This is just the kind of phony, self-destructive community that Jesus has come to interrupt. And so he responds to this criticism: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick… For I have come to call not the righteous but the sinners.” Here we find a theme that will be developed throughout the tradition—namely, the sacred meal as medicine for the sin-sick soul. In light of Jesus’ observation, we can see that the inclusion of sinners is the very heart and raison d’être of the meal that he hosts. The miracle of the feeding of the thousands with a few loaves and fish must have haunted the imaginations of the early Christian communities, for accounts of it can be found in all four Gospels.

He was destined to be, not only the host at the sacred banquet, but the meal itself. And to Christ’s manger came the shepherds (evocative of the poor and marginalized, the lost sheep of the house of Israel) and kings (evocative of the nations of the world), drawn there as though by a magnet. Thus commenced the realization of Isaiah’s vision. A story that can be found in all three of the synoptic Gospels is that the conversion of Levi (or Matthew) the tax collector. We hear that as Jesus was passing by, he spotted Matthew at his tax collector’s post.

For Christians, the most important thing to note about Jesus is that he is not simply one more in a long line of prophets and teachers. He is not merely, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, or David, a good man who represents God. Rather, he consistently speaks and acts in the very person of God. In the words of N.T. Wright, Jesus is like a portrait of Yahweh, in all of its richness and complexity, sprung to life. When he claims interpretive authority over the Torah, when he forgives the sins of the paralyzed man, when he calls his disciples to love him above mother and father, indeed above their very lives, when he cleanses the temple, Jesus says and does things that only Yahweh could legitimately say and do.

And he declared that this act of unity must be repeated down through the ages as the defining gesture of the Israelite nation. The Passover meal, in a word, was a recovery (however imperfect) of the easy unity and fellowship of the Garden of Eden, God hosting a banquet at which his human creatures share life with him and each other.

Let us look a bit more closely at two Old Testament presentations of the sacred meal. At the very center of the Jewish story of salvation is the event of Exodus and Passover. The children of Israel, who had wandered into Egypt during the time of the patriarch Joseph, became, after many centuries, slaves to the Egyptians, compelled to build fortified cities and monuments for the pharaoh.

Ch. 1: The Eucharist as Sacred Meal, continued

But why then the prohibition? Why is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to them? The fundamental determination of good and evil remains, necessarily, the prerogative of God alone, since God is, himself, the ultimate good. To seize this knowledge, therefore, is to claim divinity for oneself—and this is the one thing that a creature can never do and thus should never try.

We notice how the author of Genesis exults in describing the wide variety of things that God makes, from the light itself to the earth and sea, to all of the trees and plants that grow from the ground, to those lowly beasts that crawl upon it. From ancient times to the present day, the Church has battled the Gnostic heresy, according to which materiality is a lowly or fallen aspect of reality, the product of a lesser god. The book of Genesis—and the Bible as a whole—is fiercely anti-Gnostic.

We shall begin with the theme of the sacred meal, and we shall set this theme in the widest possible biblical framework. The opening line of the book of Genesis tells us that “in the beginning...God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). Why did God, who is perfect in every way and who stands in need of nothing outside of himself, bother to create at all?

In 2019, the respected Pew Forum released the results of a survey of Catholics in regard to their belief in the Eucharist. Along with many others, I was startled when I read the data, for I discovered that only one-third of those questioned subscribed to the Church’s official teaching that Jesus is really, truly, and substantially present under the signs or appearances of bread and wine.

Trusting in your goodness, Lord, in your great mercy, I come in my sickness to him who can make me well; hungered and athirst, I come to the fountain of life, a beggar to the King of Heaven, a servant to his Lord, a creature to his Creator, one lonely and sad to him who loves and consoles me. But what have I done to deserve that you should come to me? Who am I, that you should make me a gift of yourself? Dare I, a sinner, appear before you? And do you forget your greatness and come to a sinner? You know this servant of yours; you know nothing good of him, to make him deserve this gift at your hands.