Scott Bader-Saye reminds us of the importance of seeing the Eucharist in Jewish terms.
By re-Judaizing this sacrament and reclaiming its Jewish elements, Christians will come to see what it means to be Jews with the Jews or, in Paul's terms, to be grafted into Israel. In this way our experience of the Word in the bread and wine may transform our reading of the Word in the text.
... for [Eucharist] celebration has long ago fallen prey to Israel-forgetfulness. Just to the extent that this practice has come to be understood primarily as a transaction imparting divine grace to the individual soul, it has been not only de-Judaized but de-politicized. By abstracting the Eucharist from the context of Passover and Exodus, we have left behind the politics of liberation and community formation that were central to the Last Supper. Further, by ignoring the Jewishness of the eucharistic body, we have dissociated the practice from God's election and covenant with the flesh of Israel. So, as often as we partake of this non-Jewish body of Jesus at the table, we become trained to see a non-Jewish Jesus in the Gospels.
... by reflecting on the significance of the fact that the eucharistic body of Christ is a Jewish body, and by reconnecting the Lord's Supper to the celebration of the Passover ... the Eucharist will come to instantiate for us the figurative relationship between the Old and New Testaments in which Jesus is received not as the replacement or repudiation of Israel, but as the confirmation and salvation of an Israel now extended to the Gentiles.
Scott Bader-Sayer, 'Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics: Scripture, Sacrament, and the Jewish Body of Christ', Cross Currents 50.4 (Winter 2000), 466, 468.
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