Five Sermons on the Mass 2: Celebration

I’d like to start by considering the word “remembrance”. Often this can be a rather gloomy word - the sort of thing we associate with the “marching season” in Northern Ireland. I don’t know about you, but when they announce on the radio or TV that it’s the beginning of the marching season again, I get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach: people seem to be keeping a memory alive in order to harden their hearts in perpetuity. This kind of remembrance involves being sucked back into the past, and being held there: so that there can be no moving forward, no change of attitude, no possibility of forgiveness or reconciliation. It’s grim.

This kind of relationship with the past can happen at various levels: to nations, peoples, communities, and individuals. Probably many of us have some sort of experience of being held in thrall by the past like this. We are ruled by our memories, which means we can’t be free to move forward, to live a new life.

Is this the sort of “remembrance” we encounter at the Eucharist, where, at the heart of the eucharistic prayer, we recall Jesus’ words “Do this in remembrance of me”? Are we in our turn simply being sucked back into the past, into that upper room on the night of Jesus’ betrayal? Is the Eucharist our way of preserving that past immovably for ever and ever? Sometimes it may feel like that, particularly in the Book of Common Prayer with its very reduced eucharistic prayer: “Do this in remembrance of me - amen”, and that’s it.

But the answer to that question is emphatically NO: the Eucharist does not merely carry us back 2000 years to that upper room; and for two reasons: (1) Jesus does not say “do this in remembrance of tonight” but “of me”: it is not just the Last Supper we are to recall, but the whole Christ-event: his death on the Cross, and the life that led up to it, and the new life that flowed from it. And (2) the Greek word which is here translated “remembrance” - anamnℜsis - does not just mean remembering but recalling, bringing out of the past, making present now. That little prefix “ana-“ which comes at the beginning of this word is the same as the ana in “anastasis” - resurrection; and “an⇐then - anew, as when Christ tells us we need to be born afresh. So the Eucharist is not about going back 2000 years, but about Christ becoming present now: Christ is the giver of new life, and we are experiencing it now.

And, at the Mass, this happens not merely by our telling the story, recalling the events of long go; but also through the invocation of the Holy Spirit, who makes those events real and alive in the present. Most eucharistic prayers contain these two elements, the telling of the story and the invoking of the Spirit (although the Prayer Book has neither).

So the “remembrance” of the Eucharist is as different as possible from that of the marching season. it is not a matter of keeping alive grim memories of the past, being carried back to the sad night of Christ’s betrayal: but of CELEBRATING the risen Christ, present now, alive in our midst! He takes flesh again, becomes incarnate again, in the bread and wine we offer for consecration; and in us! We, the people who receive his Body and Blood, also actually become his Body and Blood. “The Body of Christ: amen” - yes, that’s us. “The blood of Christ: amen” - yes, that’s us”.

Furthermore, what is happening here is not just a continuation of the person of Christ, a renewal of his incarnation; but the reliving of his story: “in remembrance of me” means “in remembrance of my life, my suffering, my death, my resurrection”. As Christ becomes present among us, he plays out through us again the drama of his gospel: teaching us, and others through us, as we grapple with scripture; healing us, and others through us, as we celebrate his peace; reliving through us, individually and together, his death on the cross and his rising from the dead.

Through our celebration of the Eucharist, week after week and day after day, we become a eucharistic people. The pattern of Christ becomes alive in us again and again: always in new ways but always according to the same pattern of life, death, and resurrection: with him and in him we in our turn experience vocation and communion, agony and doubt, abandonment by others and by God, death and deadness, and the astonishment of a new beginning. And the Holy Spirit descends on us, as on Jesus at his baptism, as on the apostles at Pentecost.

I have said that the Eucharist is not merely a remembrance of the Last Supper; and indeed the Last Supper is not the only event in the gospels which the Eucharist recalls. Think of the Feeding of the 5000, think of the breakfast by the lake. And think of the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They certainly started with sad memories, gloomy faces, heads drooping - all those hopes we had, and now he’s dead. And then, suddenly, Christ is present! bread is broken, and their hearts burn within them, and their sadness has turned to celebration. So for us, at the Mass, the appropriate atmosphere is not one of sadness and deadness but of celebration; which does not mean some banal jolliness, but wonder and worship and delight, and the constant sense of a new beginning. Amen.