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Luminous Mysteries: Institution of the Eucharist
00:19:59
Do you desire to grow in your understanding and devotion to the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary? Join Dr. Ben Akers and Dr. Mark Giszczak as they explore these biblical mysteries and seek to grow in love for Christ through them. This episode on the Institution of the Holy Eucharist is the fifth episode of a five-part series on the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary.
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- [00:00]
A
Hello and welcome to Form. Now we're in part five of our five part series, a Bible study on the luminous mysteries. My name is Dr. Ben Akers. I'm the executive director of formed. And joining me today is a friend and colleague at the Graduate School of Theology at the Augusta Institute, Dr. Mark Gieshek. Thanks for joining me, Mark.
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B
Hey, it's great to be here, Ben.
- [00:18]
A
And before we get started, I want to talk and thank you for your support of the Mission Circle. The Mission Circle is a monthly donation group where you can give money to help us have conversations like this and have shows. And we hope this has been helpful to pray. The Luminous Mysteries. The luminous Mysteries were given to us by Pope St. John Paul II in 2002. He suggested them to us and they exist in between the joyful mysteries of Jesus's early life and the sorrowful mysteries of his passion. And so we're on number five, and that's the institution of the Eucharist. Mark, why is this a mystery of light?
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B
Yeah, yeah. I actually don't like the word luminous very much in English because really based on the Latin word for light, which is lumen, and it doesn't really mean a whole lot to us, I think.
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A
Right.
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B
So mysteries of light, I think is a slightly better way of talking about these because they remind us of all of the kind of connotations of light. Right. Jesus says, I am the light of the world. And so John Paul II names them Mysteries of Light because light indicates revelation, right? Divine revelation. It's not primarily about creation. Right. Let there be light. And it's not primarily about physics, if you will. It's not about photons or whatever. It really is about spiritual enlightenment. Right. About the Lord shining the light of His Son, the light of the world, on our hearts, that we might come to enlightenment. Right? To true enlightenment. That we might come out of the darkness of sin and the darkness of ignorance into the wonderful light of his presence.
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A
That's beautiful. So what is he. So what are we learning? What are we. What is God revealing to us about His Son in this particular mystery?
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B
Yes. So maybe one way to think about the institution of the Eucharist at the beginning is just like, what does it mean to institute?
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A
Right. We're the existent institute.
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B
We talk about the institution of the Eucharist or the institution narrative, which is part of the liturgy. And I think sometimes in English again, it kind of. We kind of lose the forest for the trees. What's going on here? This sense of institute, It's a verb, right? It means to establish, to originate, to inaugurate. It's to begin something. And so when Jesus institutes the Eucharist, right. He establishes it as a practice for all of history, right? Until the Second Coming, right. When we'll be caught up into the eschatological banquet.
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A
So when he says, do this in memory of me, he means keep doing this. It's not just a one time, one and done. Yeah.
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B
But it's a little bit strange, right? Because it's in some sense, there's just one Mass. It's not as though there are many, many Masses.
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A
Right.
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B
There's just one Mass. And every time we go to Mass, we're not like, reinventing the wheel or re sacrificing Jesus, which sometimes a common.
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A
Objection that we get is, you keep re sacrificing Jesus at Mass.
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B
Right, Right. But we're united to the one sacrifice of Christ for all time through the Mass. So the Mass truly is a sacrifice. Right. There truly is a participation in Jesus's death and resurrection. But we have to be careful about the way we think of this.
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A
Right.
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B
It's not as though Jesus gets re sacrificed, like we said. Right. But that he undergoes his death and resurrection for all people, for all time, and we're united to that through the Mass.
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A
One of the ways that John Paul II describes this, he says it's a sacramental. The institution of the Eucharist as the sacramental expression of the paschal mystery. How would sacrament relate to that and paschal mystery? Let's unpack some of those words if we want to go. Some etymology.
- [03:52]
B
Yeah, There's a lot going on here. So one thing to remember about the Mass that I think is easy to forget is that it actually has to do with the Passover in Exodus 12. Right. So, you know, hopefully you've watched the Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille, at some points. Right. And. And when we go to Mass, we should recall that event. Right? The delivery of the Israelites, the deliverance of the Israelites from their Egyptian slavers, you know, and while they were oppressed under, you know, physical political slavery in a foreign country. Right. Our souls can be enslaved or oppressed by sin and by evil. And the Mass delivers us from evil.
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A
Right.
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B
It delivers us from the slavery of sin. And so we should think of ourselves sort of in the footsteps of the ancient Hebrews. The Catechism calls the Eucharist the efficacious. Sorry. It says that the Eucharist fulfills the Jewish Passover and anticipates the final Passover of The church in the glory of the kingdom.
- [04:59]
A
Hmm. Let's unpack that. So one of the things that we've discovered in our conversations for the previous four shows on reflecting on these mysteries is there are clear Old Testament echoes. Would you say that this is the. The primary Old Testament echo would be the Passover of Exodus?
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Okay.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Well, one of the things that I can think about as I'm praying, this mystery that. Or that Jesus does in the new. His new Passover with the Instituting the Eucharist to help it come alive.
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B
Yeah. So. Well, maybe one way to think about it is just to look at the text. Right. So the institution narrative comes to us in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in 1 Corinthians of all places, chapter 11. The institution narrative actually isn't in the Gospel of John. We usually think of the Gospel of John as the most Eucharistic because of John, Chapter six. But the institution narrative itself isn't there.
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A
This is interesting because liturgically, on Holy Thursday, when we celebrate as a church and part of Lent, this reliving and remembering this institution of the Eucharist, the Gospel for that day is the washing of the feet.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So, like, the one day that you think that would be the best to read the institution narrative, we have the washing of the feet from John's gospel.
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B
Yeah. Well, institution narrative is in every mess. Right, Right. So you'll probably recognize these words. I'm going to read the one from the Gospel of Mark. And as they were eating, he took bread and blessed and broke it and. And gave it to them and said, take, this is my body. And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. So while there are many, many things here, the one thing to notice is that Jesus is officiating at a Passover Seder meal. Right. So while there's the original Passover meal of Exodus 12, the Jews would celebrate the Passover every year and would eat this special sacred meal along with it. What's interesting about the Last Supper is that there's no lamb.
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A
Right.
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B
Normally you would have a sacrificial lamb that you would eat that would have been sacrificed to the temple, and then you would eat it with this special meal. And in the Gospels, there's no sacrificial lamb.
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A
Do the Gospels know that? We know that. They want us to notice that.
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B
Oh, of course they do. Right. Because who is Jesus, Right? We're told in the Gospel of John by John the Baptist, Jesus is the lamb.
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A
That's why, behold the Lamb of God.
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B
So he's the sacrificial victim who's also officiating over the banquet. I mean, it's really a kind of powerful moment when you. When you start to see that. Now, what are the other features of the Passover meal? The Passover meal is very complicated, so I'm not going to go through and try to explain all of it. But it has these different cups of wine. And so actually in the Gospel of Luke's version, in Luke 22, you'll notice that there are actually two different cups of wine that the disciples drink. And traditionally, there would be four cups at the Passover meal. So a lot of wine. But every time.
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A
That's why the apostles fall asleep in the agony in the garden later.
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B
Every time you eat or drink wine as a Jew, right, you pronounce a blessing, right? So in the same way that we bless our food, right, before we eat, you would bless your wine before you drink it, and you'd bless your food before you eat it. And so in. So Jesus's blessings, right, Says he took the bread and he blessed and broke it, right? So he's blessing it in the same way that a normal Jewish man would bless before. You know, in the context of the Passover meal, there are special blessings, right? But you pray a regular blessing at every meal, and then you pray special blessings at the Passover meal. And that's part of the kind of process here. And then he does the same thing with the cup, right? And the idea is that we're thanking God for the gifts of creation. So the traditional Jewish blessings over the wine and over the bread, thank God for these gifts that he gives to us. And wine in particular is viewed as kind of like a sign of God's blessing in that, you know, obviously it has alcohol in it. It's the fruit of the vine. It makes us happy, right? And so you'll find wine all over the Old Testament from, say, the time of Noah all the way through to Jesus. And wine in this particular way signifies the blessing of creation. Now, what's. But what's going on in the Passover, back in Exodus 12 is a kind of recreation, a kind of decreation and recreation, right? The Egyptians get walloped by the Lord at the red Sea. Right. And what happens in dry ground comes out of the water for the sake of the Israelites, and they walk across to the other side. It's a recapitulation of Genesis, chapter one. It's a recreation event, a new creation.
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A
Event to be created as a people, a new people of God.
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B
Exactly right. And then the same thing happens in the new Passover in Jerusalem. You know, over a thousand years later, Jesus is there with. With his disciples as the new Paschal lamb, the new Passover lamb. And he's doing it all over again. Right. Instead of leading us out of Egypt into the promised land, he's leading us out of the slavery to sin into the promised land of freedom in Christ. Right. And the destruction of death. So what's happening is another new creation event.
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A
That's beautiful. Well, and when you said new creation, that made me think of in Luke's Gospel in particular, you. He says, this is the new covenant in my blood. What does he mean by that? So is this an echo to the Old Testament, an Old Covenant?
- [10:34]
B
Well, it's Jeremiah 31, 31. Right. You know very well. So it's important that Jesus is on the one hand, innovating, if you will. Right. But on the other hand, he's showing how what he's doing is in continuity with the Old Testament. And this is a really important tension for us to hold in our minds and our hearts as we think about Old Testament, New Testament, Old Covenant, New covenant. That what the Lord is doing in the New Covenant is not a contradiction of the Old Testament. Right. But it's a fulfillment. And I think the New Covenant idea is like a really helpful way of thinking about that. Right. Where God established a covenant with Abraham and with Moses and with David and all these heroes of the Old Testament, now he's establishing a new covenant in his Son that will be greater than and will surpass all of the previous covenants.
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A
This is a big question and. But I know you teach salvation history here in the graduate school and also the short course that you've taught for the Augusta Institute short courses. What's a quick primer on what does covenant mean?
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B
Yeah, covenant is a complicated concept. So we could think of it as a contract. It's a way that people made agreements in the ancient world. And in our contracts, right, we make agreements like, I'll play shortstop for your major League baseball team if you pay me $10 million. And then there are penalties that are built into the contract. If I don't play shortstop, then you won't pay me my Salary or maybe I'll have to pay you back some money and this sort of thing. In ancient times, agreements were just as solemn, if not more so, but they were harder to enforce. Right. The legal system wasn't as developed. And so the way that people would bind themselves to one another and make sure that you were going to make good on your end of the bargain is they would take oaths. So really the word covenant, you could translate it as oath. Right. So people would swear oaths usually to the gods. Right. Essentially wishing harm upon themselves if they didn't fulfill the stipulations of the covenant.
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A
That's very serious.
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B
Very serious. Yeah. And you get a sense of this from reading Deuteronomy chapters 27 and 28, where the people of God pronounce the covenant blessings.
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A
Right.
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B
If you fulfill the covenant and the covenant curses if you don't. These are oaths. So that might be a helpful way of thinking about it. And of course, the Latin word sacramentum means oath.
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A
Great.
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B
So there's a kind of continuity between Old Testament covenantal thinking and the new covenant in Christ and the sacraments.
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A
When I read the Old Testament, I see, as you mentioned, these different covenants with Noah, Abraham, Moses. This word comes up often. But then I get to the New Testament, I don't see it show up until this moment. Is that by design or what's going on there, you think? Strategy?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I mean, maybe one way to conceive of it is that the Old Testament is giving us far more history, right. Over a long period of time. And you have a variety of covenant mediators in the Old Testament. Like I mentioned Abraham and Moses and so forth. So Jesus is the new covenant mediator.
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A
Right.
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B
He's the new Abraham, he's the new Moses, he's the new David. So it's really. We would only expect it to happen once in the New Testament, but even the word testament in English means covenant, right. So we could have like the, you know, the King James translators or whatever gave us Old Testament, New Testament, but they really could just be old covenant. New covenant.
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A
Okay, so the old covenant and the new covenant. So we can start referring to that, the New Testament as the New. The new covenant.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's beautiful. One of the things that also jumps out when I read this text. So this new covenant, this new covenant is blood. And he talks about bread, being himself. What would be if I'm an apostle listening to this, hearing this for the first time, and if I'm maybe going to mass for the first time, never Been to Mass before when Jesus or the priest takes the bread and says, this is my body, and takes the cup of wine and says, this is my blood. What's happening there?
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B
Yeah, I mean, it's something complicated we call transubstantiation, right? And this is where when we're meditating on the Eucharist, we have to kind of hold a variety of things in our minds and hearts at the same time. So one of the documents that the Church uses to describe it is called eucharisticum mysterium from 1967. And it says there that the mystery of the Eucharist is the true center of the Sacred liturgy and indeed of the whole Christian life. That's a pretty big statement, right?
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A
This sounds like. I've heard it.
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B
It's the center.
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A
It's the center or source and summit is another phrase I've heard before.
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B
I think sometimes we can end up making a mistake based on a statement like that or on the source and summit language that we find in Vatican 2 and begin to think about either the. The ceremony itself, right. Or the. The sacrament itself as like somehow all encompassing. And that now we don't need to worry about thinking about God or. Or praying outside of Mass or theology or whatever, right? It's like what's going on in the Eucharist is the summit, right? It's the. It's the highest point of communion with God on earth. And yet it's meant to lead us into, right. The even greater reality of the eschatological banquet, right? In heaven, we'll be part of the Mass full time, right? We won't have to go to Mass because we'll constantly be at Mass, so to speak. Right? Because we'll be constantly united with the Lord spiritually. And of course, the Protestants disagree with us. They have a kind of heretical notion of the, Of. Of what the Last Supper signifies. And so I think we can end up overemphasizing the kind of physicality of the Eucharist and forget that the. Yes. While it is the body of Christ, right. We can forget that this is a spiritual meal that we're invited to.
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A
Right?
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B
We're invited to a spiritual communion. And we enter that communion through the Eucharist, right? This is why I think communion is such a powerful word that the Church uses to describe the Eucharist, right? It really unites us to the Lord.
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A
And so we won't need communion, Holy Communion in heaven.
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B
Well, we won't have repeatedly, right? Because we'll be caught up in divine beatitude. For all eternity. Right. So we'll be caught up in the who God is forever and ever. It'll be wonderful. And there's a way in which, like the. The institutions.
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A
Right. Of.
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B
Of the church on this earth will kind of fade into the background as we're caught up into the beatific vision.
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A
One of the things that words that you. You threw out that. That just. I wanted to, for our audience, if they may not be familiar with these words. You said Thanksgiving a lot.
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B
Yeah.
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A
How does that relate to.
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B
That's the meaning of the word Eucharist. Okay. So this means Thanksgiving.
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A
Yeah. The other word that. That John Paul II uses is Paschal mystery. Can you unpack what Paschal means?
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B
Yeah. Paschal, it just comes from the Hebrew word for Passover. Okay, Right. And so whenever you hear of Pascha for Easter, or Paschal for describing, you know, the Eucharist or the Mass. Right. And we often use the phrase the Paschal mystery to describe everything that happens in Holy Week. Right. The whole triduum.
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A
So the whole. All the events of Holy Week kind of condensed into one phrase.
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B
Yeah.
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A
That's beautiful. Now, as I go, you know, for us, in just the last couple minutes or two, that we have all these mysteries, the baptism cana, proclamation of the kingdom, transfiguration, have related to the cross in some way. How does this mystery relate us to the cross? Yeah.
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B
So it's one Mass. It's one sacrifice. I think sometimes people think, okay, so Jesus celebrates Mass on Thursday, and then he dies on Friday, and then he rises on Sunday. I don't really understand. But if you think about the way that the liturgy is presented to us, the Holy Thursday liturgy never really ends, and the Good Friday liturgy never exactly begins, and it never exactly ends. So it's like the liturgy begins on Holy Thursday and doesn't really end until the end of the Easter vigil. And I think that's how we should conceive of the first Mass. Right. That Jesus offers this sacrifice on Holy Thursday night, but the Mass is not complete until he dies and rises again. Right. And so, like, while the disciples are literally eating his body on Holy Thursday, that's only possible because he's going to.
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A
Die on Friday, and this is only.
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B
Possible and then rise again. Right.
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A
We're not. We're not.
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B
We're not cannibals. Right. We don't sit around eating the dead body of Jesus. Right. We eat his resurrected body.
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A
His resurrected flesh. Yeah. Well, the. Thank you for joining us, joining me and talking about this. This. It went by fast and the Eucharist is just such it's vast. It's the mystery. And there's a teaser of going through a Bible study on the different the five different mysteries, the luminous Mysteries of the Mysteries of Light. As we talked about in and as John Paul II says, the Rosary is a compendium of the Gospel, a summary of the Gospel. So the institution of the Eucharist brings us right up to the next the Sorrowful Mysteries, the first sorrowful Mystery being the Agony in the Garden. So we'll do a series on each of the Mysteries of the Rosary going forward, but we wanted to start with this Mysteries of Light. The third we pray on the Thursdays is a traditional day to pray these since John Paul II introduced him in 2002. This is a day that we as the Augusta Institute in particular prayer for the work of the Augustus Institute. So we invite you to join us if you pray the luminous Mysteries, the Mysteries of Light, if you pray them on Thursdays. Please ask the Lord to intercede and bless the work of the Augusta Institute. Thank you for joining us and God bless.