I wrote in this column a couple of years ago that “there is something odd about Christ’s risen body”, which I suppose is fairly obvious. But I meant something more than the fact that it was risen, whereas most dead bodies stay dead.
I was writing then about the fact that Christ’s body is simultaneously recognisable and unrecognisable, and I gave the examples of the encounter with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus at the end of St Luke’s Gospel and the conclusion of the fishing trip in the last chapter of John.
Something else that these two strange incidents have in common, of course, is eating. The two disciples recognise Jesus in the breaking of bread, in what is in fact the eighth meal Jesus eats in that Gospel. The seventh, you will not be surprised to hear, is the Last Supper, and this eighth we might call the First Supper of the new creation.
We are told that, as Jesus broke the bread (an obvious echo of the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist), the disciples’ eyes were opened. This too is an echo, but of a very much earlier event: in the Garden of Eden, the eyes of Adam and Eve were opened to their nakedness after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit, and they were ashamed. Interestingly, this is the only verbal echo of or reference to any particular passage in the Old Testament in St Luke’s account of the resurrection appearances.
At that first creation, food brings with it the gift of knowledge, but with that gift comes the terrible curse of the Fall, expulsion from Eden, and the shadow of shame that is cast over humanity from that moment on. At the second creation, which is what the Resurrection is and what the Resurrection launches, the food from the tree of life – the Cross – brings with it the knowledge of the mysteries of God hidden from all ages, it brings about the reversal of the fall, the end of humanity’s exile, and the abolition of shame.
So we conclude that the Eucharist opens our eyes to the new reality ushered in by the resurrection. But we should note that the disciples must invite Jesus to stay with them. We should take seriously what St Luke tells us, that Jesus made to go on without them. St Luke shows a particular interest throughout his Gospel in what has been referred to as “table-fellowship”.
The first of the eight meals that Jesus shares in the Gospel is the feast thrown for him by Levi after his conversion, which prompts the question: “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” (Luke 5:30). The answer, of course, is that “I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (5: 32) . As at that first meal, so at this “First Supper” Jesus is invited, and St Luke is surely telling us that only those who welcome Jesus, who actively desire table fellowship with him, will come to know who he is and enjoy the fruits of the new creation.
Yet, at the same time, all of Christ’s words and actions function fundamentally as invitations: we might say that his whole life and ministry is an invitation to enter into the life of God. It is St John who captures this most clearly in the last chapter of his Gospel, with the striking words from Christ to Simon Peter and his six companions (see John 21:2 – seven plus Jesus makes eight, which is surely no accident): “Come and have breakfast.”
This breakfast consists of bread and fish, which Jesus has been barbecuing on the beach. The echo is more obviously of the Feeding of the Five Thousand than of the Eucharist, but that great miracle foreshadows the Eucharist and is followed by Christ’s great sermon on the Bread of Life, which is his own flesh.
There is an almost comical contrast between the obvious theological significance of what is going on here and the ordinariness of Christ’s rather laconic invitation, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for Jesus to provide this morning picnic for his exhausted disciples. It strikes me that this same contrast is to be found in today’s Church.
Outside every church there is a notice with times of Masses, as if the Mass were something very ordinary. Yet every time we go to Mass, we break our fast with Jesus himself, risen from the dead, ascended into heaven, truly present on the altar to feed us for our lives as children of the new creation. This is what Jesus invites us to, then, when he says to us every Sunday: “Come and have breakfast.”
This article first appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, and receive our limited-time Easter offer, go here.
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