a Twilight Musing

Evangelicals tend to avoid the term “Eucharist” to refer to the Lord’s Supper because they associate it with Catholics and their view of the Mass, which is that the bread and the wine in the Communion literally become the body and blood of Christ.  However, “Eucharist” can be used merely as a general term for the Lord’s Supper based on its meaning in Greek, “thanksgiving.”  One could with some justification refer to our late November national holiday as “Eucharist Day.”  The use of the word at least can prompt us to ask, “In what sense is the Lord’s Supper a ceremony of thanksgiving?”

In instituting the Lord’s Supper, Jesus Himself set the tone of thanksgiving for the feast when He gave thanks for both the bread and the cup of wine (see Lk. 22:14ff) before He gave them to the disciples.  Moreover, our remembrance of the Supreme Sacrifice of Christ prompts us to be thankful that it enables us to be called God’s sons and daughters, children of God, siblings of Christ Himself.

 It is also worth noting that the context of Paul’s account of the origin of the Lord’s Supper is his condemnation of the Corinthians’ gorging themselves while humiliating “those who have nothing.”  In so doing, they were failing to appreciate the value of their brothers and sisters in the fellowship of Christ, as well as being in no frame of mind to be thankful for the Sacrifice they were called on to celebrate.

Finally, we can see a eucharistic attitude as one of two complementary purposes of the Holy Communion.  On the one hand, we engage in remembrance of the cost of what Jesus did for us, a rather somber act of looking back.  But on the other hand, we rejoice and contemplate blessings yet to come when we are thankful for the salvation He wrought for us.  The next time we encounter a reference to the “Holy Eucharist,” perhaps we can be more comfortable with that description of our regular observance, remembering that it simply means “thanksgiving.”

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.