Putting together a series like this means I have a list of places where I think there might be something worth sharing, but which I've not always read. A fair few places make reference to this early work from Rowan Williams, so I jotted it down. Reading it for today, it is good stuff. If David Ford (see Day 12) said we shouldn't move too quickly beyond Thursday, Rowan says we must celebrate the Eucharist from the position of after Easter.
The Eucharist ... is never a commemoration of Maundy Thursday alone, nor merely an extension of an ordinary 'fellowship meal' of Jesus with his friends (however meaningful such meals were), nor even a re-presentation of Calvary tout simple: it enacts for us the risenness of the crucified as the inexhaustible gift of mercy among us, in our common life. Almost all Christian traditions (with the possible exception of the Eastern churches) have at times in their history settled for celebrating the Eucharist as if Easter had nothing to do with it, as if, indeed, Easter had never happened. And if it is so celebrate, it is hardly surprising if men and women fail to see it as a focal identifying symbol of the life of the resurrection community.
To take food as from the hand of Jesus after Easter is to receive from him the gift of his essential being - that presence of truth and acceptance before which we find again our lost selves. His food is the bread of life, 'and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh (John 6.51): to eat Jesus' food is to recognise the gift of himself behind it, and so to eat his flesh ...
...
The Eucharist as the celebration of Jesus risen is the way in which the Church actually finds and proclaims in its own life the truths which these reflections have endeavoured to set out: the possibility of forgiveness, of reconciliation with the stranger, the healing of our lostness and deprivation, by means of Jesus' being set free for all the world in his resurrection; the understanding of the Church's task as the universalising of Easter, the creation of a universal community of gift; the confession of Jesus of Nazareth as lord and God, sharing the elusive and challenging and endlessly fertile nature of God the Father. In the Eucharist, the Church hears repeatedly the word of judgement and of grace, the heart of its identity and sources of its meaning, a call to transforming action. To take 'the world' in the eucharistic elements and name them as signs of Jesus, signs of creative love and reconciling gift, is to recognise the possibility of the world's transfiguration, in the name and power of Jesus, into a world of justice and peace; not to allow this possibility to be realised, not to act in such a way that our belief in transformed relations is made evident, is to be convicted of unbelief.
Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (DLT, 1982), pp.109-110, 114-115.
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