Neil Darragh writes that Eucharist is inescapably linked to how we produce, distribute, consume and waste food.

Eucharist and Economics

Sometimes we, or I at least, miss what’s most obvious in the things we commonly do. I had been taking part in Eucharists for years before someone pointed out to me how much the Eucharist is tied in to our economics. The Eucharist is a sacrament. That is to say, it is a major and repeated statement of what the Christian community believes in. And every time we take part in it, it nudges us along in the direction of putting those beliefs into practice. We used to say that a sacrament is a sign, an efficacious sign, of divine grace. We probably should be content to say it “nudges” us along to put into practice what we say we believe in because, it seems, it is really hard to move us. And divine power is essentially non-coercive. It doesn’t force us, it doesn’t threaten us, but it does encourage us in some directions rather than others.

So what has the sacrament of the Eucharist to do with economics? Economics, at its core, is about food and shelter.

Food and shelter are also the most basic ways human beings interact with the rest of the planet Earth — we kill and use other living beings within the planet for the sake of our own food and shelter, mainly for survival but sometimes just for comfort and pleasure.

Yet we have managed this so badly that our systems of food distribution in the contemporary world have created extreme inequalities among human beings such that some will survive while others will perish. (We could say the same about shelter, but let us restrict ourselves here to the issue of food.)

The Sign of Food

So what has this to do with the Eucharist? I used to think, along with many others, that the Eucharist was about a close personal relationship between me and God and about the divine life in a community of people. I still do, but the most obvious thing about Eucharist is rather that it is about food — bread and wine. Hardly anyone, as far as I know, disagrees with this.

The central sign which makes Eucharist different from other sacraments, the most obvious thing about it, is that it is about eating — the consumption of food. For this reason, if for no other, Eucharist is inescapably connected with economics. It has to do with how we produce, distribute, consume, and waste food.

A central feature, then, of the Eucharist, one which distinguishes it from other major Christian liturgies, is that it is not just about human beings and their relationship to God. It involves non-human beings, those living beings, that thread of creation that was wheat and grapevine. In becoming food, these living beings of ancient ancestry, much older than humans, are destroyed and processed by the work of human hands and teeth.

Eucharist alerts us, and reminds us, and encourages us to recognise the divine in the living beings around us, especially and perhaps even shamefully in those beings that we kill and process for our consumption. In the sacrament of Eucharist they have become not only food, but the presence of Christ among us.

Early Christian Eucharists

The Eucharist draws its symbolism specifically from those elements of creation that have been processed and distributed as human food.

The fair distribution of food for human beings is an issue that clearly concerned the writers of the New Testament.

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 11:17-22, 33-34), the letter of James (Jas 2:1-9), the practice of the early Church in Acts (Acts 2:42-47; 4:32-35), and the close connection the Gospel writers make between the stories of Jesus feeding the multitude and the stories of Jesus’s last supper on the night before his death (eg, Jn 6; Lk 9:10-17; 22:14-23) make the relationship between Eucharist and the equitable sharing of food a key principle of Christian community.

The early Christian community was aware of this when from the very first days they recognised that the most economically vulnerable among them (in those days, the widows and orphans) had to be fed.

The liturgy of Eucharist is intended to remind us of this, to such an extent that, as Paul points out to the Corinthians, we eat and drink the body and blood of Christ unworthily if we allow economic inequalities to exist within our own communities.

The implication that sharing God’s gifts of bread and wine in Eucharist commits us to equitable sharing of food among all God’s people is one that was widely recognised in the early Church and is still so, though perhaps less fervently, in the Church today.

Do This in Memory of Me

I have already noted the strong connection between the stories of Jesus’s multiplication of loaves and fishes and the stories of the “Last Supper” of Jesus with his disciples. The disciples’ memory of Jesus (“Do this in memory of me”) is, in a fundamental way, the memory of his feeding of the people — one of Christ’s most important action-statements of what the reign of God is (or will be) like.

The memory of Jesus is not about what he looked like, or what he sounded like, but about what he did. He demonstrated what the fully lived reign of God is like. It is at least this: that everyone has enough to eat and with food left over. The same person who said: “This is my body” also said: “I was hungry and you gave me food.”

The thankful sharing of the bread and wine is an evolving (not yet fulfilled) celebration of the (still partial) life of Christ among us that nudges us forward to the reign of God in which there is a just production and distribution of food.

Eucharist Today

Corporate industrial agriculture has made food available today in many parts of the world, but the larger impact of this corporatised and industrialised production and distribution of food is over-consumption for some, starvation for others, enormous waste and the destruction of Earth's basic life systems.

The liturgy of Eucharist, in contrast, proposes a different attitude towards the production, distribution, and consumption of food. It invites communities into a larger and more responsible relationship towards the living beings of the Earth and especially towards other human beings, most especially to those who hunger and suffer deprivation.

The fair distribution of food is a feature of the new realm of God that Jesus was proclaiming. There are all sorts of ways of frustrating this purpose, of restricting that distribution, of making it good for some and insufficient for others, but our participation in the Eucharist commits us to a just distribution of food. This is its fundamental economics.

It is easy to miss this connection between food and Eucharist. Yet this connection is an important principle on which we can revitalise and reground our liturgies today so that their impact reaches out beyond personal devotion and good community spirit.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 271 June 2022: 4-5