With Holy Thursday fast approaching, it’s prime time to commit ourselves to living out a “Eucharistic life.”
After all, when we celebrate this special Holy Week liturgy, we’re commemorating in a particular way that moment 2,000 or so years ago in an Upper Room in Jerusalem when Christ instituted the Eucharist, a mystery that we speak of as the source and summit of the Christian life.
But what does a Eucharistic life actually look like?
The immediate reaction, at least the one I have, is to think about participating in the sacrament of the Eucharist, perhaps with more frequency, more devotion, or more preparation.
Of course, this is a good place to start. But there’s a sense in which a Eucharistic life is also something even deeper. Or rather, that the Eucharistic sacrament is part of something that can’t be limited to externals. And to understand this, we need to consider the first person to ever live a Eucharistic life: the Son of God.
Jesus offered the Eucharist on the eve of his passion, opening a way for members of his body to participate in his self-gift. In fact, Eucharist comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving. As the Catechism explains, “the Eucharist is a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father, a blessing by which the Church expresses her gratitude to God for all his benefits, for all that he has accomplished through creation, redemption, and sanctification” (CCC 1360).
Especially in John’s Gospel account of the Last Supper, we see that thanksgiving is a theme throughout the whole affair. The offerings of bread and wine are united with Christ’s bodily sacrifice on the cross in a context of unceasing gratitude to the Father.
But Christ’s thanksgiving, his Eucharist, is not a one-time occasion. As the American theologian Nicholas Healy writes in a recent issue of “Communio,” self-giving gratitude is the foundational disposition of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity:
“Both as God and as man, Christ receives his existence as a boundless gift from the Father. The form of his life is a thanksgiving to the Father and offering of himself back to the Father.”
This, in a word, is astounding. A constitutive dimension of reality, the relationship between the eternally begotten Son and the eternally begetting Father, is Eucharistic. And the entirety of the Son’s incarnate life on earth is, likewise, nothing but pure offering back to the Father in gratitude.
Furthermore, Healy explains how this gift-and-response encompasses everything in existence. “Christ receives creation as an expression of the Father’s love. In receiving creation as a gift and offering it back to the Father, Christ discloses the deepest truth of creation. The world was created for him and all things hold together in him.” Jesus — who was like us in all things but sin, living a life of work, friendship, eating, sleeping, etc. — offers all of creation back to the Father.
And this cosmic, primordial, foundational reality is what we enter into when we participate in the Eucharist. In fact, Christ’s Eucharistic life is what is shared with us in the sacrament. This is what it means to say that he is “wholly and entirely present” in the Eucharist, which we in turn receive.
We can think of it this way. The sacrament of the Eucharist, which we participate in at each and every Mass, is like a portal. It puts us into contact with Christ’s sacrificial offering on the cross 2,000 years ago. But it also allows us to enter into the eternal reality that undergirds that paradigmatic sacrificial act: the Son’s perfect and perpetual self-offering to the Father, within the very heartbeat of the Trinity. And we enter into this place to do what Christ did: to give everything back.
To live a Eucharistic life means to live like Christ. It means that we don’t merely participate in the sacrament in an external or superficial way; it means that we allow the sacrament to define our entire lives. Everything we have is a gift from God, meant to be offered back to him with unceasing gratitude.
As Joseph Ratzinger (who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI) once wrote, “The Eucharist is the genuine reality. This is the yard stick, the heart of things; here we encounter that reality against which we need to learn to measure every other reality.”
May our Lenten journey and Holy Thursday celebration help us each to live this kind of Eucharistic life.
Liedl lives in South Bend, Indiana, and is senior editor for the National Catholic Register. He is a former longtime resident of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, alum of the University of St. Thomas’ Catholic Studies graduate program and a current student at The St. Paul Seminary and School of Divinity, both in St. Paul.
