In the Eucharist, we celebrate the sacrifice of Jesus sacramentally in the form of a meal. As I’ve previously said, it’s a mistake to think therefore that meal and sacrifice are unequally important or have unequal status.

Sacrifice refers to the totality of Jesus’ self-giving, which climaxed on the cross. The meal is the sacrament of that sacrifice.

In the ancient world, meals had a much deeper and broader significance than they have for us. Today, indeed, meals have what one can only describe as a diminished significance.

We live in a culture of fast foods. Families no longer eat together as often as they used to. We eat by ourselves, and we eat on the run – practices that would be been unimaginable to people in Jesus’ time and to people in ancient culture generally.

A great part of Jesus’ ministry, as we see more clearly today, centered on meals. He was always somewhere, in somebody’s house, eating and drinking. This is revelation too, one must remember. God’s communication through Jesus is in word and deed.

A meal in ancient culture was a social institution, a primary means of enhancing community bonds. It was about more than food, in other words. It was the chief expression (and a mode of meeting) for a variety of sodalities.

It defined relations in society. A friend, for instance, was someone who shared your table. Thus, when Jesus dined with sinners and tax collectors, the latter were regarded, according to custom, as his friends.

The Eucharist as meal thus has a wealth of implied associations that are no longer available to us.

Some meals were also specifically religious, and surrounded by special ritual. The Passover meal was such a meal, and its significance for Jewish culture and identity cannot be overestimated.

The Passover meal re-enacted the basic events surrounding the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. Through eating the bitter herbs, present-day Israelis tasted the bitterness of their ancestors’ slavery.

Through reclining on couches, as only free persons could, they had some sense of the freedom their ancestors experienced. In re-telling the story as part of the meal experience, they recalled the events in a way that made it possible to relive them.

The past became present. The meal was thus a complex ritual into which the participants could enter each year, to encounter the God of their fathers in a powerful and experiential way.

Given its origin and associations, the meal also functioned as a basic medium through which Israelite identity was constantly established. Participants heard nothing new – it was the same story every year. What they kept entering into is what they already knew but always learnt afresh.

The meal of fellowship, of the kind that Jesus had with his disciples before the passion, was a meal of more frequent occurrence, though similar in structure to its Passover equivalent. On the last such occasion that he ate with his disciples, Jesus departed (according to St John) from the familiar ritual in significant ways.

At a certain point, he took the basin of water kept for washing hands, and washed his disciples’ feet. This was an acted parable, a symbolic inauguration of a new community. In this community the greatest would serve the least -- not the other way around; a community, in other words, where the status quo is turned inside out.

At the meal, Jesus also broke bread, distributed it to his disciples, and said it was his body he was giving to them. After the blessing over the cup, he gave it to them, saying that they were sharing the cup of a new covenant in his blood.

Jesus’ words had a clear sacrificial intent. Body is separated from blood, as it is in traditional sacrifice. Blood is also poured out, as it is in the metaphor of traditional sacrifice. In all the Gospel accounts, the blood associations compare Jesus’ self-giving to a covenant offering, where the sprinkled blood ratified the pledge of solidarity between God and his people.

In time, the notion of sacrifice dominated all understanding of the Eucharist. In the polemical climate of the Reformation, what was further emphasised was the Mass as an unbloody sacrifice. It was not just a fellowship meal.

This was unfortunate, if we recall the rich sacramental significance of the Passover meal. What was lost and remained lost for a while was that the Eucharist was the sacrament and memorial of Jesus’ sacrifice, not its literal but unbloody representation.

The earliest biblical record of the Eucharist is located in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, written around 57AD. The community at Corinth had problems of class apparently; as Gentiles, they were also perhaps unfamiliar with the Jewish meal tradition.

Their coming together quickly degenerated into simply having a good time. Paul had to remind them of the origin and purpose of their gathering.

Paul’s account is not free of all ambiguity. We cannot say for sure whether he believed that Jesus was present in the meal. The occasion was clearly sacramental.

It made the risen Lord present in a way different from ordinary awareness, but presence here seemed to have been a pervasive presence rather than one localised in the food. The first clear identification of the bread and wine with the body and blood of Jesus would come with the Gospel of John.

Jesus did not intend his last supper to mark the institution of a new ritual. He saw it rather as memorialising what he had done (and was about to complete). As such, the meal has a variety of rich meanings.

First, it signifies a memorial of the life and death of the Lord. “Do this in memory of me,” is equivalent to “Recall my total self-giving from birth to death (my sacrifice) as the pattern for your life.” Secondly, it symbolises a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, to which all peoples are invited.

Jesus’ open table-fellowship was the anticipation and symbol of this inclusion. Thirdly, it means a pledge to become what we eat -- as Augustine said, to become what we already are, the body of Christ. Fourthly, it establishes our identity as a special community. To eat the body and drink the blood of the Lord means living as an inclusive community of self-giving service, unity, and mutual care.

And finally, it remains the unique form of the presence of the Lord, extended in space and time, until the end of time.