The Holy Eucharist

Eucharistia is simply the Greek word for thanksgiving. At the Supper on the night He was betrayed, Christ "took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body," and of the cup, "this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matthew 26:26-28). The Church has done this ever since — there is no century of Christian history without the Eucharist. Around the year 155, St. Justin Martyr described for a pagan readership exactly what Orthodox Christians still do on Sunday mornings, and exactly what they believe about it: "For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these."

The Eucharist is celebrated at the-divine-liturgy, where the gifts of bread and wine — prepared from the offering loaves — are carried to the altar and offered in the great prayer called the Anaphora. Within that prayer the Lord's own words of institution are solemnly proclaimed, and the priest asks the Father to send down the Holy Spirit upon the people and upon the gifts — the epiclesis. Orthodoxy resists isolating a single "moment of consecration" like a chemical reaction's flash point: the whole Anaphora consecrates, and the Spirit, not a formula, effects the change.

What does the Church believe happens? Exactly what Christ said: the bread is His Body and the cup is His Blood. "For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed" (John 6:55) — and when many disciples found the saying too hard and left, Christ did not soften it into metaphor. The Fathers speak with the same unembarrassed realism. St. Cyril of Jerusalem told the newly baptized to trust the Lord's word over their own tongue: the seeming bread is not bread but the Body of Christ, the seeming wine not wine but His Blood, "though the taste will have it so." The gifts are not a picture, a memory-aid, or a bare symbol; after the consecration the Church handles them as it would handle nothing else in the world, and reserves them to commune the sick.

How the change happens, the Church declines to define — this is the settled Orthodox instinct: define the fact, leave the mechanism a mystery. The medieval West developed the term transubstantiation, with a scholastic apparatus of "substance" and "accidents" to explain what changes and what remains. Some later Orthodox texts did adopt the term or its Greek equivalent metousiosis — the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) used it, and St. Philaret's catechism kept the word — but pointedly stripped of the mechanics: the catechism explains that the word "is not to be taken to define the manner in which the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of the Lord; for this none can understand but God," but only to affirm that the change is true, real, and substantial. That is a fair summary of the whole Orthodox position: the term is not condemned, the realism it guards is required, and no philosophical account of the how has ever been made dogma.

The Eucharist is a true sacrifice — the Liturgy says so constantly — but not a new one. Christ offered Himself once for all; the Eucharist does not repeat that offering but makes it present, so that every generation stands at the same Supper and the same Cross. "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?" (1 Corinthians 10:16). And because many share the one bread, the Eucharist does not only unite each communicant to Christ — it makes the many into one Body. The Church does not so much have the Eucharist as become herself in it.

It is received as food, because it gives life the way food does — from the inside. St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of the apostles' generation, called it the medicine of immortality; the priest gives it at the Chalice "for the remission of sins and unto life everlasting." What the faithful do to prepare for it, and how it is actually given and received, has its own entry: receiving-holy-communion.