On Great Thursday the focus of the Church turns to the events that occurred in the Upper Room and at the Garden of Gethsemane.
In the Upper Room, while at meal, Jesus established and instituted the mystery or sacrament of the holy Eucharist and washed the feet of His disciples as well.
The Garden of Gethsemane calls our attention to Jesus’ redemptive obedience and sublime prayer (Mt 26.36-46). It also brings us before the cowardly, treacherous act of Judas, who betrayed Christ with a kiss, the sign of love and friendship.
The Eucharist
At the Mystical Supper in the Upper Room Jesus gave a radically new meaning to the food and drink of the sacred meal. He identified Himself with the bread and wine: “Take, eat; this is my Body. Drink of it all of you; for this is my Blood of the New Covenant” (Mt 26.26-28).
We have learned to equate food with life because it sustains our earthly existence. In the Eucharist the distinctively unique human food – bread and wine – becomes our gift of life. Consecrated and sanctified, the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. This change is not physical but mystical and sacramental. While the qualities of the bread and wine remain, we partake of the true Body and Blood of Christ. In the eucharistic meal God enters into such a communion of life that He feeds humanity with His own being, while still remaining distinct. In the words of St. Maximos the Confessor, Christ, “transmits to us divine life, making Himself eatable.” The Author of life shatters the limitations of our createdness. Christ acts so that “we might become sharers of divine nature” (2 Pet 1.4).
The Eucharist is at the center of the Church’s life. It is her most profound prayer and principal activity. It is at one and the same time both the source and the summit of her life. In the Eucharist the Church manifests her true nature and is continuously changed from a human community into the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and the People of God.
The Eucharist is the pre-eminent sacrament. It completes all the others and recapitulates the entire economy of salvation. Our new life in Christ is constantly renewed and increased by the Eucharist. The Eucharist imparts life and the life it gives is the life of God.
Through baptism and chrismation we have entered into a new mode of existence. It is an existence of constant becoming. The Scriptures describe this as new birth, the death of the old man, the putting off of the old nature and the putting on of the new. This newness, this radical change in the mode of existence, is not accomplished by human effort. It is a gift from God. Rooted in the age to come, this new existence is maintained and nourished by the Eucharist. At every Divine Liturgy we hear the good news of Christ and enter into the process of conversion. We are given the possibility to acquire for ourselves the eucharistic manner of existence. Little by little we become ourselves communion and love. At the Divine Liturgy the tragic elements of our fallen existence – pride, individualism, blasphemy, vanity, hypocrisy, envy, anger, division, fear, despair, pain, deceit, untruth, malice, greed, vice, gluttony, passions, corruption, death – are being continuously defeated, in order to make us capable to be love, freedom and life.
The Eucharist is offered to the Church as a whole not as a reward, but as a remedy for sin, a provision for life, the communion of the Holy Spirit, and an opening to others. Every baptized and chrismated Orthodox Christian should be a regular and frequent recipient of the divine Mysteries. Care, however, must be taken that Holy Communion is approached with spiritual discernment and adequate preparation. A total fast, as described above, precedes our reception of Holy Communion. The observance of God’s commandments constitutes the essential preparation and proper disposition for participation in the sacrament.
In the Eucharist the Church remembers and enacts sacramentally the redemptive event of the Cross and participates in its saving grace. This does not suggest that the Eucharist attempts to reclaim a past event. The Eucharist does not repeat what cannot be repeated. Christ is not slain anew and repeatedly. Rather the eucharistic food is changed concretely and really into the Body and Blood of the Lamb of God, Who gave Himself up for the life of the world. Christ, the Theanthropos, continually offers Himself to the faithful through the consecrated Gifts, i.e., His very own risen and deified Body, which for our sake died once and now lives (Heb 10.2; Rev 1. 18). Hence, the faithful come to Church week by week not only to worship God and to hear His word. They come, first of all, to experience over and over the mystery of salvation I on and to be united intimately to the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
By the power of His sacrifice Christ draws us into His own sacrificial action. The Church also offers sacrifice. However, the sacrifice offered by the Church and her members can only be an offering given in return to God on account of the riches of His goodness, mercy and love. This sacrifice is first of all, a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. It also has other forms, including commitment to the Gospel, loyalty to the true faith, constant prayer, fasting, struggles against the passions, and works of charity. At its deepest level, however, this offering in return (antiprosfora) is an act of kenosis (Lk 9.23-25). It is constituted by our willingness to lose our life in order to gain it (Mt 16.28).
In the Eucharist we receive and partake of the resurrected Christ. We share in His sacrificed, risen and deified Body, “for the forgiveness of sins and life eternal” (Divine Liturgy). In the Eucharist Christ pours into us – as a permanent and constant gift – the Holy Spirit, “Who bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God – and if children – then heirs with Christ (Rom 8.16-17).
The central fruit of the Eucharist is the communion of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Giver of Life, who prepares us for the resurrection and makes us advance toward it (Rom 8.2, 9-8). The other fruits of the Eucharist are related to this central gift. Vigilance of soul, forgiveness of sins, a clear conscience are both a preparation for as well as the result of our communion with the Holy Spirit. Sonship, fellowship with the saints, the manifestation of love in the unity of faith, and the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom are obtained by the communion of the Holy Spirit.
St. Gregory Palamas, in an insightful passage, helps us to understand the profound power and wonder of the Eucharist:
Christ has become our brother by sharing our flesh and blood and so becoming assimilated to us. . . He has joined and bound us to Himself, as a husband his wife, by becoming one single flesh with us through the communion of His blood; He has also become our Father by divine baptism which renders us like unto Him, and He nourishes us at His own breast as a tender mother nourishes her babies … Come, He says, eat my Body, drink my Blood . . . so that you be not only made after God’s image, but become gods and kings, eternal and heavenly, clothing yourselves with me, King and God.
~ Alkiviadis Calivas, Holy Thursday, “Great Lent, Holy Week & Pascha,” Website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, http://lent.goarch.org/articles/lent_thursday.asp
