EUCHAEIST
EUCHAEIST
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demons are, as it -were, the hosts at the sacrificial banquet. It is their cup which is drunk by those ■who attend. It is their table at which the guests sit. The parallel which St. Paul draws betAveen these demonic banquets and the Lord's Supper sug- gests that in the same way the bread and the cup are ofiered to the Lord, so that He becomes the host. Therefore the Supper is His Supper, and it is His Cup and His Table. But the thought goes further than this. For not only do the communi- cants enter into communion with Christ by being, as it were, His guests at Supper ; but they enter into communion with His Body and His Blood. The use of these expressions makes it clear that what is meant is that the communicant enters into communion with Christ's Death. It is the language of sacrilice which is here employed. The sacrihcial Death of Christ is an essential part of St. Paul's thought. The worthy communicant feeds upon that sacrifice, and so appropriates the blessing won thereby.
But while it is true that it is only the worthy communicant who obtains the blessing, St. Paul's language clearly implies that the bread and the wine are not merely symbols. They are really to the communicant the Body and Blood of Christ — the Bodj'^ broken and the Blood shed in His sacrificial Death. They have this wonderful character in themselves, apart from the faith of theconmiunicant. For the unworthy communicant receives them at his peril, and the dangers of ir- reverence are very great. The communicant must discern the Body. The suggestion which has been made that ' the Body ' in this phrase means Christ's mystical Body, the Christian Church, is worthy of very little attention. It is true that the word is sometimes so used, but here the context makes it necessary to understand by it the Body of Christ which is represented by the bread and partaken of by the communicant.
This communion takes place at a common meal. The Ciiristians of the community^ come together, probably on the first day of the week, to a common meal. The question arises as to whether the whole meal is a communion, or whether communion takes place during or after the meal, v.^^ suggests that the latter is the true view. ' The cup of blessing which we bless,' ' the bread whicii we break,' sug- gest that during or after the meal there was a solemn blessing of a cup, and a solemn breaking of bread, in virtue of which the cup becomes ' the cup of blessing,' and both it and the bread which is broken assume their special character. It seems clear that the' 'blessing' is a solemn liturgical act, and the parallelism with the breaking of bread indicates that that has the same character. The ' cup of blessing' is the cup over which a blessing has been said, or the cup wiiich has been blessed. There is no necessary reference to any cup used in the Pass- over. St. Paul speaks of the cup whicli 'we bless,' but this does not necessarily mean that the Avhole assembly blessed the cup, or broke the bread. In fact, the language of Ac 20^', where it is said that at Troas St. Paul himself 'broke the bread,' suggests that the ' liturgical ' action Avas performed by a single person, who was presiding. A definite ' blessing ' of a cup and ' breaking of bread ' would seem to imply tiiat the supper as a whole was not the communion, though the supper as a whole was the Lord's Supper, for the Lord was host. But dur- ing supper, or more probably after supper (cf. 1 Co IP^), the president blessed the cup and broke the bread ; and the cup so blessed and the bread so broken assumed their special and sacred character. As we have seen, the supper is a real and not a symbolical meal. But St. Paul's suggestion that the Corinthians' own houses are the proper places in which to eat and drink, and his injunction that
if they are hungry they should eat at home (IP--^'*) indicate the way in which the setting of the Eucharist came so soon to be altered. For these injunctions lead straight to the conclusion that the Christian assembly at which the Lord's Death is shown forth is not a suitable occasion for the satis- faction of bodily needs. It is therefore not surpris- ing that we find, when next we have any evidence, that the Eucharist has been detached from its set- ting as part of a common meal.
There are two further points which deserve notice before we come to consider in further detail St. Paul's view of the effects of communion. The first is the fact that in 10^" St. Paul puts the cup before the bread. We find the same thing in the Didache ; and if the shorter text of St. Luke's Gospel be the right one, we find it also there. This is certainly a noticeable point. But, whatever may be the explanation in St. Luke and in the Didache, it is not possible to suppose that at Corinth the cup actually did precede the bread. For the form of the naiTative of the Last Supper which St. Paul gives (IP^"^^) places the bread before the cup, and it is most unlikely that that order was reversed in the Corinthian Church. The explanation may be, as jSI. Goguel suggests,* that the parallelism between the Lord's Cup and the cup of libation at a heathen sacrifice M'as closer than that between the eating of a piece of bread and anything that took place there. It may be for this reason that the cup is mentioned before the bread. Or it may be merely that the bread is put second because St. Paul IS to speak at further length about it in the next verse. But in any case it is misleading to regard 10^* as having any real connexion with a tradition of the cup having preceded the bread at the Last Supper.