Eucharist and Lord's Supper

THE SHAPE OF THE LITURGY
fellowship and Covenant-rite in some sort of balance. But gentile churches
had no such previous training in their background. Even the meetings of
the nearest gentile equivalents, the hellenistic hetairiai or 'clubs', though
they had usually a religious association, were by no means always occasions
of what we (or a je\v) would call 'piety'. The religious aspect of the matter
was, as a rule, not much more than a pretext for merry-making; and the
kind of devotion called out by tht unethical deities-with certain important
exceptions-to whose cult these pagan banquets gave a social recognition
was not as a rule likely to commend itself either to the jewish or the
christian sense of religion. If S. Paul had introduced at Corinth the
eucharist still combined with the agape, it is easy enough to see how his
unsteady new gentile converts could come to lay the emphasis on the more
human aspect of the observance, to the neglect of the special meaning
attached to the bread-breaking at the beginning and the cup at the end. It
is much more difficult to see how if they were from the first familiar with
the eucharist as a Covenant-rite already isolated from the supper they
could so quickly forget its solemn meaning, even if they had had the idea of
reviving the jewish chaburah practice by combining the sacramental rite
and the supper once more. On these grounds, rather than because of any
absolute irreconcilability with the text of I Cor. xi., we must reject all the
forms of the theory that at the time of the writing of that epistle the
eucharist was no longer associated with the agape in a single observance'!
The matter seems to be rather different when we come to examine the
later accounts of the last supper in Matt. and Mark. S. Paul is unconsciously
relating what he has to say about the specificaIlyeucharistic bread
and wine to their place in the supper, e.g. 'After supper He took the cup',
and so forth. Matt. and Mark, though they note that the historical institution
of the rite took place at a supper, are no longer concerned to do
this. They concentrate on the two things which later liturgical practice
isolatedfrom the supper in the eucharist, and neglect all else. They do not
even state where and when in the meal they came, or whether together or
at an interval. No one would gather from either account that anything
occurred in between. They are writing primarily for gentile readers, to
whom the details of jewish custom would be unfamiliar and perhaps not
particularly interesting. But they are also writing for christian readers, and
it rather looks as though the interrelation of eucharist and supper to one
another was no longer familiar or interesting to christians. There is, too, the
further point that both have changed 'This cup is the New Covenant in
My Blood' to 'This is My Blood of the New Covenant', apparently to
secure a closer paraIlel to 'This is My Body'; which suggests that the two
'words' are in much closer connection than when they came at opposite
1 In different ways this has been defended by scholars of very different allegiances,
e.g. Mgr. Batiffol and K. Volker.