Yet we may ask: What exactly did the Lord instruct them to repeat? Certainly not the Passover meal (if that is what Jesus’ Last Supper was). The Passover was an annual feast, whose recurring celebration in Israel was clearly regulated through hallowed tradition and tied to a specific date. Even if what happened that evening was not an actual Passover meal according to Jewish law, but Jesus’ last meal on earth before his death, still, that is not what they were told to repeat.
The instruction to repeat refers simply to what was new in Jesus’ actions that evening: the breaking of bread, the prayer of blessing and thanksgiving accompanied by the words of consecration of bread and wine. We might say: through these words our “now” is taken up into the hour of Jesus. What Jesus had proclaimed in John 12:32 is here fulfilled: from the Cross he draws all men to himself, into himself.
Through Jesus’ words and actions, then, the essentials of the new “worship” was given, but no definitive liturgical form had yet been established—this was still to evolve in the life of the Church. It seems likely that at first people celebrated a communal meal after the pattern of the Last Supper and then added the Eucharist. Rudolf Pesch has shown that, according to the social structure of the early Church and the customs of the time, the meal probably consisted only of bread, without any other food.
In the First Letter to the Corinthians (11:20-22, 34), we see how in another society things happened differently: the wealthy brought their own food and helped themselves enthusiastically, whereas the poor once again had nothing but bread. Experiences like this led very early to the separation of the Lord’s Supper from the regular meal and, at the same time, hastened the development of a distinctive liturgical shape. We should not suppose for a moment that the “Lord’s Supper” ever consisted simply of reciting the words of consecration. From the time of Jesus himself, these words have always been a part of his berakah, his prayer of praise and thanksgiving.
For what was Jesus giving thanks? That his prayer was “heard” (cf. Heb 5:7). He gave thanks in advance that the Father did not abandon him in death (cf. Ps 16:10). He gave thanks for the gift of the Resurrection, and on that basis he could already give his body and blood in the form of bread and wine as a pledge of resurrection and eternal life (cf. Jn 6:53-58).
We may think of the structure of the “vow-psalms”, in which the one suffering tribulation announces that after he has been rescued he will thank God and will proclaim God’s saving deed before the great assembly. The great “Passion Psalm” (Ps 22), which begins with the words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”, ends with a promise that anticipates the granting of the prayer: “From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. The afflicted shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord” (vv. 25-26). In truth, these words are fulfilled now: “the afflicted shall eat”. What they receive is more than earthly food; they receive the true manna: communion with God in the risen Christ.
Naturally these connections dawned on the disciples only gradually. Yet from Jesus’ words of thanksgiving, which gave a new focus to the Jewish berakah, we see the new thanksgiving prayer, the eucharistia, gradually emerging as the definitive form, the liturgical shape that gives the words of institution their meaning. Here the new worship is established that brings the Temple sacrifices to an end: God is glorified in word, but in a Word that took flesh in Jesus, a Word that, by means of this body which has now passed through death, is able to draw in the whole man, the whole of mankind—thus heralding the beginning of the new creation.
Josef Andreas Jungmann, the great scholar of the history of eucharistic celebration and one of the architects of the liturgical reform, summarizes this argument as follows: “The fundamental element is the thanksgiving prayer over the bread and wine. The liturgy of the Mass was derived from the thanksgiving prayer after the meal on that last evening, not from the meal itself, which was held to be so inessential and so easily detachable that it quickly died out in the early Church. On the other hand, the liturgy in all its manifestations has developed further the thanksgiving prayer spoken over the bread and wine. . . . What the Church celebrates in the Mass is not the Last Supper; no, it is what the Lord instituted in the course of the Last Supper and entrusted to the Church: the memorial of his sacrificial death” (Messe im Gottesvolk, p. 24).
A similar conclusion may be drawn from Jungmann’s historical statement to the effect “that in the entire Christian tradition, from the time when the Eucharist was separated from an actual meal (indicated by such terms as ‘breaking of bread’ or ‘Lord’s Supper’) until the sixteenth-century Reformation, no name meaning ‘meal’ was ever used to designate the eucharistic celebration” (p. 23, n. 73).
In the evolution of Christian worship, though, there is a further decisive moment. In his certainty that his prayer would be heard, the Lord gave his body and blood to the disciples during the Last Supper in anticipation of the Resurrection: both Cross and Resurrection are intrinsic to the Eucharist—without them there would be no Eucharist. Yet because Jesus’ gift is essentially rooted in the Resurrection, the celebration of the sacrament had necessarily to be connected with the memorial of the Resurrection. The first encounter with the risen Lord took place on the morning of the first day of the week—the third day after Jesus’ death—that is to say, Sunday morning. The morning of the first day thus naturally became the time for Christian worship—Sunday became the “Lord’s day”.
This fixed time for the Christian liturgy, which is of defining importance for its character and its format, was established very early on. Thus in the eyewitness account related in Acts 20:6-11 of the journey of Saint Paul and his companions to Troas, we read this: “On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread” (20:7). In other words, the “breaking of bread” was already fixed for the morning of the day of Resurrection in the apostolic age—the Eucharist was already celebrated as an encounter with the risen Lord.
In this context, it is also significant that Paul arranges for the Jerusalem collection to be taken on the “first day of every week” (1 Cor 16:2). While there is no talk of the eucharistic celebration here, it is clear that Sunday is the day when the Corinthian community came together, and so there can be little doubt that it was also the day of their worship. Finally, in Revelation 1:10 we find the first use of the expression “the Lord’s day” for Sunday. The new Christian ordering of the week has clearly taken shape. The day of Resurrection is the Lord’s day, and thus it is also the day of his disciples, the day of the Church. At the end of the first century, the tradition is already clearly established. For example, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Didache, ca. 100) states quite unambiguously: “Assemble on the Lord’s day and break bread and offer the Eucharist, but first make confession of your faults” (14, i). For Ignatius of Antioch (d. ca. 110), life “ordered by the Lord’s day” is already a distinguishing feature of Christians in contrast to those who celebrate the Sabbath (Ad Magn. 9:1).
It was logical that the liturgy of the Word—reading of Scripture, commentary on the reading, and prayer—which at first still took place in the synagogue, came to be joined to the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus by the beginning of the second century, the evolution of the essential elements of Christian worship was already complete. This gestation process forms an intrinsic part of the institution of the Eucharist. As we have seen, the institution of the Eucharist presupposes the Resurrection and hence also the living community that, under the guidance of God’s Spirit, gives form to the Lord’s gift in the life of the faithful.
A “purist” attempt to cut out the Resurrection and its dynamic and simply to imitate the Last Supper would not in any way correspond to the nature of the Lord’s gift to his disciples. The Day of Resurrection is the exterior and interior locus of Christian worship, and the thanksgiving prayer as Jesus’ creative anticipation of the Resurrection is the Lord’s way of uniting us with his thanksgiving, blessing
us in the gift and drawing us into the process of transformation that starts with the gifts, moves on to include us, and then spreads out to the world “until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26).
CHAPTER SIX
Gethsemane
1. On the Way to the Mount of Olives
“When they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” With these words, Matthew and Mark conclude their accounts of the Last Supper (Mt 26:30; Mk 14:26). Jesus’ final meal—whether or not it was a Passover meal—was first and foremost an act of worship. At its heart was the prayer of praise and thanksgiving, and at the end it led back into prayer. Still praying, Jesus goes out into the night with his disciples, reminding us of the night when the first-born of Egypt were struck down and Israel was saved through the blood of the lamb (cf. Ex 12). Jesus goes out into the night during which he will have to take upon himself the destiny of the lamb.
We may suppose that, in keeping with the Passover that he had celebrated in his own way, Jesus may have sung some of the Hallel Psalms (113-18 and 136). These are hymns of thanksgiving to God for liberating Israel from Egypt, but they also speak of the stone rejected by the builders that wondrously turned out to be the cornerstone. In these Psalms, past history constantly comes into the present. Thanksgiving for liberation is at the same time a plea for help in the face of ever new tribulations and threats; and in the reference to the stone that was rejected, the darkness and the promise of this night are simultaneously brought into the present.
Jesus prays the Psalms of Israel with his disciples: this element is fundamental for understanding the figure of Jesus, but also for understanding the Psalms themselves, which in him could be said to acquire a new subject, a new mode of presence, and an extension beyond Israel into universality.
We also see a new vision of the figure of David emerging here: in the canonical Psalter, David is regarded as the principal author of the Psalms. He thus appears as the one who leads and inspires the prayer of Israel, who sums up all Israel’s sufferings and hopes, carries them within himself, and expresses them in prayer. So Israel can continue praying with David, expressing itself in the Psalms, which constantly offer new hope, however deep the surrounding darkness. In the early Church, Jesus was immediately hailed as the new David, the real David, and so the Psalms could be recited in a new way—yet without discontinuity—as prayer in communion with Jesus Christ. Augustine offered a perfect explanation of this Christian way of praying the Psalms—a way that evolved very early on—when he said: it is always Christ who is speaking in the Psalms—now as the head, now as the body (for example, cf. En. in Ps. 60:1-2: 61:4; 85:1, 5). Yet through him—through Jesus Christ—all of us now form a single subject, and so, in union with him, we can truly speak to God.
This process of appropriation and reinterpretation, which begins with Jesus’ praying of the Psalms, is a typical illustration of the unity of the two Testaments, as taught to us by Jesus. When he prays, he is completely in union with Israel, and yet he is Israel in a new way: the old Passover now appears as a great foreshadowing. The new Passover, though, is Jesus himself, and the true “liberation” is taking place now, through his love that embraces all mankind.
This combination of fidelity to tradition and novelty, which we observe in the figure of Jesus in every chapter of this book, appears now in a further detail of the Mount of Olives narrative. On each of the previous nights, Jesus has withdrawn to Bethany. On this night, which he celebrates as his Passover night, he follows the instruction to remain within the city of Jerusalem, whose boundary was extended outward for the night, so as to offer all pilgrims the opportunity to keep this law. Jesus observes the norm, and in full knowledge of what he is doing, he approaches the betrayer and the hour of the Passion.
If at this point we look back once more over Jesus’ entire path, we encounter the same combination of fidelity and utter novelty: Jesus is “observant”. He celebrates the Jewish feasts with others. He prays in the Temple. He follows Moses and the Prophets. Yet at the same time his whole outlook is new: from his explanation of the Sabbath (Mk 2:27; cf. also pp. 106-12 in Part One) and his position on the purity regulations (Mk 7) to the reinterpretation of the Decalogue given in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:17-48) and the cleansing of the Temple (Mt 21:12-13 and parallel passages), which anticipates the demise of the stone Temple and proclaims the new Temple, the new worship “in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24).
This action, as we have seen, is in profound continuity with God’s primordial will, and at the same time it marks the decisive turning point in the history of religions, a turning point that becomes a reality on the Cross. It was this action—the cleansing of the Temple—that contributed significantly to Jesus’ condemnation to death on the Cross, thereby fulfilling his prophecy and heralding the new worship.
“They went to a place which was called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, ‘Sit here, while I pray’ ” (Mk 14:32). Gerhard Kroll comments as follows: “At the time of Jesus, in this terrain on the slopes of the Mount of Olives, there was a farmstead with an oil press for crushing the olives. . . . The farmstead was named Gethsemane on account of the oil press. . . . Nearby was a large natural cave, which could have offered Jesus and his disciples a safe, if not particularly comfortable place to spend the night” (Auf den Spuren Jesu, p. 404). We know from the pilgrim Egeria that by the end of the fourth century there was a “magnificent church” here, which was reduced to ruins by the turmoil of the times but was rediscovered by the Franciscans in the twentieth century. “Completed in 1924, the present-day Church of Jesus’ Agony not only encompasses the site of the ‘ecclesia elegans’ [Egeria’s church]: it once more surrounds the rock on which tradition tells us that Jesus prayed” (Kroll, Auf den Spuren Jesu, p. 410).
This is one of the most venerable sites of Christianity. True, the trees do not date from the time of Jesus; Titus cut down all the trees within a wide radius during the siege of Jerusalem. Yet it is still the same Mount of Olives. Anyone who spends time here is confronted with one of the most dramatic moments in the mystery of our Savior: it was here that Jesus experienced that final loneliness, the whole anguish of the human condition. Here the abyss of sin and evil penetrated deep within his soul. Here he was to quake with foreboding of his imminent death. Here he was kissed by the betrayer. Here he was abandoned by all the disciples. Here he wrestled with his destiny for my sake.
Saint John takes up all these experiences and gives a theological interpretation to the place when he says: “across the Kidron valley, where there was a garden” (18:1). This same highly evocative word comes back at the end of the Passion narrative: “In the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid” (19:41). John’s use of the word “garden” is an unmistakable reference to the story of Paradise and the Fall. That story, he tells us, is being resumed here. It is in the “garden” that Jesus is betrayed, but the garden is also the place of the Resurrection. It was in the garden that Jesus fully accepted the Father’s will, made it his own, and thus changed the course of history.
After praying the psalms with his disciples, while still on the way to the place where they were intending to rest for the night, Jesus makes three prophecies.
He applies to himself the prophecy of Zechariah, who had said that “the shepherd” would be struck down—killed, in other words—and then the sheep would be scattered (Zech 13:7; Mt 26:31). Zechariah, in a mysterious vision, had spoken of a Messiah who suffers death, after which Israel is once again dispersed. Only after going through these extreme tribulations does he await redemption from God. Jesus gives concrete form to this dark vision of an unknown future. Yes, the shepherd is struck down. Jesus himself is the shepherd of Israel, the shepherd of humanity. And he takes injustice upon himself; he shoulders the destructive burden of guilt. He allows himself to be struck down. He takes up the cause of all who are struck down in the course of history. Now, at this hour, there is the further consequence tha
t the community of disciples is scattered, the newly formed family of God falls apart before it has been properly established. “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (Jn 10:11). Zechariah sheds new light upon this saying of Jesus: its hour has come.
The prophecy of doom is followed by the promise of salvation: “After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee” (Mk 14:28). “Go before” is a typical expression to apply to a shepherd. Jesus, having passed through death, will live again. As the risen Lord, he is now in the fullest sense the shepherd who leads, through death, to the path of life. The Good Shepherd does both: he offers up his life, and he goes before. Indeed, the offering up of his life is the going before. It is through these actions that he leads us. It is through these actions that he opens the door onto the vast panorama of reality. Having experienced dispersal, the sheep can now be definitively reassembled. So right at the beginning of the night spent on the Mount of Olives, we find the dark saying about striking down and scattering, but also the promise that through these events, Jesus will reveal himself as the true shepherd who gathers together the scattered ones and leads them to God, to life.
The third prophecy is a further development of the exchanges with Peter that occurred during the Last Supper. Peter does not hear the prophecy of the Resurrection. He only registers the reference to death and dispersal, and this prompts him to declare his unshakable courage and his radical fidelity to Jesus. Because he wants to bypass the Cross, he cannot accept the saying about the Resurrection, and as we saw in the earlier episode at Caesarea Philippi, he would like the victory without the Cross. He is relying on his own resources.
Jesus of Nazareth: From His Transfiguration Through His Death and Resurrection Page 13
