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Section 3: The Upper Room
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Do this in memory of me: The institution of the Holy Eucharist
"Do this in memory of me" (Lk 22:19). With these simple words, what occurred one Thursday evening 2,000 years ago was destined to become a perpetual institution. Indeed, the word 'memory,' as Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa reminds us, is what "connects the Eucharist to the Jewish Passover which, as we know, was also a "memorial." It is of such critical importance that St. Paul twice repeats this command of Jesus in his account of the institution of the Eucharist. He also specifies the content of this remembrance of Jesus: 'For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord' (1 Cor 11:26). The content is Christ's death."
The great troubadour of the Body and Blood of Christ, St. Thomas Aquinas, showed his awareness of the content of Eucharistic remembrance in his great hymn "Adoro Te Devote":
O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.
As we can see in these moving words, St. Thomas understood the paradox that the bread reminding us of Christ's death is nevertheless a "Living Bread." He recognized that Jesus's act of giving his life in the Upper Room already encompassed the Resurrection.
As Pope Benedict XVI explains:
In his certainty that his prayer would be heard, the Lord gave his body and blood to the disciples during the Last Supper in anticipation of the Resurrection: both Cross and Resurrection are intrinsic to the Eucharist – without them there would be no Eucharist. Yet because Jesus' gift is essentially rooted in the Resurrection, the celebration of the sacrament had necessarily to be connected with the memorial of the Resurrection. The first encounter with the risen Lord took place on the morning of the first day of the week – the third day after Jesus' death – that is to say, Sunday morning. The morning of the first day thus naturally became the time for Christian worship – Sunday became the "Lord's Day."
(Source: archspmmainsite/Synod_Pastoral+Letter)
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