

Fr. Stephen: Right, it’s the Greek word for Passover, and it’s also what we call—what the Germanic peoples call “Easter.”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I don’t even know if it’s all of them; I’d have to check—but it’s true: it’s a specifically Germanic language-term.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, it’s only in Germanic languages.

Fr. Andrew: Sorry, everyone who somehow thinks that a Christian feast that arose in the Ancient Near East is somehow named after a Germanic goddess… [Laughter] Not a thing!

Fr. Stephen: No, it’s Ishtar. It’s Ishtar. The Germans just remembered ancient Babylonian mythology.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right. [Laughter] Easter has as much to do— Easter as a holiday has as much to do with Ishtar as celebrating the Fourth of July means that we’re giving worship to the divine genius of Julius Caesar.

Fr. Stephen: Well, I don’t know what you do on the Fourth of July… [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yes, that aside.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. The correct response to anyone telling you that Easter or Pascha is a pagan holiday is to ask them if they consider Jewish people to be pagans.

Fr. Andrew: Ooh.

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s literally Passover.

Passover. We of course often in the Orthodox Church refer to Pascha as the Feast of feasts. We’re celebrating Christ’s resurrection: kind of obvious that that’s why that would be the Feast of feasts. But that’s also true in the Old Testament, that Passover—the Passover is the Feast of feasts in that festal cycle as well.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the highest of all high holy days.

Fr. Stephen: In the Old Testament, it represents the beginning of one of the festal cycles. When the instructions are being given by God to Moses about the celebration of the Passover, he says, “This will be for you the first of months.”

Fr. Andrew: Right, which— You’re like, “Wait a minute. I thought the Feast of Trumpets was the first of months.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, what happened to Rosh Hashannah? [Laughter] And that’s because—and I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this before on the show—there were two different overlapping calendars and festal cycles in the calendar as it’s laid out in the Torah. You have the older actually calendar that’s based on the agricultural cycle, and that’s where you get the early September beginning of the year; and then you have the festal cycle that’s based around Passover. This is still true in the Orthodox Church calendar. We have a set of feasts that are based around Pascha every year, and then we also have the Indiction on September 1, the beginning of the ecclesiastical year, and we have the cycle of fixed-date feasts.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and this is what keeps all those people who help to interpret the Typikon for us in business, because it creates this beautiful complexity.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but that’s a point of continuity that we still have these two layers. [Laughter] But the cycle centered around Pascha is sort of the most important; that’s why it sort of overlaps and trumps the other and moves around in relation to the other.

Another interesting thing that we’ve noted before is that the future observance—how the Passover will be celebrated and observed annually in the future—is actually presented by God to Moses in Exodus before the Passover event actually happens. Before the tenth plague.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and it’s worth noting especially that this feast, and then all the other feasts related to it, are— They’re not about sort of natural cycles, like that other calendar; these are God acting in history.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That’s why it trumps.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, exactly, and that’s underlined by then: “Okay, I’m about to this, and this is how you’re going to celebrate it.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, that it’s based around this act, and it’s right before! [Laughter] So this is key to the way the Torah presents the Passover—is that it’s not presenting the Passover as a single, one-time historical event that will be reflected on later. It presents the Passover as the beginning of an ongoing reality. That’s a pattern that will continue into the future, without an endpoint.

That makes that one sense of memorial—I said I’d return to this— That makes that one sense of memorial, of just remembering a past event, impossible, because that’s not where it’s focused. We see the same thing with the Eucharist, that Christ describes how the Eucharist will be celebrated and says, “This is my body, broken for you,” before his body had been broken. “This is my blood, shed for you,” before his blood had been shed.

Fr. Andrew: Right. There’s a participation even before the event in terms of historical, linear time.

Fr. Stephen: And so he’s instituting this before the event happens, to convey the same thing, not just to parallel—because he’s doing this at Passover.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, this is the new Passover, the renewed Passover.

Fr. Stephen: Christ is doing it at Passover, and he’s not just presenting this as his death and his resurrection are going to be this historical event that will someday be in the distant past and we will reflect and look back at.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right, because that wasn’t even possible. He’s not like: “Okay, remember when—tomorrow…” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So this is an ongoing— He is creating again— It’s not just this singular mighty act of God in history, but it is this reality that will continue with no stated endpoint other than the return of Christ at the end of the world. And that’s the language of: “as often as you do this, you will proclaim his death and his resurrection until he comes.” So it is this ongoing thing.

And the fact that this temporal relationship between when Christ institutes the Eucharist and when he actually dies and rises again is reiterated in our Liturgy, in our Orthodox Liturgy, where—

Fr. Andrew: I was going to say there was that line—and it’s only in Chrysostom’s iteration of the Liturgy; I don’t think this is in Basil’s—where it says, “On the night on which he was betrayed, or rather gave himself up for the life of the world…”

Fr. Stephen: So it’s being directly connected. We have the “gave himself,” so we have the voluntary self-offering element there. We have the Eucharist as a participation in that, but we also have a reminder that this is instituted right before he does it.

Fr. Andrew: And there’s both this kind of historical, earthly expression, “on the night on which he was betrayed,” and then: here’s the inner reality that’s maybe not apparent when you’re looking at it.

Fr. Stephen: What’s really happening.

Fr. Andrew: What really happened is he gave himself up for the life of the world. And both things are true at the same time.

Fr. Stephen: Apocalyptic Liturgy.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, right, exactly. Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Another element that we see in the Passover and its celebration is that the Passover involves the whole family.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so related to that—

Fr. Stephen: The Passover is sort of led by the father in his priestly role, but encompasses the whole family.

Fr. Andrew: Related to that, we have one of our first voicemails that I’m going to play for everybody, and we’ll talk about it.

Iakovos: Hi, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen. My question about the Eucharist relates to the fact that, in Orthodoxy, we give the Eucharist to infants. In the Protestant tradition that I grew up in, that was not the case. One typically received holy Communion the first time at the age of 13 or 14, and only after passing the material in a catechism or confirmation class to the satisfaction of the pastor. When I explored Orthodoxy, the fact that Communion was given even to infants was something that was very attractive to me as I explored the Church. Could you explain some of the rationale behind why this has always been the practice in the Church? Is it related to any notions of the sacrifice of Christ and the Eucharist as sacrifice, and the fact that infants who have been born again by water and the Spirit also need to be nourished with the life-giving body and blood of Christ that sustains our faith and helps us to grow in our faith?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so that comes to us from Iakovos. He didn’t introduce himself, but that was on the email. Thank you very much for that question, Iakovos. This is directly what we’re talking about here. In the Passover celebration, the whole family is involved. There’s no indication that you have to be a certain age or that you have to pass classes or anything like that.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the children are not only included, but the one little bit of actual Passover liturgy that’s in the Hebrew Bible itself is this sort of mini dialogue between father and son. So the children have a particular role, because part of what’s going on in the Passover meal is that this is intergenerational.

Fr. Andrew: Right. It’s handed down.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. There are some—not a lot— There are some Protestant groups—there are some Presbyterian groups who practice what they call pedocommunion, which— People are going to have to get rid of terms like pedocommunion and pedobaptism, because I think they’re going to be really unpopular soon, because they have other connotations.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, but it just means communion for kids, baptism for kids.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yes, that’s it. But that’s a definite minority in Protestantism. And of course, Roman Catholicism doesn’t commune infants normally either.

Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, the 1.5% of Catholics who are Eastern Catholics do, and historically— I can’t remember exactly when it was, but historically Latin Catholics would commune infants, but it’s not been for many centuries that they did that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not common practice any more. There’s always the temptation to punt and say, “Well, hey, you have to explain to me why not.” [Laughter] But we have available to us various groups’ explanations why not, and we can interact with those. One of them is actually kind of confusing to me. That’s not being totally genuine.

Fr. Andrew: Is it, though?

Fr. Stephen: One of them doesn’t make sense to me. [Laughter] I’m not really confused; I just think it doesn’t make sense. And that is… There are some of our Protestant friends who are very anti-sacramental, meaning they’re against the idea of sacraments. They don’t like the word; they won’t use the word. I know of Protestant pastors who literally will do a baptism or something, or serve communion, and give a talk beforehand about how it’s not a sacrament. What the heck! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Oh, right, exactly. I remember in my Evangelical days especially, especially in baptisms, you would get a little mini-sermon saying this doesn’t do anything.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so here’s my thing where I don’t understand, or, to be more honest and less nice, that I don’t think it makes sense: is a lot of these same people who have the position that it doesn’t do anything won’t do it to infants.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Contradiction.

Fr. Stephen: “Baptism doesn’t do anything; it’s just a symbol—but I will not apply this empty symbol to anyone under a certain age.” Or “Communion is just symbolic; we’re just remembering Christ and what he did for us—but you have to be a certain age.” That doesn’t make sense to me.

The version of that that makes more sense to me—I still think it’s incorrect, but that I understand the argument—is groups that believe it does something and that it is—in the terms of the Eucharist— and think that in order to receive the Eucharist worthily and in order to participate in it in a worthy manner, you have to have some level of intellectual understanding of what it is and what’s going on, that they say an infant doesn’t have, and that’s why there’s an age thing. You have to reach a certain age and have a certain understanding.

There’s a bunch of problems with that. One of them is—maybe this is just me being Orthodox and mysterious—but is there someone out there who really understands the Eucharist?

Fr. Andrew: Right.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So we all have these partial understandings, but it has to reach a certain level of partial before— [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: The one part, the version of this that makes the least sense to me is with folks who have—honestly, it’s hard for me to keep track of what the proper term is now, but intellectual disability or however you want to describe it—forgive me if that’s offensive to anybody—especially if they’re profoundly that way; for instance, they’ll never be able to speak and it’s clear that they don’t have much mental understanding. On that basis, you would have to, for their whole life, refuse them to commune. For those who believe, who apply the same rule to baptism, that they would go their whole life without being baptized.

Now, if you are in a purely memorialist tradition, then you probably would say, “Well, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, then, since it doesn’t really do anything, so it doesn’t matter if you do it or not.” But that’s the one that doesn’t make any sense to me, for people whose understanding never will reach that level, at least as far as we can tell.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. I used to use that as an example, and unfortunately I found out recently that there are a lot of Roman Catholic priests who will not give the Eucharist to someone who is mentally disabled like that.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, there are people, and there are Protestants who will— who simply say, “Yeah, no, they would never, because they have to be able to make a confession of faith.”

Fr. Stephen: I know we have some Roman Catholic listeners, and I’m not trying to be anti-Catholic—

Fr. Andrew: No, no.

Fr. Stephen: —but I have to be honest and say I now live in a majority Roman Catholic area, and there’s a lot of very bad pastoral praxis that goes on. [Laughter] That I think is one of them. I mean, I think infants should receive the Eucharist, but if your practice isn’t to give infants the Eucharist that doesn’t make me upset. But when you tell me that someone has a traumatic brain injury and so now you will never allow them to share in the body and blood of Christ again, that does get me upset.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Stephen: When you tell me that because somebody’s dad got divorced and remarried, you won’t baptize them, that gets me upset. So this is not just me taking shots at the Roman Catholic Church willy-nilly, but I think that is… [Laughter] I can’t understand how a compassionate human being could do that. So props to—and I’m definitely not going to name them and get them in trouble—props to the Roman Catholic priests whom I know of who bypass those rules for the sake of compassion. Kudos for you for disobeying your hierarchs. Didn’t think you’d hear that on Ancient Faith, did you? [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Well… I mean, you’re telling Catholic priests that it’s good to disobey their hierarhcs.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, I’m telling Catholic priests it’s okay to disobey the pope, so there we go. Can’t get in trouble for that where I live.

Fr. Andrew: I’m into disobeying the pope as well! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So to me the core is the reality of human life—first and greatest commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” At the beginning of our life, our mind and our strength are not really there yet. We’ve still got our heart and our soul with which to love God. And none of us remembers what our relationship with God was like in the womb, for example, but it’s totally wrong to assume that there wasn’t one. Then when we get to the end of our lives, our mind and our strength start to go, but we still have our heart and our soul with which to love God.

The idea that we are going to exclude people from the family of God from participating in Christ’s self-offering, the idea that we need to do that based on how much mind or how much strength they have doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, spiritually or biblically. If you aren’t loving God with your heart and your soul, then we need to talk about you not receive the Eucharist, but if you’re loving God with everything you’ve got, it doesn’t matter how much or how little you’ve got.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So another one of the big objections, of course—and we mentioned this earlier—is the idea that the Eucharist is a kind of Christ’s crucifixion: he’s being re-sacrificed and so forth. But that doesn’t work, based on what we already said, because this is a participation in an even that has occurred; it’s not a repetition of that event.

Fr. Stephen: This is another continuity with the Passover.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly, so in the Passover it’s not “And now tonight we’re going to remember when our ancient ancestors were saved from Egypt”; it’s “This is the night that we were brought out of Egypt.” And this gets repeated. God uses this language when he’s speaking to Israel: “I am the Lord who brought you up out of Egypt,” and he might be talking to people who are generations removed from those who actually made the exodus. So it’s again: “You are brought out of Egypt.” So when Christ offers himself, we are saved. It’s not “Oh, let’s remember when those people were saved 2,000 years ago.” We’re participating in that offering of Christ as it happens: You are there. It’s not a repetition. It’s a return, in a sense, but it’s not a repetition.

Fr. Stephen: Repetition would be if, once a year, all the Jewish people in the world flew to Egypt and then made an overland trek.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Where’s Yam Suph again? It’s right here on this map!

Fr. Stephen: That’s not…

Fr. Andrew: It’s a re-enactment.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, that’s not how any of this works! They are participating in the event that happened in the past; they are not repeating it.

Fr. Andrew: Ritually. It’s a ritual participation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it’s not a repetition. That’s the difference.

As we’ve mentioned before, when these commandments are being given, what God says he’s going to do through the Passover event is make a distinction between the Israelite and the Egyptian. So the previous plagues, for the most part, affected the parts of Egypt where Israel wasn’t living, outside of the land of Goshen, and didn’t affect where Israel was dwelling. So if you were an Egyptian who happened to live in an Israelite neighborhood, you just lucked out and missed most of the plagues.

Fr. Andrew: Win!

Fr. Stephen: But what happens with the tenth plague, with the Passover, God says he’s going to make this distinction: he’s going to draw the limit. On that night, everyone who participated in the Passover, ate the Passover, marked their door: they’re now Israel. And anyone who didn’t is now an Egyptian.

Fr. Andrew: He’s made this new nation for himself.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so this is why you get the centrality of eating the Passover in the Israelite and then Judaite, Jewish identity. As we’ve talked about, that’s why you find a canon—always dangerous to talk about the minimums, because somebody’s going to be tempted to do it—but you find the bare minimums in the canons of the Church of being baptized and receiving the Eucharist once a year at Pascha, at Passover.

Fr. Andrew: Right, which parallels Israel: You’ve got to be circumcised, and you’ve got to eat the Passover.

Fr. Stephen: And if you don’t, then you become a lapsed Christian. It’s now maybe an ethnic identity or something, but you’re not observant; you’re lapsed. All that about sort of these things connecting the Eucharist and the Passover, but of course we don’t just have the Eucharist once a year. Well, we don’t celebrate it just once a year. Some folks may only receive the Eucharist once a year, but we don’t just offer it once a year.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so this is one of the things that’s different from the Passover in the old covenant.

Fr. Stephen: A point of discontinuity, as it were. Well, in part because we talked about the Eucharist as taking up that regular cycle of sacrifices also.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s pulling it all in.

Fr. Stephen: But sort of the minimal level, we have every Sunday the Divine Liturgy, the celebration of the Eucharist, and that’s because we not only have this annual cycle with the annual commemoration of Christ’s resurrection, but every Lord’s day for us is the commemoration of Christ’s resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Pascha continues.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so we continue to offer it there. And, as we just mentioned, places and times—monasteries now, and other places and other times in the Church’s history—where you have daily Eucharist that’s based on this, that daily cycle of sacrifices that are sort of taken up into it.

This raises the question about the relationship between the Eucharist and the Passover seder as such.

Fr. Andrew: Is it just a seder? Or is it derived from the seder? Some people say that. And then also you get some, particularly some Evangelical Christians, they will do both a communion ritual, and they will also sometimes hold seders, maybe invite the local rabbi or do it themselves.

Fr. Stephen: The answer is No, to all of that. Just no. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: It’s not a seder.

Fr. Stephen: Nope. Don’t do that.

Fr. Andrew: And we’ll mention why there seem to be some similarities between the two in just a second, because it’s not that there’s nothing similar between the two, but we’ll talk about why!

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so right off the bat, in terms of whether the Mystical Supper or the Last Supper, the meal at which Christ instituted the Eucharist, wasn’t a seder is that it’s the wrong day of the week. St. John’s gospel especially makes explicit that Christ died at the time they were killing the lambs.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and to do a seder you have to have a lamb already ready to go.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Doesn’t match up. So, that said, What meal is this, then? What kind of meal is this? Because Christ sends the apostles: “Get this room,” gives them the sign and everything of “Here’s how you find the room. Go get this room. We’re going to eat the Passover together.” Well, this is a kind of meal which is described in the book of Deuteronomy.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, not one of the ones that people seem to know; it’s not quite as famous, but it’s related to all of this. Yeah, Deuteronomy 14:22-26, you get this commandment from God:

You shall tithe all the yield of your seed that shall come from your field by year. And before the Lord your God, in the place that he will choose to make his name dwell there, you shall eat the tithe of your grain, of your wine, and of your oil, and your firstborn of your herd and flock, that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always. And if the way is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, when the Lord your God blesses you because the place is too far from you which the Lord your God chooses to set his name there, then you shall turn it into money, and bind up the money in your hand and go to the place that the Lord your God chooses, and spend the money for whatever you desire: oxen or sheep or wine or strong drink, whatever your appetite craves. And you shall eat there before the Lord your God and rejoice, you and your household.

Fr. Stephen: Right. So this is talking about the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I’m noting where it says, “the place the Lord your God chooses,” which— Literally that’s what happens there.

Fr. Stephen: And makes his name dwell there in the Temple. And so this is also, for the record, Deuteronomy 14:26—mark this down—this is the place where God tells you to buy liquor. Sorry, Baptists.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, because it makes the distinction between “wine” and “strong drink.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes, wine or strong drink. So don’t tell me the wine is grape juice, because it’s not that strong.

Fr. Andrew: Some really strong Welch’s tonight, honey!

Fr. Stephen: This is fermented drink. So, sorry to our Baptist listeners, but this is in the Bible.

Fr. Andrew: It’s true.

Fr. Stephen: And so this is the kind of meal they’re having. This is: we made our pilgrimage, and we’re going to eat and drink before the Lord. This is kind of reference, a little bit sub rosa in the text, like where Christ says he will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until he comes in his kingdom, that this is sort of a celebratory type of meal. Now, it doesn’t come out celebratory because Christ announces his betrayal, but…

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of a dark turn at the end—Judas. Looking at you, Judas! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But it was intended to be. One of the things with the… So that said, if it isn’t a seder, if you’ve been to one of these presentations or read an article written by somebody—and this is very common, as Fr. Andrew said, in the Evangelical world now—drawing all these connections between the Eucharist and the Passover seder, including things that are said and that kind of thing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, specific ritual connections.

Fr. Stephen: Here’s an audio footnote. A good place to go to learn more about this history is [Israel Yuval], who’s a Jewish scholar who’s written a lot about this. There’s some lectures he’s given that are on YouTube. He says provocative things like Christianity preceded Judaism. That’s half click-baity. I mean, he’s pointing at something real, but that’s being click-baity by him. [Laughter] But one of the things he points out relevant to what we’re talking about here is that actually a lot of the practices within the seder as it’s now often celebrated actually went the other way. It’s not that the Christian practice is based on the seder; it’s that what’s in the seder is a sort of response to the Christian practice.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because if you look at what the Scriptures actually say about how to do this meal, it doesn’t include some of the stuff that gets pointed to as being the links between this meal and the Eucharist.

Fr. Stephen: Right, there’s actually very little in terms of actual ritual liturgics for the meal in the Torah, for example, so the specifics have sort of spun off later. One example that [Yuval] gives is the practice of lifting the unleavened bread and saying something on the order of “This is the bread of our suffering.” And people say, “Oh, look! Christ lifted the bread and said, ‘This is my body, broken for you,’ like suffering.” It actually went the other way. It actually went the other way, and—

Fr. Andrew: Influence of Christianity on Judaism.

Fr. Stephen: Right, or at least Judaism, in part, defining itself over against Christianity. So it’s about the suffering of the nation of Israel in Egypt and later, rather than about the suffering of Jesus, for example, here. Ironically, a lot of the “Christian things” people are seeing in the seder are actually responses to Christianity, not the origins of Christian practice. They’re responses to Christian practice.

As I just mentioned, and an obvious point of discontinuity, if you’re familiar with Orthodox practice, at least, that when we celebrate the Eucharist we use leavened bread—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, risen bread.

Fr. Stephen: —and Passover is very deliberately unleavened bread. [Laughter] This is because this is a reflection for us—in addition to just being the correct way to do it. This is a reflection for us of the fact that— of Christ’s resurrection.

Fr. Andrew: Risen bread for the risen Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s not just being punny. [Laughter] But the idea is that we’re not just focusing in the Eucharist on Christ’s suffering or just on his death, but on his resurrection as well. And his resurrection is celebratory. The unleavened bread is the bread of suffering. You bake unleavened bread because you’re about to go on the run from the Egyptians.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, you need something that’s not going to go bad.

Fr. Stephen: And you don’t have time to let anything rise. [Laughter] You’ve got to get going.

Fr. Andrew: So the Eucharist is not a participation in Jesus’ last seder, as we just said. So that’s not why it’s not unleavened.

Fr. Stephen: It’s that and his resurrection, and that resurrection element of the Eucharist is absolutely key. Absolutely key.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because his resurrection is what changes the Passover into what it becomes in Christian practice.

Fr. Stephen: And so now, to briefly grind an old axe of mine…

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s got to be pretty sharp by now.

Fr. Stephen: ...because once again a good, respectable, and decent Protestant pastor has expressed disbelief that I do not see any sense of substitution in the Passover, I will very briefly reiterate why there is no substitution, let alone penal substitution, in the Passover ritual, and therefore that also has nothing to do with the Eucharist. I’ll try to do this relatively quickly, because this is not the first time I’ve done it, even on this show, but notice there is no one-to-one correlation between lambs and sons.

If you have a family— If you were an Israelite and only had daughters, you still did the Passover. You still followed the Passover. Even if you didn’t have a firstborn son to be killed, you still marked your door: you still celebrate the Passover. If you have a family—a household, because these are extended families—if you’ve got the firstborn son who’s the son of a firstborn son, who’s the son of a firstborn son, you don’t do three lambs; you do one lamb. If you have a small family that can’t eat the whole lamb, you share it with another small family, even if you both have sons. So you could have one lamb and two sons.

There’s no reason from the text to believe that God wanted to kill Israelite children such that it would require a substitute. The death of the firstborn is a response to the fact that Pharaoh had murdered the Israelite boys. Why would God want to kill more of them and have to kill a sheep instead? The death of the lamb is not ritualized in any way. You’re not told how to kill the lamb, so no part of the ritual is based on killing the lamb. You have to kill it so you can cook it and eat it: you’re not going to eat it alive.

There’s no substitution; there’s no nothing. The Day of Atonement and the Passover are two different things. Getting back to the Eucharist, you don’t really find much Day of Atonement stuff in the Eucharist, of any kind. There’s kind of a little sideways thing that we’re going to talk about in the third half, to do due diligence, but really it’s not there. There are really no elements of the Day of Atonement incorporated into the Eucharist. So there’s that. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Okay. Yeah, so before we wrap up our second half here, we had another voicemail that we wanted to play for you. This is from Matt.

Matt: Hi, Fathers. It’s Matt from Ontario, Canada. I have often heard that the agape meal is an extension of the Eucharist, and even these two meals were originally the same event. Why should we distinguish between the two meals? Are all meals we share with other Christians an extension of the Eucharist? And what are the implications of that? And, perhaps most importantly, why is one meal restricted to properly prepared Orthodox Christians and the other not?

Fr. Andrew: You can always tell when someone sends a question that they’ve written it out beforehand, because that was all very concise. Good job, Matt! I expect nothing less of a Canadian. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: It was a good delivery.

Fr. Andrew: So he’s connecting… There is this ancient connection to the agape meal, and certainly that resembles more the Passover meal. Everyone’s sitting around a table. And we’re going to finish talking about eating. So what’s the deal with that? Why is it kind of separated out, and why is it that the agape meal is kind of opened to even people who might not be able to receive Communion? What’s going on there?

Fr. Stephen: Right, so part of this is how we’ve become disassociated from the way sacrifice worked, because it’s not just that sacrifices were meals, but… If we’re talking about a pagan context, pagan Greek and Roman temples, for example, had huge banquet halls. In their remains, we’ve found bones and remains of all kinds of things, things that weren’t being sacrificed on their altars.

Fr. Andrew: Side dishes.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, like sea urchin and stuff in Corinth, for example. So we’ve found all that. There’s even a word for it. It’s trapezomata: table-things. [Laughter] Everything sounds cooler when you say it in Greek, because “table-things,” enh. So if we’re talking about ancient Israel, you’d go, you’d bring the sacrifice, the sacrifice would be taken from you, the priests would do their thing and offer it, and then you’d be given your portion back of the meat to eat with your family, but you’d take that home and you’d eat it, and you’d eat it in the context of the meal. You wouldn’t sit and just eat that; you would have it in the context of a meal. Again, this is not— This is deeply built into the understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrifice.

So in the very earliest phase of Christianity, while it is still a Judaism, essentially—it is one group within Second Temple Judaism—Christians were going to the synagogue on the sabbath, and then gathering separately as Christians on the Lord’s day. And within that concept of gathering on the Lord’s day, they were offering the Eucharist and then enjoying it in the context of this meal. In the same way that you could have people who were not Christians who were there eating the meal but not the Eucharist, St. Paul has to tell the people in Corinth, “Hey, don’t go eating in an idol’s temple.” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because it’s still communion with idols.

Fr. Stephen: Because it’s still communion with idols—and notice, St. Paul has to not just say, “Don’t eat meat offered to idols”; he has to say, “Don’t be eating in an idol’s temple also.” Because you can have the person who says, “Hey, I’m not eating any of this stuff that was sacrificed; I’m just going there because it’s my trade guild, or…”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “I like the side dishes.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, whomever, and “I’m just sort of hanging out there, having a couple of drinks, nibbling on some apps.” [Laughter] “I’m not eating the sacrifice. I’m not participating in the sacrifice. I’m not eating the sacrifice.” And St. Paul says, “Uh-uh. No. Get all the way out.” [Laughter] So that’s why there’s the difference. This was—the agape meal was just the sacrificial meal that accompanied the Eucharist. So it fit in very well with everybody’s understanding of how sacrifice worked. In terms of the question of “Is every meal Christians eat together an extension of the Eucharist?” I’ll do you one better: Your whole life should be an extension of the Eucharist. But we’ll talk more about that later on.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so Passover is this shared meal, and it’s focused on eating.

Fr. Andrew: One question that might come up, then, that some people would have is: If a sacrifice is eating a meal with your god, is God eating the Eucharist?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Fr. Andrew: No. Yeah, because not all sacrifices actually functioned in that way. I mean, am I correct in remembering that within—

Fr. Stephen: Well, the portion that was burned is the portion being given to God, but they didn’t believe God was actually eating it.

Fr. Andrew: Eating it, yeah. There’s an offering, but not necessarily an eating.

Fr. Stephen: Right, that it’s— The language that’s always used is about the smoke being a pleasing aroma. The idea is that God is pleased with the offering, so the same would be true of the offering of Christ. “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

Fr. Andrew: Not every offering or sacrifice involved giving a specific piece over to God. The fact that we don’t take a portion of the Eucharist and burn it is the ritual indication of that, in a sense.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and the Eucharist is a ritual participation in Christ’s sacrifice, which was offered to God as a pleasing sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: So you don’t need to— Again, that would be a kind of repetition of something that’s already been done.

All righty. Well, that’s our second half, and we’re going to take another short break and will be right back with the third half of The Lord of Spirits.

Fr. Andrew: Welcome back to The Lord of Spirits podcast. It’s the third half of our Thanksgiving episode; we’re talking about the Eucharist. In the first half, we talked about sacrifice and the priesthood of Jesus Christ. In the second part, we talked about the Passover and how that’s related to the Eucharist. Now we’re going to kind of focus in specifically on the body and blood of Christ, the actual—what we receive as holy Communion particularly in this part. All right, so where do we begin, Father?

Fr. Stephen: Well, we begin at the beginning.

Fr. Andrew: It is a very good place to start.

Fr. Stephen: It is a very good place to start, yes. [Laughter] Thank you to both Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you for that. Some pop culture I know about.

Fr. Stephen: I have to throw you a bone once in a while.

Fr. Andrew: Thank you, thank you.

Fr. Stephen: We begin with—all the way back again in the Old Testament—the idea—and we’ve talked about this before on this show, back when we talked about the tabernacle and its furnishings—that one theme in the Torah is that God feeds his people. He feeds and provides for his people. This is a contrast there—and that’s how it’s very directly presented—a contrast with pagan idolatry, where once the nostrils are opened on the idol and once the spirit is in the idol, one of the priest’s primary jobs was to feed, dress, care for, dust the idol. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: We don’t feed God.

Fr. Stephen: And so that relationship of having to provide for the god is directly reversed. One of the places we saw this when we were talking about the tabernacle furnishings was in the table of the shewbread—

Fr. Andrew: The shewbread.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which is pronounced “show"bread, despite being spelled—

Fr. Andrew: Probably. [Laughter] Got any recordings of any 17th-century biblical scholars? I don’t know… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: I’m pretty sure.

Fr. Andrew: Probably.

Fr. Stephen: Pretty sure. [Laughter] Where there was the table where the loaves of bread were kept in the tabernacle and then in the Temple, which was to— The table is God’s table, but from that table he’s serving the priests who are serving in the Temple, rather than the priests feeding him. Then of course this happens in a very literal sense in the wilderness, as Israel is in the wilderness and is fed with manna and quail. People forget the quail; they don’t talk about the quail, how many quail gave their lives in the course of 40 years in the wilderness.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] It’s just uncomfortable to think about it coming out of their noses.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s maybe why people are blocking it out.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the manna we know more about, the sort of flaky breadstuff that fell out of the sky.

Fr. Andrew: What is it?

Fr. Stephen: “Manna” means “what is it.”

Fr. Andrew: Exactly.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which made the— I still can’t remember where I lived that had manna doughnuts, but that just cracked me up. The doughnuts you look at and you say, “What is it?”

Fr. Andrew: I’m going to have to look that up!

Fr. Stephen: Or they fell out of the sky? I don’t know what they were claiming there.

Fr. Andrew: That’s a real place!—I just looked it up—in Chino, California.

Fr. Stephen: Oh! Well, there you go. That’s where I saw it. Out in SoCal.

Fr. Andrew: Wow. Wow. Man. When I was growing up—when I was finishing growing up, although some would argue I never completed that process—the place where I finished high school, right around the corner from the school was Jolly Pirate Donuts. Occasionally during photography class when we were sent out to photograph nature, we would occasionally photograph apple fritters and crullers as they appeared in nature. So there you go. There’s our doughnut digression.

Fr. Stephen: So there’s a place called Jolly Pirate Donuts, and they did not sell wine or other strong drink: I would be disappointed.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] That’s true! I do not recall that they did.

Fr. Stephen: Because there are no jolly pirates who have no wine or other strong drink.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, very disappointing in the piracy department.

Fr. Stephen: I mean, that was the whole point of the pirate-versus-ninja debate—would you rather be a pirate or a ninja—was that the pirates—far less competent, far less lethal, but have a much better time.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yes, absolutely.

Fr. Stephen: Also more scurvy, but that’s a side issue.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, well, you’d just need to be Greek pirates and then you’re with lemon! [Laughter] I didn’t think I’d make a Mr. Panos joke when we started recording today, but there we are.

Fr. Stephen: There you go. Very on top of it. Well, you’re going to a Greek city.

Fr. Andrew: Indianapolis, that’s true.

Fr. Stephen: Indiana-polis.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, exactly. Indiana-polis, right.

Fr. Stephen: The Greek city. Ana, again. [Laughter] Anyway. We’ve now alienated all the Greek listeners! Who should be left listening by the end of this?

Fr. Andrew: I’m actually going to a town called Noblesville, and I’m working, trying to work out in my head what that would be in Greek. Aritipolis? I don’t know, but anyway. [Laughter] That’s my from-the-hip version of the name of it.

Fr. Stephen: So we’ve now— All of the Protestant listeners, all of the Roman Catholic listeners, and now all of the Greek listeners have left.

Fr. Andrew: All that’s left are some scurvy pagans.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. We’ll offend them by the end of this, too, I’m sure. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Where were we? Manna! Quail!

Fr. Stephen: This theme of God feeding his people gets picked up in one of the relatively rare events featured in all four gospels. So remember, the birth of Christ: not in all four gospels. Other than— You have Christ’s death and resurrection; you have his baptism—that are in all four. But relatively rare. So there’s no exorcisms in St. John’s gospel, for example. But the feeding of the 5,000, the feeding of the multitudes, is in all four. And it’s in St. Luke’s gospel sort of twice, but we won’t go into that now.

This event in which Christ feeds multitudes of people. Where that story occurs in St. John’s gospel is at the beginning of chapter six, and then later in chapter six there is sort of an extended theological meditation on it as one might expect from St. John the Theologian, which sort of directly connects this idea of God feeding his people as expressed in this particular event to the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. So it’s kind of long, but I’m going to read a lot of—not all, but a lot of verses 22-59.

Fr. Stephen: There will be the occasional ellipsis if you’re following along.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, some ellipses, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: You’ll know it is time to turn the page when you hear the chime ring.

Fr. Andrew: “Bong!”

Fr. Stephen: Like this.

Fr. Andrew: When I was in middle school, since we’re going to digress again— [Laughter] When I was in middle school and we still watched those film strips—do you remember those, everybody?—where they would play the cassette tape, and you would hear: “Bong!” As a twelve-year-old, I worked hard to be able to replicate that sound. I was able to be so successful at it, because I got— Because that sound was to indicate to the teacher to turn to the next frame in the film strip. I actually got the teacher to start skipping ahead by making that sound. I was so proud of myself. So there you go. I don’t think I’ve ever revealed that before.

Fr. Stephen: 90% of our listeners are way too young to know at all what you’re talking about.

Fr. Andrew: I know! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: We’re old men. We’re yelling at clouds.

Fr. Andrew: We’re pushing 50 pretty hard. Well, yes, so, all right. There will be ellipses; there will be no bongs. And by that I mean the sound.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, wow. Wow. This is what happens when we pre-record and we’re unsupervised.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I’m so sorry!

Fr. Stephen: That’s what this is right here.

Fr. Andrew: Trudi, come save us! No, there’s no Trudi. [Laughter] Okay. Right, I’m going to read this—

Fr. Stephen: Wheels coming right off this.

Fr. Andrew: And we’re going to kind of start and stop along the way to offer some comments. All right. Starting with verse 22 of John 6. “On the next day”—and that means after the feeding of the 5,000.

On the next day, the crowd that remained on the other side of the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone. Other boats from Tiberius came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus.

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?”

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.”

Fr. Stephen: Okay, pause it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Now, that might— What you read there—for those following along at home, this is in verse 26—what you said there about, when you read, “Not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves,” that might be confusing to some folks, because they might say, “Wasn’t the sign that he fed all those people?” [Laughter] “That all those people were able to eat their fill, that kind of was the sign, wasn’t it?”

So this relates to— St. John uses the term “sign” in a very particular way all through his gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and isn’t it sometimes called the book of the seven signs? Like there’s seven great signs before his death? Or is that not a thing?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, well, so there’s this whole… There was this whole… critical theory that St. John’s gospel was a reworking of what they called the Signs Gospel.

Fr. Andrew: Ah, I see. I see. I’m not going there. I’ve just heard that.

Fr. Stephen: Right. Um…

Fr. Andrew: Didn’t want to derail you there.

Fr. Stephen: I’ll just go ahead and refer this. I was trying to decide whether to just openly reference this. So the now unfortunately departed Dr. Daniel Fletcher, his doctoral dissertation was about this, was about St. John’s use of signs, and he particularly connected it to the book of Numbers and the way signs are used in the book of Numbers in the wilderness. The idea here of a sign is not just “oh, a miracle,” but it is a miraculous occurrence which represents the reality of the impending coming of the kingdom of God. What Christ is saying here is that you didn’t— They didn’t follow after Jesus because they understood what he had done, that they looked at what he had done and said, “This is God feeding his people. This is like the manna in the wilderness. And so this is a sign that the kingdom of God is near, that this is the Messiah. We need to go find him and follow him.” They were just looking for him because they were hungry again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “This guy’s got food!” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: They were approaching him, and so this is why he says to them, “You need to not be so concerned striving after filling your belly, and be more concerned about the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man, this messianic title, will give you.” So that’s what he’s aiming at there. He’s saying, “You guys, you’re looking at it like cool magic tricks. You have something you want me to do for you right here and now. You’re not understanding what’s really going on, and you’re not really trying to come and become my disciples.”

Fr. Andrew: Got you. All right, are we ready to keep rolling here?

Fr. Stephen: Yep.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, verse 28.

Then they said to him, “What must we do to be doing the works of God?”

Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, to be faithful to him whom he has sent.”

So they said to him, “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and trust you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness. As it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ”

Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven, for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

Fr. Stephen: Pause it.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: So they’re sort of getting closer to the right track, but they pick up on the word “sign” and use it differently. They say to him, “Oh, okay, so you want us to come and follow you and become your disciples. Well, show us something!” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “What makes you the guy?”

Fr. Stephen: Then they basically ask for bread again.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: Like: “Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness, right? You gave the bread to them, so give us some more bread, too. Give us some more bread.” So Jesus’ response has these two things. “First of all, it wasn’t Moses; it was God who gave the bread.” So again, encouraging them to see. They were saying, “What sign will you do? What will you do? This is what Moses did.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, they followed Moses, so…

Fr. Stephen: “What will you do?” And he’s like: “Look it wasn’t Moses; it was God.” Meaning: “If I give you bread from God, it’s a sign in the other sense.” He’s trying to push them to a bigger… Not just like: “I’m a prophet; you should listen to what I say,” but that Christ is beyond that.

Then he goes to further define the bread he was talking about, because he had mentioned that bread that continues to eternal life. Now he says that bread is “he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

Fr. Andrew: Okay. So then, verse 34:

They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever is faithful to me shall never thirst. But I have said to you that you have seen me and yet are not faithful.”

Fr. Stephen: So they already have it, in that they’ve met him.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “You’ve got the bread. I’m… standing in front of you!” [Laughter] Skipping ahead a few verses, now to verse 41:

So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”

They said, “Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’ ”

Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me—not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever is faithful to me has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

Fr. Stephen: Okay, pause it there. So there’s a little bit of wordplay going on here with this “grumbling.” The Judeans grumble; he says, “Don’t grumble.” That word for grumbling is the word that’s used in the Septuagint for what the Israelites kept doing in the wilderness, when they became disaffected. They would grumble: they would grumble against Moses; they’d grumble against God. “You brought us out in the wilderness to die!” [Laughter] Over and over and over again. So this is deliberately setting up: Well, not a lot has changed, but also that the people who are talking to Christ now are still not seeing what is really going on in front of them, in the same way that those in the wilderness were just sort of concerned day-to-day: “Oh, we don’t have enough water. Oh, we don’t have enough food.” Like, not seeing: “Hey, remember the exodus that just like happened!?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: “God brought us up out of Egypt and he’s going to abandon us in the wilderness!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, and being faithful to God and trusting in him to bring them through now to the land of Canaan: the same thing is going on in terms of Jesus. They keep asking, “Give us some more bread.” [Laughter] But they’re still thinking about it in this manner and not understanding what’s really happening. So even the generation that wasn’t struck down in the wilderness for their grumbling against God and against Moses—they all died in the wilderness—but even those of the next generation, that actually went into the land, were brought into the land, they still eventually died. So what Christ is talking about is a faithfulness to him and a feeding on the bread which he is—which he identifies here as his flesh, that he will give for the life of the world—that leads to eternal life, not just to another few days of life on this earth.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and you get the sense, especially when he says, “The bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” that that sounds nuts to them by what they say next. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, verse 52: the Jews say that it sounds nuts.

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.

Fr. Stephen: And that last verse is important, because we didn’t get the setting at the beginning. We were told they went looking for Jesus and found him at Capernaum. But he’s actually saying all these things in the synagogue as he’s teaching in the synagogue.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, which has got to seem especially weird to a lot of people listening. [Laughter] “What? This is the weirdest sermon ever.”

Fr. Stephen: “This isn’t what we came here for today.” [Laughter] We talked a little bit about the comparison and contrast that goes on here with the manna, the bread, the bread from heaven in the Old Testament. There’s also a little bit of a connection to what’s going on with the shewbread in that Christ here connects coming to know God and learning from God this relational element with the eating of the bread, in the same way in which the shewbread was eaten in the presence of God. So there’s this connection between eating the bread and drawing close to God that’s also sort of interwoven in there. Some of the verses we skipped developed that a little more, but, I mean, it was long enough.

Fr. Andrew: Sure.

Fr. Stephen: So again, we’re not intending to pick on whatever Protestant listeners may still be listening, but this passage we just read—and again, I think this really stems from some of the same kind of reactionary thinking against medieval Roman Catholicism, which speaks very clearly about eating Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood—there have been a lot of historical efforts from some corners to try to argue that this has nothing to do with the Eucharist. And those arguments are kind of weird and not very good.

One of these arguments is kind of really circular and sort of the dénouement of this argument was made by Rudolf Bultmann who’s a 20th-century German, so at least I’m branching out in whom I pick on.

Fr. Andrew: He was kind of the bogeyman in Scripture classes when I was in seminary! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: He wasn’t all bad. Just mostly.

Fr. Andrew: Only mostly bad. All bad, there’s only one thing you can do…

Fr. Stephen: He had a lot of quotes that are super ironic now. Like: “Who can believe in the resurrection of the dead in the age of radio?”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! Wow.

Fr. Stephen: “We’re in the age of the wireless, people. How can we possibly believe in this primitive superstition?”

Fr. Andrew: It’s current year! It’s amazing. A biblical scholar making the current-year argument. That is so great. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But what this is based on—again, Bultmann’s Exhibit A, but this is found more widely than it should be—people have noticed about St. John’s gospel that sort of the traditional places you’d go to look for things about the sacraments in the other gospels aren’t there in St. John’s gospel. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, there’s this weird little thing in the way Christ’s baptism— Christ’s baptism is in St. John’s gospel, but the way it’s narrated, there’s this weird thing where it doesn’t actually describe the baptism. He goes and he interacts with St. John the Forerunner, and then it talks about him coming out of the water.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so “St. John is avoiding sacraments!”

Fr. Stephen: Like, it skips— Right. And even more sort of major is St. John’s gospel doesn’t have the institution of the Eucharist in it. When you get to the place of the Mystical Supper in St. John’s gospel, it describes him washing the disciples’ feet—Christ washing the disciples’ feet—and doesn’t describe him instituting the Eucharist that’s in the other three gospels.

So with Bultmann and some of the other people who make this argument, it is in part a relic of this older, now very outdated, view that the gospels, especially St. John’s gospel, was sort of this weird, independent composition that had nothing to do with the other ones, and that they were produced by these different communities. This is the “communities write books” theory, which tells me that these people have never been a member of a committee.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Yeah, communities can sometimes translate books, but…

Fr. Stephen: Eh, no, they don’t. Individual people do the translating and then committees argue about it and hold up the process. [Laughter] So there’s this idea that: “Oh, whatever we see, we have to isolate St. John’s gospel, and then whatever we see in it, whatever features we want to notice, that then reflects the community that produced it. So the Johannine community… Well, clearly since there’s not the institution of the Eucharist there and baptism gets skipped, this is a community that didn’t have sacraments.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah…

Fr. Stephen: “Or St. John himself, if we have this writer,” who, of course, most of the people wouldn’t hold was the actual St. John, but I digress—that “the author or authors of St. John’s gospel were anti-sacramental or didn’t believe in sacraments.” Once you then make that argument and you come to, say, Christ telling St. Nicodemus that he had to be born of water and the Spirit, that can’t be referring to baptism—

Fr. Andrew: Right, because you’ve got this a priori commitment.

Fr. Stephen: —because St. John is anti-baptism; he’s anti-sacrament. So when Christ in John 6 talks about eating his body—eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he can’t be talking about the Eucharist, because “St. John and his community didn’t have the Eucharist: they didn’t do sacraments.” This is why I say this is like a textbook circular argument of assuming what you want to prove. [Laughter] You take half the data, argue for a conclusion based on that half of the data, and then use that conclusion to exclude the other half of the data.

Fr. Andrew: Don’t try this at home, kids! Or anywhere, really. [Laughter] Definitely not in school.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, this is bad. This is a waste of time. This is sophistry. That dog don’t hunt. You sometimes also get: “Well, look, we’re going to accept that St. John is actually St. John or just that St. John’s community was an actually existing church that we have evidence of that had the Eucharist, but Christ doesn’t institute the Eucharist until, like, right before his death, whereas John 6 takes place, like, way before that. So how can Christ be talking about the Eucharist? Because he hasn’t instituted it yet.”

Fr. Andrew: Are they trying to say he hasn’t thought it up, hasn’t come up with it yet? So he’s like: “Oh, wait, wait.”

Fr. Stephen: I’m not sure? Usually they don’t say that. Usually they say, “No one would have understood what he was talking about.” And it’s like: “What? Christ talked about things during his ministry and no one understood what he was talking about until after the resurrection? You don’t say!”

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Right!

Fr. Stephen: The gospels literally say, over and over again, that Christ said things all the time during his earthly ministry that no one understood until after the resurrection. So this would be par for the course!

Fr. Andrew: Depth charges, as you like to do. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: And especially in this case, we’re literally told in John 6, in the text itself, that nobody understood what he was talking about. After we left off, the disciples come to Jesus and say basically, “This is a hard saying. What are you talking about?”

Fr. Andrew: And he’s like: “You going to leave me, too, guys?”

Fr. Stephen: And Jesus says, “Will you now also leave?” [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s really notable, I think, that he doesn’t at any point at this say, “Okay, wait. Sorry. Guys, guys, you misunderstood. This is a metaphor for something else, so calm down. I’m not talking about eating flesh and drinking blood; I’m talking about ‘eating flesh,’ ‘drinking blood.’ ” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. And if— Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the Eucharist is “just symbolic.” Pageau just broke another pencil. [Laughter] Let’s say it’s just— this is just some nebulous woo-woo sense that it’s the body of Christ; it represents it in some way or something, but isn’t. Why would this be the metaphor you’d choose—

Fr. Andrew: A cannibalism metaphor, apparently?

Fr. Stephen: —if there’s no reality to it?

Fr. Andrew: “It’s like cannibalism, guys.” “Ohhh!”

Fr. Stephen: If you could choose any metaphor—you could choose any metaphor in the world, because the metaphor has no connection to the reality—it’s purely a metaphor—why would you choose this one?

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] I mean, this is— Even among pagans, cannibalism was considered to be super ooky. Even only certain pagans did this sort of thing.

Fr. Stephen: And we know that from later Roman sources: “They get together and eat the body and drink the blood of this Chrestus!”

Fr. Andrew: “These Christians are like cannibals! What’s wrong with them!”

Fr. Stephen: Right, they get accused of cannibalism! Why would you keep using this metaphor if it’s just a metaphor?

Fr. Andrew: Kind of an unfortunate choice.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah.

Fr. Andrew: In this world you will have hermeneutical trouble… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and that creates the biggest problem with trying to take this text in some other direction as referring to something else, is whatever kind of spiritual thing you want to say it’s actually talking about, it’s always going to beg the question: So why this metaphor, then? So then why is it compared to this of all things?

Bluntly, we’ve got to say maybe our doctrine should come from the Bible instead of going to the Bible and telling it what it can and can’t say.

Fr. Andrew: Enough of those traditions of men.

Fr. Stephen: Like… it’s kind of clear on the face of it what it says. And to me, most decisive about this—and we talked about this in our how to and how not to read the Bible—you can’t get into the brain of the original author from this vantage point. You can try all you like to figure out what was in St. John’s head when he wrote this. Good luck to you. You’re probably just going to project yourself back into history.

But we can try to recreate the ear. Who were the first people who heard these words? Probably read to them. Who were the first people who heard this from St. John? And the first people who heard this from St. John were a group of people who gathered at least once a week to celebrate the Eucharist and heard someone in the leadership position, depending on where they were, say, “This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, shed for you,” and participated in the Eucharist. So the people who originally heard this would have immediately connected it to the Eucharist that they were celebrating at least weekly.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, every indication about what early Christian worship looks like says that that’s what they’re doing.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and since that’s what they’re doing, since at least 1 Corinthians was written, which was written before St. John’s gospel, they would have immediately jumped to that conclusion, and there is nothing in the text to dissuade you from that conclusion. St. John famously has these editorial comments all through his gospel, like—

Fr. Andrew: “Let the reader understand.”

Fr. Stephen: “He said this to refer to the Temple that was his body,” where he clarifies things just in case there’s someone clueless. He does not clarify this—at all. It’s allowed to just be how it is. And that’s how everyone would have read it and heard it.

But so, moving on from that. [Laughter] One important element here, more important than just defending the traditional, normal read of it, actually, is that this gives us another little piece in terms of the Eucharist, because what Christ says here talks about what we could call a positive element of the sacrifice of the Eucharist. And what do I mean by positive? Well, we talked about the “forgiveness of sins, peace with God” element. We talked about the “offering of thanks and praise to God” element. But also that this is positive in the sense of the life of the participants and being positively transformative, not just the remission of sins.

Fr. Andrew: There’s what, twice in this passage, where Christ says, “I’m going to raise him up at the last day”? Yeah, there’s this resurrectional promise.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and that this is the one who learns from God, the one who knows God; this knowledge is drawing closer to God, encountering him, being empowered by him, receiving eternal life, life and strength, becoming like God through participating in the Eucharist.

Fr. Andrew: “You have life in you…”

Fr. Stephen: And so that is a critically important element.

Fr. Andrew: Right, and connects with the general sacrificial understanding that you become like what you worship or, as we would say, “You are what you eat.”

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So I am a Big Mac! [Laughter] Right, so that’s that positive— And that’s a big part of what it means when we talk about the “in return we receive the body and blood of Christ.”

So another importance, though—another important image related to the Eucharist in the New Testament and importance of this idea of Christ’s flesh, is related to the image of the wedding-feast.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, the marriage-supper of the Lamb.

Fr. Stephen: The wedding celebration. And this is—obviously this originates in the Old Testament in the prophets, where God presents himself as sort of the husband of Israel, sometimes separately of Judah and Israel.

Fr. Andrew: Right. Writ large in Hosea, especially.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and Israel is the unfaithful spouse in this situation, the unfaithful wife. So we see those themes get continued into the New Testament, and particularly prominent in various ways in the parables that Christ tells, many of which involve the coming of the Bridegroom, the preparation for the marriage-feast. You get these explicit parables that revolve around wedding-feasts and marriage-feasts in, like, Matthew 22 and Luke 12 and Luke 14. We won’t read those whole things here, because we’re just talking about sort of the theme. You see this theme of the wedding-supper of the Lamb in Revelation 19. This is the way in which Christ’s glorious appearing is discussed; one of the preeminent ways is as this marriage celebration, this sort of consummation of the marriage between Christ and his Bride, the Church, the Assembly, the assembled people of God. This is not, to reiterate some things we said last time—it is not that God got a divorce from Israel and now has a new wife. [Laughter] That’s not how any of this works. This is the restoration of that marriage. So the new covenant is like a renewal of vows, as it were. [Laughter]

But one of the places where this comes out specifically in terms of the Eucharist— I mean, the fact that it’s a wedding feast, we can see the sort of connections there. But to put a finer point on it, in John 19, and specifically verses 31-37— So when St. John in particular narrates Christ’s crucifixion and death, he starts drawing on all of this language from Genesis. Christ completing his work and then resting on the sabbath: we’ve talked about some of these things before, how the Theotokos is referred to as “Woman” repeatedly in St. John’s gospel and then gets referred to as “Mother” at the side of the cross, and the way “Isshah” becomes “Eve.” He’s drawing on all of this imagery.

One of those that I think we pass by o’er quickly is the— in that section of John 19, it describes the opening of Christ’s side when Christ is pierced with the spear. The opening of his side is supposed to call us back to Adam’s side being opened in Genesis 2, and Adam’s side is opened to create woman, to create his bride. And when he sees her, he says, “This is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” And we’re told because of this the two become one flesh. So when Christ’s side is opened, blood and water flow out. Pick your Church Father and look this passage up. This is connected to the water of baptism and blood in the Eucharist, which sort of create, as we’ve talked about many times, his Bride, the Church. So part of this imagery of eating Christ’s flesh is becoming one flesh with Christ, this imagery.

Fr. Andrew: That’s cool.

Fr. Stephen: But so the blood there coming out of his side, the blood being involved in the Eucharist—to anyone who’s passingly familiar with the Torah, the idea of drinking Christ’s blood raises questions.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, as it should, given all of that cannibalism stuff we were saying earlier. [Laughter] So we got— Here’s another voicemail that we got, and this is from Nathan.

Nathan: Hello, Fathers. My question has to do with the Eucharist in general, and in particular the consuming of the wine and/or the blood of Christ during the ritual. In the Old Testament, the worshipers were prohibited from drinking the blood, and that blood was taken in particular during the Day of Atonement into the tabernacle and was used to atone the elements within the tabernacle to remove the taint. Is it accurate to say that now, in the New Testament, we are commanded to drink the blood, primarily because our bodies are now the tabernacle of the Lord, of the Holy Spirit? And that because we still sin—albeit we shouldn’t, but we still do—once we have confession and that sin has been absolved, we then need the blood of the sacrifice, the blood of the Lord, to go into our bodies, which is the tabernacle of the Holy Spirit, the tent of the Holy Spirit, in order to cleanse, to wipe away, to expiate, to smear away that taint and corruption that’s left by that sin? I look forward to hearing your comments. Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: There you go. Well, is he onto something there? There’s certainly in the Liturgy, there’s talk about washing away sins and all that sort of stuff related to the blood of Christ.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: Yes!

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] And in fact, I promised in the second half that we would get to this in the third half. So, yeah, starting with why the blood-drinking was forbidden. I think we’ve talked about this a couple of times. You see this sort of descent happen in the early chapters of Genesis where, in paradise, the humans are eating fruit. Nothing dies from fruit, so fruit is— The rest of creation is sort of offering itself to humanity for food in a way that’s not doing any harm to anything.

Part of the curse when humanity is expelled from paradise is: “Now you’re going to have bring forth food from the earth through the sweat of your brow. So now the creation isn’t going to sort of offer itself to you for food; you’re going to have to work to bring forth this food by farming.” This kind of growing and harvesting food: you’re killing plants. So there’s already a bit of a descent there, both in the relationship between man and the rest of creation and in terms of: Now it’s dying. It’s not offering itself; you’re killing it and eating it.

But it’s only after the flood that humanity is given permission to eat meat, to eat animals. It’s in that context of this further descent where humanity is now going to be hunting its fellow creatures that that’s where the blood-drinking, because the blood is the life, that’s where that limit is placed. Because that is the limit to remind humanity not to become completely predatory. That’s where there’s a shift, where you’re killing and feeding on other living things, but we don’t go so far as life directly feeding on life. So it’s a limit on sort of predation.

Fr. Andrew: Which—that limit’s not there for pagans. They have blood-drinking rituals.

Fr. Stephen: Right, but this is why this applies, the blood-drinking part, even in Acts 15 that we talked about last time—this is why the blood-drinking part applies to everybody. So the pagans should not have been doing that; it’s not like eating pork. It’s not like— We didn’t read it, because it wasn’t completely on point, but right before the passage in Deuteronomy we read about the sort of meal on the pilgrimage, there was actually a comment that the commandment that was there was that the Israelites were not to eat an animal that they found dead, but they could take it and give it to a foreigner or sell it to a foreigner. So there’s no problem with them eating the animal that was found dead; this was just something that was off-limits to the Israelites.

But the blood-drinking was off-limits to everybody. Why? Because it’s the signifier of man becoming predatory. And we talked about werewolves and cannibalism and all that in our last year’s Halloween episode, that kind of predatory thing. Humanity was not created to be a predator in the world, of any kind.

So, that said, why, then, in the Eucharist?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, how did it become okay?

Fr. Stephen: Right, and so there’s two main pieces here. The first one is one that’s been sort of a theme all through this, is that Christ’s sacrifice is one of self-offering. So Christ is offering his flesh and his blood to us; we are not preying upon Christ. [Laughter] That’s sort of that first element, so it is more like in paradise creation offering itself to us as food than like murderous cannibalism.

But the other element is exactly what Nathan was talking about, that the life that is in Christ’s blood is eternal life; it’s the life of God—

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, it’s not animal life.

Fr. Stephen: —which purifies, which is eternal life, which drives out sins, purifies from sin, cleanses from sin. When I mentioned in the second half, that there is kind of sideways an element of atonement in the Eucharist, this is what I was pointing toward, was precisely what Nathan was pointing out, this element of the purification of sin. And this is when Christ’s blood is talked about in the Scriptures—and the Johannine literature is a particular place where this happens a lot—it’s talked about in terms of his blood purifying, purging, washing us from sin, not his blood appeasing wrath.

Fr. Andrew: The blood god… “Blood for the blood god.”

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So those are the sort of elements surrounding that. And it’s not, again, that now it’s okay for Christians, because Acts 15 says it’s not. It’s still sinful to… Cannibalism obviously is still sinful, and drinking animal— eating and drinking animal blood is still sinful and still has that predatory significance, but we are not preying upon Christ. Christ is offering his blood to us to purify us from sin and its effects.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Okay, we got another question that came in, asking about—we actually have a couple of questions about this, but from a couple different angles—about the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

Grant: Hello, Fathers. My name is Grant, and I had a question on the topic of Christ’s presence within the Eucharist. Is God’s mystical presence something that is relative to the person receiving the Eucharist, or continually present regardless of who partakes in the mysteries? As an added topic, can God be present in a different church communion, even that of a low-church Protestant group, let’s say, supposing a faithful Orthodox Christian has nowhere else to go? Thank you.

Fr. Andrew: All right. Well, I mean, I think the answer to the first one, from Orthodox practice, is pretty easy, that Christ is present in the Eucharist, no matter the disposition of the person receiving, which is why it can be bad for you.

Fr. Stephen: Or the priest: or the disposition of the priest.

Fr. Andrew: Exactly. We’re not Donatists.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that’s because Christ is the actual offerer of the actual sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew: Yep. So how about the other side?

Fr. Stephen: The other piece— Well, since he phrased it as can God be present: Yes—

Frs. Andrew and Stephen: God can do whatever he wants.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah, there’s not a “can’t” with God, really. But “Is this what regularly happens?” might be a better question. I mean, the first thing we have to say, or at least that I have to say—I won’t speak for Fr. Andrew, because we are, again, two separate people—is that I’m not going to say more about Protestant worship than those Protestants would say about their own worship. That may seem obvious, but it’s not always obvious. So if you don’t believe that ordination is a sacrament, as most Protestant groups don’t, then I’m not going to say that your Protestant ordination was a sacrament. That just seems sort of basic and respectful to me.

So if someone says that communion or the Lord’s supper or the Eucharist, however they name it, if they say, “Hey, what we’re doing here is not a sacrament,” I’m not going to say it is. I’m not going to say they’re performing a sacrament when they say they’re not performing a sacrament.

Fr. Andrew: Okay, well, what about the ones who say that they are? Because that’s a thing, too.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah. Well, this is a smaller group in this case, because we’re talking about the presence of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Right, it’s true.

Fr. Stephen: So most—the majority of Protestants in the United States would not say that the body and blood of Christ are really present in the elements, so I’m not going to say that he is in the elements when they do it, because that just seems respectful to me, to not say they’re doing something they don’t think they’re doing or want to be doing.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, because Kyle—not Kyle, sorry—Grant did mention even low-church Protestants. Well, that’s basically people who don’t believe—don’t say, don’t teach—that Christ is truly present there.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And I believe the Speakpipe, it said “Grant M.” So I’m going to assume that this question is from Grant Morrison, the writer of Doom Patrol, Animal Man, and JLA in the ‘90s.

Fr. Andrew: There can’t be any other “Grant M"s out there, so. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: No! No. And if so, Grant, I haven’t seen you since San Diego Comic-Con 1998. You never call; you never write.

So then in the minority— We have minority cases. And he’s specifically asking about Protestant churches. You basically… I mean, congregational groups, who knows, but you’re basically talking about the Lutherans.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and maybe some Anglicans.

Fr. Stephen: Right, some Anglicans, although half of them don’t want to be called Protestants, especially the ones who think Christ is really present in the elements! They’d rather be called Catholics. So, yeah, you’re talking about a smaller group. I mean, in that case, I have to fall back to what St. Irenaeus said. “We know where the Holy Spirit is; we don’t know where he isn’t.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, we can’t— On the one hand, we can’t say, “Yeah, they’ve definitely got it,” because that’s not our place to say that. But I think it’s also problematic to say, “Yeah, they definitely don’t.”

Fr. Stephen: Right, but so for an Orthodox Christian who doesn’t have access to an Orthodox church, which was mentioned in the question, there’s a whole other set of issues about worship and that kind of thing that then come into play. If the question is aimed at: Well, if I’m unable to go to an Orthodox church, can I go to a Lutheran church and receive the Eucharist there and really be receiving Christ?—if that’s the nature of the question, there’s a whole other set of issues beyond just “Is it possible that Christ is present in their elements when they perform their Mass or their Liturgy?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, kind of a “Is that good enough?” even in difficult circumstance.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and not just that, but ritual, as we’ve talked about a number of times on this show, informs and changes you and how you view things, and so—why not offend everybody?—if this is like an ELCA, very liberal Lutheran church that’s still doing liturgical high-church things, the way in which actively participating in that worship over a long period of time is going to inform and shape you is not going to be into the likeness of Christ.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think that— And I’m going to touch on this in some of my final comments in a few minutes, but I think that if you think— If you go there in terms of “Well, I want to receive Communion, and maybe they have it,” then what you’ve done is you’ve extracted that from the ritual context that you just described, or trying to, but it turns out that you can’t actually do that. You’re there. You’re participating. You’re being formed; you’re being transformed. Yep.

Okay, well, we’ve got another— As I said, we’ve got another Speakpipe, another voicemail, related to this question of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

Kyle: Greetings, Fr. Andrew and Fr. Stephen, from the Philippines. I have a question on the Eucharist. From my understanding, it seems that in Orthodoxy, the belief is that Jesus is really and truly present in the elements, but there isn’t any clear description of how. I was wondering if there is any take, like Roman Catholics on transubstantiation, within Orthodoxy, if there’s any metaphysical approach. And secondly, what role does it play to ask the questions of how when it comes to things like the real presence in the Eucharist? Thanks. Appreciate what you guys do.

Fr. Andrew: So this is Kyle in the Philippines. Now we’ve got Kyle in Ireland, whom we hear from fairly regularly, and Kyle in the Philippines. So the world is really bracketed by Kyles. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Neither of whom is Kyle Braslavsky.

Fr. Andrew: I’m pretty sure that’s true.

Fr. Stephen: This is… I mean, the short answer is No. And the long answer is: Noooo. I’m kidding.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Wow! Wow. That was a really low-hanging joke, but you went right for it.

Fr. Stephen: It was.

Fr. Andrew: It was amazing. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: In large part, this is a place where I think from an Orthodox perspective, the West kind of took a wrong turn in the sense that when you read the Eastern Fathers and they talk about the Eucharist, they talk about what the Eucharist does, what it’s for, what it does in our lives, how it relates to Christ’s sacrifice and self-offering, the kind of things we’ve been talking about. When you read—very early in the West—there start to be these eucharistic debates, and those debates don’t focus on what it does or how it relates to Christ’s sacrifice directly; those debates are about how it works.

One of my favorite examples of this was the Radbertus-Ratramnus feud.

Fr. Andrew: It’s still hard to believe all of those are real names.

Fr. Stephen: I know everyone knows all about it. It was all the hot goss’ in the 11th century.

Fr. Andrew: Radbertus, Ratramnus—and friends! [Laughter] I feel like this is like a—I don’t know, a feature on The Muppet Show: “Now for Radbertus, Ratramnus—and friends!”

Fr. Stephen: Radbertus had published a thing about the Eucharist in which he argued that the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist is his physical body from his earthly ministry, so it is the crucified body of Jesus; it is the body and blood which hung on the cross. Ratramnus countered that the Eucharist is actually Christ’s resurrected body and blood. And you may say, “Wait, what?” [Laughter] And when I mention this debate to Orthodox people, it’s fascinating, because I can tell they’re trying to figure out which one we believe! [Laughter] And they can’t, offhand, because we don’t have this kind of discussion. Christ’s body is Christ’s body! [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. “Is it his body at this point in time or is it his body at this point in time?”

Fr. Stephen: But there was a decision in the West that Radbertus was right and Ratramnus was wrong. So that shows a different shape of thinking about these things, and there’s all kinds of reasons why this happened. It’s not just like: “Oh, they were all Scholastics, and there were no Scholastics in the East.” There are people in the East—saints in the East with the surname Scholasticos. [Laughter]

Fr. Andrew: And that wasn’t just their dad’s name.

Fr. Stephen: Right. There are particular reasons why this happened, cultural things, and why these disputes sort of break out and why they had to be decided, and why there’s sort of an official statement in the West on all these issues, whereas even when the East issues official statements, there’s usually a contradictory statement issued by someone else shortly thereafter. So it’s a different cultural issue and that kind of thing.

But, that said, this kind of debates continue throughout the history of the Western Church. As with so many things—and there’s a long list of these things—you’ll have sort of multiple traditions going on in the West, and then when you get to the Protestant Reformation, Protestantism lines up on one side, and Roman Catholicism lines up on the other side of these issues, which previously had been sort of internal debates in the Western Church.

The whole issue that Kyle is asking about, about Christ’s presence, is one of those issues. If you read in the Summa, Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of this, he says that he finds among the Fathers two different views. The two views he found among the Fathers was one view that after the bread and wine were consecrated, they were now the body and blood of Christ, and no trace of bread or wine remained—that’s what comes to be called transubstantiation, and that’s the position Thomas Aquinas took. But he says that there’s also a position in the Fathers, the people who wrote before him, that the body and blood of Christ became really physically present in the elements but there was still bread and wine—the substance of bread and wine still remained—and this is basically what becomes consubstantiation, which is basically the view of Lutheranism. I know Lutherans— You guys are unique snowflakes. You don’t like consubstantiation. I get it, okay. You don’t want to be categorized; you don’t want to be put in a box! And I know there’s more nuance to it that Luther uses the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures with bread and wine—that’s super problematic, by the way, but we won’t go into that here.

Fr. Andrew: In panem…

Fr. Stephen: There’s all kinds of nuance here, I get it, but basically Thomas Aquinas testifies to, existing in the West, these two currents of tradition: one that becomes the Roman Catholic position authoritatively, and one that basically becomes the position of Lutheranism.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, often called consubstantiation.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, which they don’t like. And so again you see these— Part of these lining up on either side of it is because of the conflict of the Protestant Reformation. That’s also something that doesn’t exist in the history of the East, and so there’s no need to sort of settle those things.

So if you ask, “How is this the body and blood of Christ?” we would say, “Really” or “Truly.” Now, there are, from the post-Reformation era— From the 17th century, there were a couple of local councils—I have to do due diligence here. There were a couple of local councils of the Church of Constantinople—that are not available in English: their findings are only available in Greek, so you’ve got to track the Greek down if you want to really read them—you can find stuff written about them in English, but the actual text nobody’s bothered to translate in full, at least that I’ve been able to find—where they condemned the Lutheran view. And by “condemned the Lutheran view,” I don’t mean “condemned consubstantiation”; I mean, they went into detail about the whole hypostatic union model and condemned that.

That news did not get to certain people in the Greek Orthodox Church in the pandemic, that their own Church had condemned that view, because they, some of them promoted the condemned view during the pandemic. You can edit this out if you want to, Father, otherwise—

Fr. Andrew: No, no!

Fr. Stephen: —otherwise, send hate mail to Fr. Andrew Damick.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, yeah, I’ll take it. Send it on.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] To which I refer them. Their Greek should at least be as good as mine. I’d refer them back to those councils.

Fr. Andrew: There you go.

Fr. Stephen: But, though they condemned the Lutheran view, the term they used in Greek to describe what actually happens, some people have wanted to translate as “transubstantiation”—

Fr. Andrew: Yes, metousiosis.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. That’s not really “transubstantiation,” in the sense that that term does not necessarily include this idea that there is none of the substance of bread and wine left? It’s hard to nail down is what I’m saying. The term is vague. The most you can get out of that term for sure is that there’s a real change. It now is a different thing, which is hard to derive technical details from. But I want to acknowledge that, because that’s the closest thing— But that, even that, if you took that to mean “transubstantiation,” that would be the statement of one local church and wouldn’t be sort of binding on all of the Orthodox churches. And I don’t think it is, really, that simple in terms of what it means.

So where does the rubber meet the road on this? There are places where this difference in approach actually makes a practical difference, and I’ll give you one: the concept in the Roman Church of the perpetual adoration of the sacrament.

Fr. Andrew: Right, where they take the Eucharist and put it in a monstrance and put it usually in a little chapel, and people go and bow down in front of it and worship it.

Fr. Stephen: Right. That is eucharistic adoration, not veneration.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, not within the context of the Mass, but as a separate act.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, because based on a series of decisions regarding the nature of the Eucharist, that is Christ himself now for them.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, period.

Fr. Stephen: And therefore can be worshiped. The problem with that from an Orthodox perspective— The problem with that from the perspective of the Protestant Reformers was it was a “condemnable idolatry,” as one Reform statement of faith says. So they viewed it as idolatry. That’s not the problem from the Orthodox perspective, or at least not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem from the Orthodox perspective with that is that this is sort of the ultimate outcome of focusing on what it is rather than what it does. Because the Eucharist is to be eaten!

Fr. Andrew: Right, it is food.

Fr. Stephen: It is food for the faithful. It is Christ giving himself to us for food. And so looking at it, propping it up—that makes sense if your focus is on what it is and having defined what it is, but it doesn’t make sense if you’re focused on what it does, because then it’s: “Why aren’t you eating it?” That’s how we partake of Christ, is by eating it, not by worshiping it.

Fr. Andrew: It’s a good question. We got some good questions for this episode. I appreciate everybody who sent those in.

Fr. Stephen: And that, I’m sure, ticked off the last remaining Catholics. There’s probably like three people still listening.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Fr. Stephen: All three of you. Maybe they were in a turkey coma, so they’ve only been vaguely paying attention, and we’ll get away with it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah. Tryptophan. Some final thoughts. So to kind of jump off what we were just talking about there, and also to put it within the context of things that I’ve seen within Orthodox churches—Orthodox people doing some things that are… problematic, shall we say— For instance, you have the reality of people who come to church shortly before Communion is served, receive Communion, and then leave. Or sometimes they’ll be there for most of it and then leave right after they’ve received Communion. Or—and I actually was told this by a priest up in Canada—I’m not going to mention where; I don’t want to call anybody out—but that the parish that he inherited, that they’d had a practice there where people would commune once a year, usually on Holy Friday or Holy Saturday, and they would come by the church—they would stop by; they would drive up, and even one person left their car running out on the curb—and they would come in and expect the priest to commune them, then they would just be sort of on their way. So literally drive-by Communion. Literally.

So why do people do this? I mean, obviously on some level it makes sense to them; it seems right to them. Something’s in their head that says this is the way to go here, and they’ve thought it through on some level. I believe that what it comes down to is this objectification that we were talking about, that holy Communion maybe not being defined by precise philosophical terms like transubstantiation or consubstantiation, holy Communion is nonetheless objectified in a kind of talismanic way: “I went, I got my Communion.” I’ve actually heard people say that: “I got my Communion.”

This is a problem. This is a problem, and I think some of it stems from— Well, a lot of people probably just uncatechized entirely, but also some bad catechesis, too, and I think some well-meaning catechesis that often focuses on the fact that it is the body and blood of Christ. It absolutely is the body and blood of Christ—don’t get me wrong—but when that’s the, maybe in some cases, exclusive thing you focus in on with regards to what the Eucharist is, then there is a space within which it can be treated in this talismanic way. “Well, that’s the body and blood of Christ. Wow!” Sure, all kinds of piety flows from that, and that’s beautiful and good, but when “getting” the body and blood of Christ is the thing you showed up for, then that means that the setting in which it’s embedded doesn’t really matter to you—that’s why you can just show up right before Communion, or that’s why you can do the drive-by; that’s why you can get it and walk out.

It’s embedded, and we’ve talked in this episode about all the ways it’s embedded, but just to sort of summarize that a little bit, it’s embedded within a ritual experience, a ritual that we participate in, that is a ritual meal that brings us together, that binds us together, that binds us to God, that vivifies us, that shapes us. And that experience of being bound and shaped and all of that doesn’t come simply from the moment that holy Communion goes into our mouths. There’s a lot that precedes that, and there’s stuff that follows it, too. It’s embedded.

This episode is releasing on American Thanksgiving. Sorry, Canadians, we didn’t maybe do something for you back at the last month. And Americans, we have a ritual that goes with Thanksgiving. There’s a lot of variations on it, but the one element that pretty much is universal is a big meal with lots of stuff, and that it’s family gathering together. This is the American tradition about Thanksgiving. Often then you’ll have people saying something that they’re thankful for, etc. But the family gathering around a big meal with a lot of variety to it is kind of the core ritual. Well, there’s an analogy to this. I mentioned at the beginning Metropolitan Philip said that Thanksgiving was the last holiday, American holiday, that had not been ruined, but I think there’s a ruining happening, which is—and I know people don’t mean anything bad by this, but often they refer to it as “Turkey Day,” which reduces it down to a single thing that’s being eaten at that meal traditionally: turkey. But if that’s what Thanksgiving is, is it’s just turkey, then you’ve lost all of those beautiful things that Metropolitan Philip recognized as good about this American holiday.

Now, I’m not commenting about the way that people celebrate or don’t celebrate American Thanksgiving. That is up to you and your family, your father confessor, whatever. But by analogy, to reduce it to “Turkey Day” is much like reducing the Divine Liturgy to “getting Communion,” just “getting Communion.” We have to understand that the fact that it is Christ’s body and blood is embedded within the context of him as the Priest offering it, as the Priest offering himself to us, and we participate in that.

And especially one of the things that we often like to talk about on this podcast is the pagan context in which the practices of early Israel are expressed. They’re surrounded by pagans, but it’s not just pagans that do this, but there’s this shared meal with your god. When you eat a sacrifice, you’re communing with your god in various kinds of ways. If you understand that that’s what’s going on in the Divine Liturgy—and then within that context you see that God himself is the Priest, that God himself is the Offering, then the fact—the very true fact that bread and wine become his body and blood—that becomes in a sense the jewel on this crown. It’s at the center of it, for sure, but it’s the center of something. You can’t take it out of that something; it’s centered there.

Now, some people might say, “Well, what about people who can’t come to church, and the priest or the deacon brings that to them?” Okay, but that is an exceptional circumstance that’s borne out by necessity, because they’re ill, because they can’t do that. But even when the priest or deacon brings that to them, there are still prayers that go along with that and there is still a connection, a communal connection that happens during that visit. It’s necessary that it happen that way, but that’s not the way that it is for everyone, and it’s just an extension of what is the normal, normative way, which is that embedding within the Divine Liturgy.

I just wanted to offer that especially, because there’s a lot of pious feelings that surround the way that people think of the Eucharist, and some of them are really good, and the fact that we have this sense of reverence, and we see how special and important it is—that’s beautiful—but we need to see that it’s embedded, and not this kind of independent talisman that we want to go and acquire without the larger context of the ritual itself and the whole life, the whole liturgical life—not just the service of the Divine Liturgy, but the whole liturgical life of the Orthodox Christian. Fr. Stephen?

Fr. Stephen: So in response to one of our callers, who, based on his tastes in podcasts, I can only assume is brilliant, handsome, and successful in life, I mentioned that not only should our meals with our fellow Christians be an extension of the Eucharist, but our whole life should be an extension of the Eucharist. I meant a few things by that. On a basic level, our whole life should consist of thanksgiving and praise to God. I’ve said before—or I’ve asked before, rhetorically, in homilies and other places—if when you woke up tomorrow everything you didn’t thank God for today was gone, would you have much of anything left? We tend to take everything for granted until it goes away. When we get sick, we’re kind of mad that we got sick. We might ask God why he let us get sick, and we pray that God would heal us from our sickness. Rarely do we thank God for our health when we’re not sick. Sort of a “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” So all of us could use a lot more thankfulness in our life, not just when you’re a kid and you get put on the spot around the dinner table on Thanksgiving.

As the caller was alluding to, I think the kind of fellowship and unity and oneness that’s enacted by us coming and receiving the Eucharist together ought to translate to a unity and a oneness and a family relationship and a brother- and sisterhood among Christians outside of the worship service in our communities, in our lives. So in that sense also our life should be an extension of the Eucharist. But I think one of the most important things that we neglect—and it’s bad that we neglect it, because it’s something that if you attend an Orthodox Liturgy, we say over and over and over again—and that is that when we gather to participate in Christ’s voluntary self-offering, him voluntarily offering himself to the Father in a sacrificial way, part of how we participate in that in the context of the Liturgy is that repeatedly we say that we are also offering our lives and our selves and each other, our whole life to Christ our God. That we combine sort of our self-offering with his, when we gather to celebrate the Eucharist.

And I say when we neglect that—I’m not saying that when we say it in Liturgy— I mean, I think a lot of times it may pass by us; we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. But I’m not saying that when we do stop and think about it that we’re being insincere at the moment when we say that in the Liturgy, but if we think about it a little more… If I’m going to come on a Sunday morning or on a feastday to a Liturgy and I’m going to say that I am offering my whole life to Christ, aren’t there a whole lot of things in my life outside that moment that it would at least be minimally awkward if I tried to offer them as a sacrifice to God? Would they, at the bare minimum, not represent me offering God my best? Could I reasonably offer a lot of the things I watch on the internet or streaming services to God as an offering that would be pleasing to him? Could I offer sort of my worst moments of anger, of criticizing other people, of making fun of other people, of gossiping about other people—could I take those moments and say, “Oh, God, I’m offering these to you as a sacrifice; I hope this pleases you”?

We’re sincere in the moment of offering our whole lives to God, but if we look back at our life, there’s a whole lot there that we would not want to offer up to him. In fact, we’d be kind of embarrassed of and would want to hide from him, as if that were possible.

And also, looking forward, beyond that moment, where I may be being sincere in that moment, but when I look into the next week, how many of my plans that I make for any given week or month or year or the future—how many of those plans are based on the idea that I’m offering that time of that plan, I’m offering that to God as a sacrifice?

Now, this isn’t to say, “Oh, we all need to become monks; we all need to do nothing but pray,” but I can gather with my family and enjoy, for example, a meal on Thanksgiving with my family. I can offer that to God as a sacrifice. There’s nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed of there; there’s nothing sinful there. That is a good thing. Times of fellowship, times of enjoyment of God’s creation: those aren’t things that are problematic to offer up to God. Sin is, and we know the difference. We know the difference. We know the difference between doing something to gratify myself and my desires and enjoying the company of other people and enjoying the goodness of God’s creation. We know the difference of those two things. We’re being precious if we try to argue that there isn’t one, to try to justify behavior that we know is wrong, by comparing it, somehow, to behavior that we know isn’t.

And so I think, as we think about the Eucharist and we think about our participation, because even if you’re not clergy you’re participating in the Eucharist in this sense, and we think about what it means to really offer ourselves and our whole life to God, then it goes beyond just trying to be sincere during that hour and a half or however long it is that we’re there in church, and start being honest about how being able to say that sincerely during that hour and a half means we have to make some changes and reorder some things in our lives.

Fr. Andrew: Amen. Well, that is our show for today. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Thank you for listening. This was not a live show, but normally we’re live, and we’d love to hear from you. If you can’t get through live or didn’t, you can email us at lordofspirits@ancientfaith.com; you can message us at our Facebook page; or you can leave us a voicemail at speakpipe.com/lordofspirits.

Fr. Stephen: And join us for our live broadcasts on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, 4:00 p.m. Pacific. And if you’re one of the people enjoying a turkey sandwich—you know who you are—come to the Thanksgiving meal.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] And if you are on Facebook, you can like our page, join our discussion group, leave reviews, ratings everywhere you listen, but, most importantly, please share this show with a friend whom you know is going to love it and benefit from it.

Fr. Stephen: And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com/support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air—and that everyone in the Maddex family has stuffing this Thursday.

Fr. Andrew: [Laughter] Thank you, good night, and God bless you all.