Collins, Keenan Jones: Sharing the Priesthood of Christ

23 A. T. Lincoln, The Gospel According to John (London: Continuum, 2005), 232.

In the discourse on the Bread of Life, John’s Gospel provides its own precious commentary on what Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist intended. We documented the strong resistance of the Reformers to a sacriﬁcial interpretation of the Last Supper. In the historical circumstances, this opposition of Luther and Calvin was understandable. The belief that priestly sacriﬁce had been made and mandated by Christ at the Last Supper had led not only to life-giving Eucharistic practice but also to the abuses of ‘multiple Masses’ and ‘private Masses’.

The Reformers called for Eucharistic celebrations at which the faithful regularly communicated and also did so by receiving from the chalice. The title and subtitle of Torrance’s book (see n. 22 above) bring to mind easily what has happened ‘on both sides’, so to speak.

On the ‘Catholic’ side the faithful have come to participate much more in the celebration of the Eucharist and to communicate regularly whenever they do so. By mandating the celebration of the Eucharist in the vernacular and a wide availability of ‘Communion under two kinds’, the bishops of the Catholic Church have, in fact, said ‘yes’ to two changes that Luther earnestly desired. The call of the Reformers and members of Roman Catholic religious institutes to hear and preach the Word of God was also heard in Vatican II’s document on the Eucharist. The faithful assembled for the Eucharist should not only be ‘nourished at the table of the Lord’s Body’ but also ‘instructed by the Word of God’ (SC 48).24

24 On the ‘double table’ of word and sacrament, see Thesis 4 above.

On the ‘Protestant’ side, twentieth-century biblical scholars led the way in recognizing the sacriﬁcial implications of a key phrase from the institution narrative: ‘do this in memory of me’. For the ancient Israelites, ‘memorial (zikkaron)’ was a sacriﬁcial word: a victim burned on the altar was called a ‘memorial’ or ‘reminder’.25

25 On the signiﬁcance of ‘memory/memorial’ for clarifying the sacriﬁcial dimen sion of the Last Supper, see R. Moloney, The Eucharist (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995), 42 9.

A new appreciation of the sacriﬁcial signiﬁcance of ‘memorial (anamnesis)’ and of its counterpart in the words of Jesus (Luke 22: 19; 1 Cor. 11: 24–5) found its place in such landmark ecumenical documents as BEM and the Final Report.26

26 On ‘anamnesis’ see BEM 115 16 (‘Eucharist’, 5 13); Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, The Final Report (London: SPCK, 1982), 18 20;

From the 1920s Romano Guardini and others encouraged Catholics to think of the Eucharist as a sacriﬁcial meal and not simply as a sacriﬁce.27

27 See J. Ratzinger, ‘Is the Eucharist a Sacriﬁce?’, Concilium, 4/3 (1967), 35 40.

Protestant scholars like Pannenberg and Torrance exemplify the shift by heirs of the Reformation in their readiness to recognize how ‘meal and sacriﬁce’ go ‘together’ at the celebration of the Last Supper and in the ‘Eucharistic sacriﬁce’ of the Church.28

28 This change allows BEM to speak not only of the ‘eucharistic meal’, 11, 12 (‘Eucharist’, 2, 12 14) but also of the Eucharist as a ‘sacriﬁce of praise’, 10 (‘Eucharist’, 4).

Observing this shift still leaves us, however, with a crucial question to be faced in the next chapter: what is the relationship between the Eucharist celebrated by the Christian priests and the sacriﬁcial self-offering of Christ at the Last Supper? But before closing this chapter, we must state ﬁve further theses.