“No unbaptized person shall be eligible to
receive Holy Communion in this Church.” — Canon I.17.7 of the Constitution
& Canons of the Episcopal Church
When
we are baptized into Christ, we are made members of his body, the Church. As
the body of Christ, the Church is called to witness to and be a sign and
foretaste of the kingdom of God. The central sign and practice of this body is
the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, the Church is nourished by Christ himself. We
remember what God has done in Christ and anticipate God’s restoration of all
things in him as we participate in Christ, nourished by his body and blood. In
this way, the Church is a eucharistic community living in remembrance and
anticipation, nourished by her participation in Christ, even as a note of
accountability — judgment — enters in, as the community is called to live
eucharistically.
It
is the ancient understanding of the Church that the Eucharist as remembrance,
anticipation, and participation only makes sense for those who have been
baptized. And that has been the discipline of the Episcopal Church, as also
of most other churches. Increasingly, however, this traditional understanding
and discipline is being questioned, and in many places the Eucharist is now
“opened” to the unbaptized. While this is well meant, I will suggest that such
a practice undermines what the Church and Eucharist are about. Accordingly,
what follows is a sketch in several parts of a defense of the logic of the
traditional discipline of expecting those who partake of the body of Christ in
the Eucharist to be baptized members of the Church, living into its discipline.
Baptism and Jesus’
Disciples at the Last Supper
Sometimes
people wonder whether the disciples gathered around Jesus at the Last Supper
were themselves baptized. In all likelihood, they were. Andrew was certainly
a follower of John the Baptist (John 1:40) and thus presumably baptized. More
significantly, Jesus is recorded as baptizing (John 3:26), or at least having
his disciples baptize (John 4:1). And, of course, Jesus himself was baptized.
John’s baptism is arguably irrelevant to subsequent Christian practice and we
see the early Church understanding it as inadequate (Acts 19:1–7). But the
evidence that Jesus — or at least his disciples on his behalf — baptized those
who wished to respond to his call suggests that Jesus was not bashful about
making distinctions between those who responded to his summons and those who
did not, and marking that distinction in public ritual.
While
the Church’s sacrament of baptism has its roots in John’s and Jesus’ practice,
it is somewhat other. Since we are baptized into Christ’s death and
resurrection in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our baptism is
not the same as that of John or even Jesus and his (pre-Easter) disciples. It
is an Easter event. And it is the risen Jesus who commands his followers to
make disciples and baptize — as the mark of our incorporation into the
resurrection; or, at the very least, into the body of witness to the
resurrection, which must logically precede the typical meal by which we are
nourished in the resurrection life.
Renewal and
Incorporation
Jesus
famously welcomed sinners and outcasts into his movement. But it is easy for us
to ignore the particularity of Jesus and his ministry in ways that are
misleading. Simplistic appeals to his inclusiveness miss some of the contours
of what Jesus was about. He was not a generic spiritual person teaching
universal truths about God to generic people. Nor was his summons simply
inclusive without context or expectation.
There
is no reason to suppose that Jesus did not accept the particularly Jewish
belief that God had chosen and called Israel to bless the nations, even as he
recalled Israel to its mission and ultimately fulfilled it himself. Nor was his
summons to enter the kingdom a generic welcome of any and all, regardless of
repentance and the embrace of particular commitments (see Luke 15:1–10).
Jesus’
movement was a Jewish renewal movement; his mission was to “the lost sheep of
the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5–6, 15:24). His words and actions thus need to
be understood in that context. Whatever symbolic fellowship meals he shared
were limited to those who were already members of the covenant people. They
make sense, as several parables indicate, as prophetic enactments of the
wedding banquet of Yahweh and Israel, following on their courtship. Jesus
therefore welcomed the outcasts of Israel and called all Jews to repent of
their neglect of their particular call to be holy and the light of the world.
In this context, he gathered around himself a renewed Israel, represented by
the call of 12 disciples paralleling the 12 tribes.
Though
Jesus showed interest in and compassion toward Gentiles and hinted at their
eventual incorporation, he did not gather them into his movement. As one would
expect of an observant Jew of his time, there is no indication that he ever ate
with Gentiles, outcast or otherwise. There is no reason to suppose that the
multitude that was fed miraculously was any- thing other than a Jewish
multitude. It was the fragments of Israel that Jesus gathered into the baskets
of his movement.
Only
after Easter and Pentecost does the Church emerge as a New Israel, in which the
old divisions have been overcome by the breaking in of the kingdom of God
through Jesus’ resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Now
Gentiles, as the “wild olive branches,” are to be grafted onto the “cultivated
olive tree” of Israel (Rom. 11:17–24). In this way, the Church is not a generic
faith community but an extension of a particular people. Gentiles are welcomed,
but only by means of repentance and baptism through which they are identified
with Christ and incorporated into his body.
Accordingly,
baptism is seen early on as analogous to circumcision, by which new members are
incorporated into the covenant community (Col. 2:12–13). And it is the
natural expectation for those who wish to come near and keep the feast of the
new covenant, the Lord’s Supper (with its own parallels to the Passover meal:
see Ex. 12:48). It is about the formation of a people with normal boundaries and
normative practices. To miss this is to make Christianity less Jewish than it
is.
Community vs.
Association
The
Eucharist is a communal meal, hence its other name, Holy Communion. That
communion is not simply a matter of our communing with God. It is also an
expression of and means toward the communion of the gathered body of Christ.
Do
we believe that the divine-human drama centers primarily on the individual, or
rather on a community? Are we essentially individuals who associate with other
individuals, for one reason or another, or are we persons shaped in community,
in which case belonging is essential?
Historically,
Christianity has emphasized community and belonging. Part of the Church’s
rejection of Gnosticism had to do with the latter’s appeal to esoteric
knowledge, focused on individual enlightenment apart from communal traditions
and disciplines.
In
an American, post-Enlightenment context, shaped by the ideology of
individualism, the difference between real community and an association of
individuals can be hard to appreciate. Inviting someone to the Eucharist
irrespective of “where they are on their spiritual journey” puts the emphasis
on the individual rather than on our being members of one another with
responsibility for, and accountability to, the whole. The Church cannot counter
the ideology of individualism by reinforcing that ideology in its central
communal practice.
Fellow Citizens
We
belong to one another, and to “another country.” We are citizens of heaven and
of the kingdom of God (Phil. 3:20, Eph. 2:9). In this perspective, we will do
well to look more carefully at what it may mean to live in a
post-Christian/post-Christendom context. Under Christendom, the Church acted as
the chaplain of a (presumed) Christian society which included every- one. When,
out of long habit, the Church continues that role in a post-Christian context,
the distinctive practices, disciplines, and beliefs that are the marks of
membership become an embarrassment. Thus, we may be tempted to minimize the
particulars of Christian discipleship, while emphasizing the generic
spiritual journey of all citizens of the society.
Where
our true citizenship lies is a question both the religious right and the
religious left of the United States tend to get wrong. Baptism is, in fact, our
naturalization into a nation other than the one into which we are first born (1
Pet. 2:9). The creed is our pledge of allegiance. And Eucharist is the
characteristic privilege and responsibility of citizenship that shapes us as a
people and calls us to live as members of the body of Christ with each other in
the world. As William Cavanaugh writes:
In the Eucharist one is fellow citizen not of
other present “Chileans” [or Americans] but of other members of the body of
Christ, past, present and future. The Christian wanders among the earthly
nations on the way to her eternal patria, the Kingdom of God. The Eucharist
makes clear, however, that this Kingdom does not simply stand out- side of
history, nor is heaven simply a goal for the individual to achieve at death.
Under the sign of the Eucharist the Kingdom becomes present in history through
Christ the heavenly High Priest. In the Eucharist the heavens are opened, and
the Church of all times and places is gathered around the altar (Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics,and the Body of Christ, p. 224).
The
Church is therefore a body of people who are citizens of another country and
the Eucharist is one of our constitutive practices, marking our loyalties as
different from, and often at odds with, those of others. That Christians all
too often subsume Christianity into local prejudices does not negate our
responsibility to get our heads on straight. And part of this should include an
honesty with others that participating in the Church’s citizenship carries with
it particular responsibilities and accountabilities.
Under Judgment
Are
we living in communion with one another as the body of Christ such that
partaking of his body and blood makes sense? Are we living together into the
deep reconciliation God is working in Christ? Are we bearing one another’s
burdens? Is our common life reflective of scriptural mandates like those in
Matthew 5–7, Luke 6, Romans 12, Philippians 2, and Ephesians 4? Is our life
together “a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity
may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair”? To
participate in the Eucharist is to enter into such expectations. And with such
expectation comes judgment.
1
Corinthians 11 emphasizes the serious expectations that come along with
partaking of the Lord’s Supper. That text is about how those who take part in
the feast of Christ treat each other as members of the body of Christ. That is
what discerning the body means. Unless we take seriously our belonging to and
caring for one another, we have not discerned the body, and our communion is
false — with one another and with Christ. Thus the Eucharist is as much an act
of commitment and accountability as is baptism. Again, William Cavanaugh puts
his finger on the point:
The parousia is to be a time not only of
redemption but of judgment, when the “world” — meaning that part of creation
which refuses the sovereignty of Christ — will be overthrown. As the sacrament
which anticipates the parousia now, the Eucharist is also placed in the context
of judgment. Those who do not “discern the body” and become a member of Christ
risk condemnation along with the forces that oppose Christ. The failure to
“discern the body” refers not only to the body on the table but the ecclesial
body as well (Torture and Eucharist,
p. 235).
Beyond
the responsibility for, and accountability to, one another as members of the
body of Christ into which we are absorbed in the Eucharist, there is a call to
mission. To partake in the Eucharist is not a matter of simple passive
receiving but of participating in the passion of Christ. Feeding on the body
broken for us and drinking from the cup shed for us implicates us in the
mission to be ourselves broken and poured out for the sake of a hungry and
thirsty world. As our Lord told James and John, baptism and Eucharist go
together, in his life and passion (Mark 10:35–45).
The
fact that many who are baptized members of the Church do not understand the
responsibilities that go with discerning the body is a shortcoming of the
Church’s catechesis. That all too often the Church does not face up to those
responsibilities is a scandal that places it under judgment. At the same time,
inviting people to partake of the Lord’s Supper without being clear about the
expectations laid on those who participate places them under a particular
judgment unawares, and is neither responsible nor particularly hospitable.
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