Eucharist rooted in liberation, Jubilee

National Catholic Reporter, March 27, 1998 by Jeff Dietrich

Twenty-six years ago when our only Jewish community member suggested that we celebrate a Passover supper together, it seemed a little bizarre for a group of Catholics to celebrate the quintessential Jewish high holy day. We had no idea what Passover was or how to celebrate it or even if we had permission to celebrate it.

Fortunately, in good Catholic Worker fashion, we went ahead and just did it. It has tamed out to he the high point of our social and liturgical year and a helluva great party.

But more important, it has come to embody the most powerful expression of our collective and personal lives as we serve the poor in our soup kitchen, struggle against injustice, work for peace and journey through the wilderness toward the kingdom.

My initial, attraction to the Passover supper grew out of a sense that any liturgical event that required the consumption of three cups of wine could not be a bad thing. Ultimately, however, through the celebration of Passover, we have deepened our understanding of the Jewish, tradition and the Hebrew Bible and our own tradition, especially the tradition of Eucharist.

We sometimes forget that Jesus was not Christian, he was Jewish. And the Last Supper was not a Eucharist, it was a Passover. The Eucharist, like all of our Christian rituals, has its roots in the history of Judaism. At the heart of our Catholic faith, Eucharist embodies the radical secret of the Exodus tradition. It is firmly rooted in the experience of political liberation, manna and Jubilee. It is based on the recognition that Creation is good, that it is a gift from God and that there is enough for all, a sufficiency if we do not hoard it.

Eucharist is a kind of holy communism -- the symbolic, liturgical enactment of a renewed political economy based on gift and grace rather than debt and commerce.

Like the prophets before him, Jesus emphasized the Exodus tradition of decentralization and economic redistribution over the Sanhedric tradition of kingship and priestly piety. Jesus never went to "church" to pray or offer sacrifice. Like the Exodus Jews before him, he went to the wilderness. When he went to "church" at all, it was not to commune with God but to disturb the peace of the pious who no longer remembered the God of the wilderness -- the God who hears the cry of the slaves and the oppressed and leads them to liberation.

Jesus began his public life with a 40-day wilderness experience that recapitulated the liberation tradition of the Hebrew people, and he took the values of the wilderness directly into the heart of the nation by declaring a Year of Jubilee, in which captives are freed and debts are forgiven.

The Jubilee laws, as understood by Jesus and outlined in Leviticus 25, are an attempt to encode the wilderness principles into the law of the land by requiring that every 50 years all debts must be forgiven, all debt slaves must be released and all land returned to its original tribal owners. It was an attempt to ensure that financial power never became centralized into the hands of a few individuals or families.

While these principles were never fully or faithfully enacted in ancient Israel, it is clear that they are virtually unheard of in 20th-century America, where, as Kevin Phillips points out in his book The Politics of Rich and Poor, 1 percent of the population owns 60 percent of America's wealth. He sees the entire history of America as a continuous struggle between the opposing forces of wealth and centralized power on the one hand and fairness and democracy on the other.

It is just this problem of wealth accumulation that Jesus desired to address in the multiplication of the loaves. This event took place in the wilderness because it was meant to recall the manna experience in which the Hebrew people were sustained by the gracious gift of God in the form of bread from heaven -- bread that rotted if it was stored up or hoarded.

The experience of manna must be understood as both a critique of the political economy of empire, slavery and debt, as well as an example of the alternative economy of creation as gift of Yahweh. A gift that may not be utilized in the form of power, privilege or wealth accumulation. So, too, the multiplication of the loaves was clearly meant to illustrate an alternative model of social interaction based upon creation as gift and the sharing of food that would otherwise be stored up.

In the presence of Jesus, the multitudes realized that the hoarded food in their cloaks and baskets was a gift from God for which they must be grateful, give thanks and share with their neighbor. That is Eucharist. Any magician can turn stones into bread, but only Jesus can turn hearts of stone into hearts of flesh.

For Jesus, Eucharist means the establishment of an economy of grace, the forgiveness of debt and the openness to sharing. His was a ministry that began in the wilderness and ended with a Passover meal in which he left us his own body in the form of matzo, crackers and wine and said, "Do these things in memory of me."