“…we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17)

In those terrible yet sublime days when the Church was relentlessly persecuted in the Roman Empire, to attend the Eucharist meant death if one was caught.  The government was swift to recognise that the very life and existence of the Church depended on her Eucharistic worship.  That was the basic source of her unity and her strength.

Those Christians who, while professing belief in the Christian Faith, absented themselves from the Sunday Eucharist, they could safely be left well alone: a faith which did not express itself in worship was no danger to anyone and could be ignored.  The Sunday communicants, however, presented an altogether different problem.

Sunday was, of course, an ordinary working day and so the Eucharist used to be held before anyone else was astir, probably about five o’clock in the morning.  They often met at the home of the Christian who owned the largest house and therefore could accommodate the greatest number.  The worshippers slipped along the deserted streets in ones or twos so as to attract no attention.  At the door one of the deacons was posted who knew all the members by sight, and they were only admitted after a careful scrutiny had satisfied him that each of them was a Christian and not a government agent.

Several minutes would elapse between the first arrival and the last, but the Eucharist itself was quite short for, like the Last Supper, it began at that time with the Offertory and ended with the Communion.  When it was over, the communicants slipped away as inconspicuously as they had come.

Outwardly very little seemed to happen at these Sunday gatherings.  The celebrant, who would be the bishop, stood at a table facing the people with his priests and deacons on either side of him.  On the table was a dish and a two-handled cup.  When they were ready to begin, those present filed past in front of the table and put a piece of bread, which they had brought with them, on the dish and poured some wine from a small flask into the cup.  Then, after the bishop had said a longish prayer of thanksgiving – the Prayer of Consecration – he broke a piece of Bread, ate it, and took three sips from the cup.  Each communicant then filed past and was given a piece of consecrated Bread and sipped from the cup as the bishop had done.  And that was all.

Yet it was this which, repeated in countless towns throughout the Mediterranean lands, preserved the Church and its Faith.  It was to do this that an innumerable company of men, women and children risked their lives week in and week out.

And why?  Because they knew that in the Eucharist they were actually entering into that new relationship with God which Christ had won for them on Good Friday.  For Christ was crucified and was raised again in order to bring them to God as his people whom he had saved; and it was in the Eucharist that he brought them – week by week – to the very Throne of Heaven itself.

Through this simple rite, which Christ had commanded, they entered with him into the Eternal Holy of holies.  “Do this”, he had said; and the Christians – the people of God – did it Sunday by Sunday until the last week of their lives.

Yet it was not so much that the people of God went to the Eucharist as that the Eucharist formed them into the people of God.  By receiving Sunday by Sunday in Communion the actual Risen and Ascended Body of Christ – the living Bread from Heaven – they became a real and living part of himself; and being thus all made one with him they also thereby became truly and actually one Body, the Body of Christ.  That is why the Eucharist was and is and always will be the centre of the Christian life, not only the life of the individual member of the Church but of the Church itself as a whole.

There could be no direr punishment than for a Christian to be excommunicated – to be excluded from the Eucharist.  What a long way we have travelled from those days to these when many voluntarily and deliberately excommunicate themselves!

But it is still true that the glorified Body of Christ, which we receive in the Eucharist, is continually making the communicants into his Body, into the people of God.  And so just before the Communion, at the Breaking of Bread, the priest says:

“We break this bread
to share in the body of Christ”.

And the people all respond:

“Though we are many, we are one body,
because we all share in one bread”. (1)

Reference

1. © The Archbishops’ Council (2000) Common Worship: Holy Communion, Order One.  Available from:
http://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-worship/worship/texts/principal-services/holy-communion/orderone.aspx (Accessed 02 June 2012) (Internet).