A New Plan for Good Friday

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 14 March 2013 2 Comments
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Question

Given that most of the events in the gospels’ accounts of the last week of Jesus’ life are, as you suggest, myth and metaphor based on Old Testament passages, what do you think was the origin of the “Lord’s Supper”/Holy Communion”/the “Eucharist?”

 

Answer

Dear Bill,

Let me first expand on your stated assumption that you seem to attribute to me, namely the accounts of the last week of Jesus’ life were nothing more than myths and metaphors based on Old Testament passages. The early Christians interpreted Jesus in the light of their conviction that he fulfilled their expectations of the Hebrew Scriptures in regard to “the one who is to come,” but they had an experience with a person of history for whom this interpretive process was employed. Behind the narrative in the gospel in regard to the crucifixion was the fact that a person named Jesus actually lived in history and was in fact crucified by the Romans. So the story is not all myth and metaphor, though both myths and metaphors have always been used as an interpretive means by which we seek to get to the heart of the “Jesus experience.”

There is little doubt in my mind that the origin of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, or the Holy Communion was an adaptation of the Jewish Passover for Christian usage. The Passover was a liturgical interpretation of the moment that witnessed the birth of the Jewish nation in the experience of the exodus from Egypt and out of slavery. The Eucharist was a liturgical re-enactment of the birth of Christianity born out of the transformative experiences that we call the crucifixion and the resurrection. The breaking of the bread and the blessing of the cup of wine in the Passover were newly understood and expanded into the symbols of the broken body and the shed blood of the crucified one. To eat and drink these symbols was to interpret his death as the doorway to life. Almost inevitably these symbols were literalized and began to represent the entry of the worshiper into the resurrected life of Jesus or, more specifically, the entry of the worshiper into the life of God, which pointed the worshiper toward a kind of mystical union of the human with the divine. The early Christians gathered to break bread in the name of the resurrected one and to remember what his death meant as the moment of their transformation.

Today, eating together remains a symbol of community and eating together to celebrate a special event in life like a birthday or an anniversary is still the way we keep the community’s memory alive.

I treasure the Eucharist. I do not literalize it. I think every occasion of sharing food brings lives closer together. I rejoice in both.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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