Patrick J. Nugent

This communion with Christ and with one another is not intrinsically engendered by a liturgy which abstracts the Jewish elements of bread and wine from their Jewish context and the context of a full-bodied meal. Friends United Meeting’s recent response to the World Council of Churches document On the Nature and Purpose of the Church states:

While the celebration of the Lord’s Supper has been a nearly-universal Christian practice for a good 1900 years, it has also been in most times and places been the subject of incisive, even violent, critique and even efforts for radical reform. While it is not fair to imagine that the major denominations would change their practice, there is certainly room for a Quaker critique of dominant ecclesial practice. George Fox complained that the dominant churches preserved the Eucharist as an anachronistic Jewish relic with no intrinsic power. Part of what bothered him was its Jewishness – an important reminder of the anti-Judaism in early Quaker rhetoric. What he objected to, though, was neither a connection to ethnic Judaism nor to Jewish religion, but to excessive confidence in the power of liturgy as theurgy, the attempt to conjure grace by mechanical processes. There is no question that he little understood Jewish ritual and the theology behind it, either in the Second Temple period or in his own day. But the essence of his protest, disconnected from the anti-Jewish polemic, still stands. "We can accept no intrinsic connection between outward sacraments and inward grace."

Fox’s protest points to an important issue. He insisted that the outward sacraments were continuations of the old covenant, which had its time and place, but which in the new age became perilous distractions since Christ has become personally and fully present as Teacher and Lord. The New Covenant, promised in Jeremiah 31:31 and repeated in Hebrews 8:8, is the covenant written inwardly in the human heart. The forms of worship proceeding from the New Covenant are what early Friends called "spiritual worship," evoking John 4:24, Jesus’ instruction that those who worship God must worship "in spirit and in truth."

Modern Christians might well find difficulty with what the distinction between Old and New Covenants implies for relations with Judaism, especially in a society where "old" means "worthless, to be discarded" and where we constantly strive, in religion as in most things, to displace the old with the new. On the other hand, there are good reasons to observe and respect the legitimate boundaries between the two great traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Eucharist as it is usually practice blurs those boundaries in ways that ought to make Christians uncomfortable because they smell of supercessionism.

With centuries of anti-Semitism now in the Christian historical record, Christians ought to be extremely careful about how we treat and co-opt Jewish ritual practice. The current Holy Week fad of many Christian churches, celebrating Passover "seders" in Christian congregations, raises the hackles of many modern Jews, and rightly so. Mimicking Passover and co-opting it for Christian purposes is fundamentally imperialistic, as is much of the "international cafeteria" approach many Americans take toward non-Christian religion. If this is true for Christian parish Passover seders, it may well be true for the Eucharist as well. The Christian Eucharist is often explicitly understood as a Christian version of Passover, following 1 Cor 5:7, "For Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us." Eucharist invokes the Passover dimension of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples and its continuance in the early Church, while it has often abandoned its character as a meal with open table fellowship. Which is more central to Jesus’ instruction?

A. Open Table Fellowship

Since at least the founding of the American Friends Service Committee, Quakers, particularly liberal ones, have pursued reconciliation between antagonists by inviting them into personal fellowship with one another: Americans with Germans and Japanese, Protestants with Catholics in Ulster, Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East, Hutus and Tutsis in Burundi. The Friends World Committee for Consultation tries to bring reconciliation within our own ranks by promoting personal fellowship across theological and international divides. Whether or not this work involves sitting down to a meal, it embodies the spirit, the power, and the risk of Jesus’ open table fellowship and is thus fundamentally eucharistic in intention and effect.

Closer to home, and more central to a practical theology of Quaker fidelity to biblical mandates, a great many Friends’ Meetings habitually share meals together. I have been part of meetings which share meals frequently and meetings which never do, and can attest to the power of shared meals in fostering communion within a meeting. Conversely, meetings I have known which do not share meals seem to suffer from a spiritual anemia, or worse, alienated malaise.

This is not to suggest that regular potluck (or carry-in, or pitch-in) suppers (or lunches) are a panacea or a guarantee of peace and harmony, nor the lack of them the root of all disaster. But they are agents of fellowship, a kind of glue that can hold Friends together especially through difficult times. When Friends eat together regularly, they remind themselves and therefore bring it about that they are part of the same spiritual community, that the same God works for good among them, and that they are called, as Jesus prayed, "That they all may be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, so may they also be one in us" (John 17:21).

When we eat together, we share across and between our differences of experience, belief, social class, gender, and age. Such an enterprise is always risky, but opens us more deeply to the love of God in one another. On the other hand, the Catholic parish in which I grew up never had "church suppers" of the kind our Southern Baptist and Moravian neighbors reveled in. Despite the central place Eucharist occupied in parish life, we were far more distant from one another and had far less real communion than Quaker Meetings which make a habit of eating a full-bodied meal together.

The key to this communion, I am convinced, is that it replicates the open table fellowship practiced by the Pauline communities and, more broadly and with greater risk, by Jesus. But on most Sunday mornings in most Christian churches, in the hour of the week most segregated by class and race and language and ethnicity, what passes for Eucharist hardly counts as open table fellowship of the sort practiced by Jesus and recommended by Paul. One wonders how many Christian families and homes practice open fellowship at their own tables. One wonders how many Quaker Meetings and families do any better. Is not failure to do so a violation of New Testament eucharistic practice?

If all this is true, Friends might consider in their Yearly Meeting books of discipline recommending the practice of sharing meals with one another; perhaps even a testimony of communion and hospitality might be a logical outgrowth of this practice which is so widespread among us, a central part of many meetings’ life together, but which has occasioned little or no theological reflection among us.

Further, if communion and hospitality were to become a testimony, then like our other testimonies it might be something we could practice before, and recommend to, the wider world. Could Friends become models of the power of open table fellowship in bridging differences and healing conflict? If so, we would be eucharistic in the deepest and best sense.

The transformative power of sharing meals positively radiates from the following story reported in the newsletter of Taizé, an ecumenical and international Christian monastic community in France. A correspondent from Mindanao in the Philippines, where her parish priest had been killed a year previously amid deepening tensions between Christians and Muslims, writes of how fellowship with Palestinians in an atmosphere of communion and hospitality enabled her to build relationships with Muslims in her hometown, culminating in a shared meal that seems to me profoundly eucharistic:

B. Gratitude and Good Work

Christian churches which practice the Lord’s Supper often accompany it by a long prayer called the "Great Thanksgiving." Thanksgiving or gratitude is at the heart of the Christian practice of Eucharist, and ought to be at the heart of Quaker spirituality as well. The Greek word eucharistia is nearly impossible to reproduce in English with all its associations, but at its root it means gratitude, or more fully, "returning good favor for good favor received." In the ancient religious economy, Christian or otherwise, the world was sustained in prosperity and justice by the favor (charis, usually translated "grace") of one’s God or gods. By bestowing favor a god both evoked gratitude and responded favorably to it.

Mortal humans demonstrated gratitude both in word and deed: giving credit where credit was due, both with one’s words of prayer, proclamation, and remembrance and with one’s deeds of justice, equity, and honor towards one’s God or gods. Grace and gratitude are bound to one another both etymologically and practically.

"Eucharist " as the name by which Christians appropriated Jesus’ Passover meal with his disciples imported an ancient Greek notion into Christian theology, a helpful notion that may illuminate how Quakers in our own way celebrate Eucharist.

Words of eucharistia, gratitude, spread the word about the source of one’s grace. Eucharistia is religious public relations of a sort; in Christian terms, spreading good news, spreading Gospel (eu-aggelion). We spread Gospel as a response of gratitude to God’s grace, a response of eucharistia returned for God’s charis.

But Gospel is spread not only in word the good word of eu-aggelion but in deeds, which are the heart of eucharistia. Gospel is Good Word, but it narrates the Good Work, God’s reconciliation with creation in the event of Jesus Christ. The heart of grace is a Good Work, God’s. So the heart of our gratitude, while it will involve proclamation or good news, is our own good work of grateful response for God’s good work in Christ and in us. Gospel as grace, charis, is the proclamation of God’s work of salvation; eucharistia as gratitude comprises our response of both proclamation and good work.

The nature of this work is made clear in the New Testament: responding to God’s reconciling presence by work that reflects, repeats, and extends God’s work. In Mark’s gospel, God’s work is to heal the dis-integrated body and soul, to reflect on the Law, to spread the Word, to oppose the powers, and to suffer rather than resist with violence. In Luke’s, God’s work is casting the mighty from their thrones, lifting up the lowly, proclaiming the good news to the captive. In Matthew’s, it is recognizing God’s incarnation in those who hunger and thirst, responding with food and drink.

These human exertions in concert with God’s exertions are the outward embodiment of human gratitude, human Eucharist. We return to the divine what the divine has given us. The same was true for pagans: if the god gives grain, the devotee returns a sacrifice of grain. If livestock, then a sacrifice of livestock. If fruit, then of fruit. For Christians, God’s gifts of love, justice, confrontation of the powers, healing of the sick, speaking truth to power, feeding the hungry, suffering with the suffering, and restoring righteousness, all activities Jesus is depicted as doing, call forth eucharistia in kind. So in this sense Catholicism has it right; real Eucharist repeats the sacrifice of Christ.

Where Quakers run astray is that we have disconnected our good works from our gratitude. We are often guilty of what classical Protestant orthodoxy, following Titus 3:5, calls "works righteousness." The rock-bottom foundation of Protestant theology in every form is the conviction that God’s good work of redemption in us and God’s work of drawing us into the divine life is not a reward for our good deeds. "Not by works of justice which we have performed, but because of his mercy he redeemed us, by the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit" (Titus 3:5). (Incidentally, this passage well expresses a Quaker understanding of the "washing" of baptism!) God’s love for us and God’s transforming regeneration of our spirits is a sheer gift welling up from the depths of divine compassion. Our good works, as Luther insisted, are a grateful response to divine compassion, not a strategy for earning it. As Augustine and Calvin both insisted, God’s love and power empower and enable our good works.

Too many Quakers believe they are not good, or not good enough, unless they are performing as many good works as possible. They treat good works as an obligation; we do them because Quakers are supposed to. As a result we whip ourselves into a frenzy of self-destructive, enervating activity and overcommitment, and we burn ourselves out. I recall a prominent small-town Midwestern Friend rising in Meeting to speak about being approached by a beggar on the street in Philadelphia. He found the experience burdensome and draining; put on the spot he was unable to think through the best response and so remained dissatisfied and despondent with how he did finally respond. He then complained how, in a world filled with pain and tragedy, the Quaker testimonies are burdensome and cause us to feel like constant failures.

If we imagine the testimonies are obligations God lays on us in order to measure success and failure, we have invented a creaturely religion serving a perfectionistic God who loves only those who measure up. This is neither good Christianity nor good Quakerism. What an ethics of burdensome obligation lacks is a foundation in gratitude. Lewis Benson was fond of reminding Friends that our testimonies are not public position statements on pressing social issues but ways of acting in the world which bear witness to what a person can do once taught and transformed by the living Christ. The testimonies should be grateful responses of the transformed heart eager to spread God’s good charis and thereby transform the world. Good works, eucharistia, are like making love to God who has, as it were, "made love" to us.

In the dimension of action, so dear to Quakers of all sorts, we live the spirit of Eucharist, responding to God’s grace in us by action which gives credit where credit is due and spreads the influence of the divine love which can transform the world. Quakers live Eucharist by living out the testimonies, living out Gospel order, being faithful to God’s revelation in Christ and to Christ’s present activity as Inward Teacher, priest, prophet, and king (as Lewis Benson might have put it).

C. The Body and Blood of Christ

A Quaker colleague of mine at Earlham College is an expert in the early Greek Christian writers. Another colleague of ours who had converted to an Eastern Orthodox church asked my Quaker colleague why, with his love of Greek theology, he did not become Orthodox.

The Quaker responded by asking, "What is at the heart of Orthodox practice?"

"Receiving the Body of Christ in the Eucharist on Sunday," came the answer.

"Exactly. I want that all the time, not just on Sunday. That’s why I’m a Quaker."

His answer may seem odd to a liberal Quaker, but for early Friends it would have been a natural one. Robert Barclay devotes an entire Proposition of his Apology to "the Communion, or Participation of the Body and Blood of Christ" (Barclay 1908, prop. 13). Early Friends understood themselves to be sharing in the body and blood of Christ in the Meeting for worship and in God’s inward, transformative work in their souls.

Sharing in the body and blood of Christ meant sharing in the life and power of Christ the Seed, the Inward Light that transforms the soul and brings it into communion with God. Barclay insists that "the breaking of bread by Christ with his disciples was a figure, which even they who had received the substance used in the church for a time . . . yet seeing [the Lord’s Supper, baptism, washing of the feet, etc.] are but shadows of better things, they cease in such as have obtained the substance" (Barclay 1908, 422, prop. 13).

All the Protestant reformers had to defend their continued practice of the Eucharist in light of the scriptural mandates but in contradistinction to Roman Catholic practice. Most preserved some semblance of sharing in bread and wine while dispensing with belief that communicants shared in any substantial way in the body and blood of Christ. Barclay takes an oddly Catholic position, preserving the insistence that Christians can partake of Christ’s body and experience its Real Presence, but dispensing with the outward partaking of bread and wine.

Unlike Catholics, he did not believe that believers partake of the earthly body of Christ; the earthly body having ascended into heaven, he argues, it is no longer available. He invokes Augustine to argue that when Christ said, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you" (John 6:53), he meant not his earthly flesh, but "that heavenly seed, that divine, spiritual, celestial substance, of which we spake before in the fifth and sixth propositions. This is that spiritual body of Christ, whereby and through which he communicateth life to men, and salvation to as many as believe in him" (Barclay 1908, 423, prop. 13.2).

The body and blood of Christ feed our spirits, he argues; only spirit can nourish spirit, only bodily flesh nourish bodily flesh. The body and blood of Christ, in which Jesus promised believers they would share, is therefore the same Inward Light which Barclay argues is the very substance of Christ’s presence on earth and the means by which God redeems and transforms human souls and communities.

This overly simple treatment of Barclay points back to the early part of the argument, and the most important, for it draws attention back to the most important thing Quakers do with one another "in the presence of the watching world," a phrase John Howard Yoder uses to describe the public function of Christian sacraments. We gather in expectant silence not to rest, relax, think, ponder, or empty our minds, but with the intention, even the yearning, to encounter and be drawn into the very being of God, the presence of the living Christ among us.

Barclay argues that the profoundest eucharistic language in the New Testament is not that of the Synoptic Gospels or Paul, but of John, where "Christ speaks more at large of this matter, than in any other place: and indeed this evangelist . . . gives us a more full account of the spiritual sayings and doctrine of Christ than any other" (Barclay 1908, 423, prop. 13.2). Significantly, he notes, John "speaks nothing of the ceremony used by Christ of breaking bread with his disciples . . . yet he is more large in this account of the participation of the body, flesh, and blood of Christ, than in any of them all" (Barclay 1908, 423, prop. 13.2).

Barclay’s reading of the eucharistic language of the Bible revolves around John 6:51: "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world" (KJV). The point of Jesus’ eucharistic language is therefore not the outward use of elements from the Passover ritual, but being directly nourished by the Living Christ. The living bread comes to us in waiting upon the Lord in expectant worship. As Fox himself wrote, "Wait upon God for the living bread, that never fades away."

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