The Eucharist and Peacemaking more

Eucharistic Worship and Peacemaking Matthew John Paul Tan1 Introduction How often do we think about how our worship ties in with the politics of our world? For sure, we may hear something in the epistles and Gospels that speaks to the violent state of our world. But how palpable is this sense as we gather in worship around the Lord¶s Table? Many Christians, whilst vigilant in their observance of the partaking of the body and blood of Christ, may focus more on the sacrament¶s effects on souls than its interface with our contemporary political context. This short article sketches the ways in which our engagement with the sacrifice of Christ through the liturgy constitutes a heavenly dynamic that is anything but cut off from what takes place in space and time. It argues that the liturgical prayers asking that the Eucharist µadvance the peace and salvation of all the world¶ can be more than a distant spiritual nicety. Indeed, our participation in the Eucharist ought to be one of the most impolite things Christians can ever do vis a vis the status quo. For it opens up new possibilities for political engagement, allowing us to reimagine the world around us, and in so doing transforming the way we act in it. In particular, it provides valuable resources for resisting the violence that pervades our society, freeing us to respond to it differently. Time Chief among the ways to apprehend the political dimension of the Eucharist is the way it enacts the Body of Christ as a political configuration operating in its own arena. To understand how this takes place, we need to understand how the Eucharist interrupts our Modern conception of time by having eternity enter into history,2 warping and even confusing the mundane procession from one moment to another, a flattened notion of time which Benedict Anderson argues sustains the modern state as our normative political community.3 On one level, the Eucharist is a memorial. But it moves beyond a mere µtravelling back¶ to a distant irrecoverable past. It interrupts µscientific¶ time by remoulding our participation in time itself. The Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig spoke of the liturgy as a µreflector which focuses the sunbeams of eternity in the small circles of the year¶.4 Through the liturgy of the word, historical events are remembered, but they do not remain in the past untouched, isolated and cut off from the present. Rather, they are brought into the present and lived as if one were living in that µpast¶ moment.5 The liturgy of the Eucharist demonstrates this µconfusion¶ of past and present well. For, in the offering of bread and wine, the µin the now¶ offering casts the participants¶ minds back to the events leading up to Jesus¶ death and Resurrection. This can be a simple memorial of a past event. But the endpoint of the Eucharistic liturgy is not merely symbolic and pointing to the past, but real and present. We really feed on Christ by faith. This real reception µin the now¶ of the body and blood of Christ - the result from that same single sacrifice that took place in the past6 - brings that past event forward into the present. What is more, because the liturgical sacrifice is a memorial of Jesus¶ historical death and resurrection as well as part of a heavenly drama, the duality between historical (Kronos) and eternal (Kairos) time is collapsed.7 The participants arrive at µthe heavenly Jerusalem, to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven¶.8 It is this participation in the Kairos that allows for the bringing into the now the seemingly unknown events of the future into a single moment. The political implication of this collapse is a transformation of our conception of political community. This is evident in the same prayers that ask that the participants be in union with all µwho share in the Body and Blood of Christ¶. The rituals make clear that the point of union is in the supper table of the wedding of the Lamb of God, an event recorded in the Book of Revelation, to take place in an eschatological future µKingdom of God¶.9 There is thus a simultaneous looking back and eschatological looking forward that makes the Modern compartmentalisation of past, present and future µlose their fixed character¶, and makes the future tangible.10 Citizenship As was hinted above, this Eucharistic reimagination of time radically redefines our notions of who is in and who is out. And this, in turn, has massive implications for our notions of who is a fellow citizen. In our participation in the liturgy, we can no longer conceive our fellow citizens as merely those that exist within the borders of the civic bodies we inhabit. Because participants from all over the world, regardless of their state citizenship, participate in the same Body of Christ, our worship can be said to enact a polis that is spatially transnational. Yet it is not transnational in the sense that it leaves the current state-centric configuration alone and overlays it with a conception of Eucharistic confederacy. Rather, the Eucharist unites the whole Church as a unitary political entity, making liturgical participants, in the phrase Rousseau employed as a criticism, µfellow citizens even though they come from different parts of the globe¶.11 Indeed such a redefinition of the boundaries of citizenship questions the way we tend to fetishise state borders as the touchstone of who to regard as µfellow citizens¶. This then raises questions as to the need for the fetishisation of the integrity of those borders.12 From that, one can further question the need to employ any means necessary to ensure that integrity, including the resort to force. The Eucharistic critique of our state-centric political context emerges from the fact that citizens of the liturgical polis are not only those who partake of the liturgy around the world in the present. The Kingdom of God includes all who µshare in the body and blood of Christ¶. Because the sacrifice of Christ is both one and eternal, the citizens who share in it are not merely those who partook of the liturgy in the past but also those who will partake of it in the future.13 Such terms of citizenship cannot help but challenge the fetishisation of borders. It also challenges a typically Modern sense of identity arising only from association with what Chesterton calls the µsmall and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about¶.14 It challenges that sense of contemporaneity that is confined only to other living Americans, Chinese, Argentineans or Singaporeans. This becomes even more pertinent in light of our culture of postmodernity, where there is a growing interlocking between citizenship and consumption into a single complex. Under such circumstances, µinclusiveness¶ is necessarily defined by an exclusion of fellow human beings, even within the same state. This is an arrangement that leads to the marginalisation of whole sections of humanity, which in turn fosters relations of reciprocal violence both domestically and internationally.15 In making past, present and future participants at once citizens of the same liturgical polis, living, dead and soon to be born all participate in the same divine narrative and in one another. Just as death no longer becomes the chief object of fear, protecting the means of survival no longer becomes the overriding political concern.16 The liturgy thus challenges state exclusion by challenging its fear of the future and concomitant obsession with its current temporal survival, both of which paradoxically drive the state to ensure its own perpetuity by engaging in intergenerational conflict. It is a paradoxical dynamic because excluding future generations from citizenship feeds back on itself and undermines the lives of present generations. Exemplary of this phenomena is the debate over population, where measures ensuring control over future populations end up producing relations of domination that also violate the rights (civic as well as reproductive) of large swathes of present populations.17 The coercive practices of China¶s one child policy are but one µon-the-ground¶ example of this destructive dynamic.18 By having eternity irrupt into history, the Eucharist radically challenges the violence of State in/exclusion by radically expanding the terms of inclusiveness. Not only are the horizons for inclusion spatially broadened, but in also incorporating past and future citizens in the liturgical polis, the criteria of inclusion assume virtually boundless proportions.19 No longer are fellow citizens merely confined to the living. In the Eucharistic polis, our contemporaries include those that partook of the Body in the past and those who will partake of the Body of Christ in the future. Such terms of inclusivity have great implications in correcting the exclusivity derived from the pure temporal immanence of the state, which in turn fuels the anxiety that catalyses the relations of violence outlined above. At the same time, such inclusivity can provide a corrective to the practice of engagement with different others, be they other Christians or those in other faith (or non-faith) practices.20 Without abandoning the need for cultural critique,21 the possibility of that other being part of the µBody of Christ¶ can nevertheless aid recognition that each finite encounter with that other is infused with µeschatological waiting¶ for that other to be a fellow Eucharistic citizen.22 While rejecting relativism, this can forestall triumphalism and the ambition to dominate that has become the mainstay of current relations between citizen and noncitizen.23 The liturgical mandate of the Christian life as the eschatological fulfilment of God¶s reign of peace24 is not rendered a flight of fancy only realisable outside of history. Rather, the liturgical collapsing of the barriers between past, present and future time renders possible the historical living out of this eschatological life, however imperfectly. Because the Kingdom has already arrived, living out this eschatological life becomes a tangible political probability through a life modelled on Jesus Christ. But this apocalyptic political programme operates on the basis of what Bader-Saye calls the µpolitics of providence¶. In particular, it recognises that despite our efforts, God is the ultimate lord of history. This claim runs counter to Modern alternatives that place exclusive agency and responsibility with the temporal subject.25 What is more, the historical processes that God governs are not neutral but geared towards a µcomic¶ end, in spite of the tragedies that plague historical existence. The experience of such tragedies therefore is coupled with the hope of redemption²not in the sense of relief from earthly suffering, but of transformation of temporal experience. Surrender to this hope enables us to relinquish control of that unknown future. It allows the absorption of greater risk to physical integrity and makes it possible to sustain acts of generosity and hospitality.26 What is more, relinquishing control to the benevolent lord and judge of history questions the apparent necessity of coercion and violent revolution to hurry processes of change when they do not meet visible benchmarks or proceed at the desired rate. Indeed, in light of what is demanded of participants at the Eucharist, such strategies may even become unthinkable. Values Eucharistic worship also challenges the popular representation of Christianity as a collection of values. It does this as it plays out the distinctly Judeo-Christian narrative characterised by original union, fall, reconciliation, restoration and final eschatological reunion. This dynamic is played out in the liturgy of the word which remembers the lives of Abraham, Joseph, the exile and restoration of Israel in the Old Testament, the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the cosmic battles in the Book of Revelation that culminate in the wedding feast of the lamb in the New Creation. Narrative fosters resistance to violence by providing a lens that brings into focus the events in which a particular µvalue¶ becomes manifest. This contrasts with the Modern tendency towards anti-narrativity,27 in which narratives are systematically dismantled in pursuit of disembodied, crystallised and thus universally accessible and applicable µvalues¶ or µprinciples¶. In contrast to this Modern tendency, the Eucharist reminds us that the moral significance of a µprinciple¶ is contained first in a narrative of a collective life.28 Extracted from a narrative and a specific set of practices, a µvalue¶ hangs suspended in a state of flux and is susceptible to manipulation or appropriation to justify almost any practice or sequence of events, including the resort to violence and domination.29 The risk of such µvalues¶ being abused becomes strikingly apparent²and insidious²when one considers the typical behaviour of the Modern State. Its very existence is in constant need of legitimising narratives, which often have religious frames of reference.30 The disengagement of µvalues¶ from narratives opens them to appropriation in the service of a set of relations acclimatised to aggression for the sake of territorial integrity or even expansion, and lends apparent plausibility to their claims to manifest Christian µvalues¶. Think of Hitler¶s justification of his territorial acquisitions as the result of µProvidence¶31 or Bush¶s initial labelling of his campaign against international terrorism as a µCrusade¶. Narrative resists reappropriation because it is not left in flux, but is rather completed in a set sequence.32 Liturgical participants are reminded that any given µvalue¶ is not manifested in the abstract but only in its being played out in a particular pattern²the pattern set in the Old and New Testaments put together as a single fixed narrative.33 This setting of principles against their narrative backdrop demands a distinct pattern of life from the worshipper²one that corresponds to this narrative. More often than not the behavioural patterns demanded of the Christian are inconsonant with the webs of practices demanded by the State,34 since the liturgical narrative exposes the State¶s politics to be the µsign of fallenness, not divine ordination¶.35 By collectively and repeatedly acting out this divinely mandated pattern of life via a liturgical imaginary, participants solidify the narrative that undermines the persuasiveness of the Modern dynamic in which rootless µvalues¶ become available for strategic mobilisation by the state. Conclusion Our worship encompasses more than a mere collection of symbols to denote abstract µspiritual¶ ideas. A lot more could be said about the exact mechanics whereby the political is transformed, but this short article has bracketed that aspect in order to focus on how the liturgy draws participants into a process of radical reimagination of the political. For that is where the political potential of the liturgy is located²in its power to spur our imagination. The Body of Christ reveals to us that our temporal political context needs not be the only way to conceive the world. In so far that it does this, it also exposes the lie of our resignation to the often violent relations that scar our political landscape. Because our participation in the sacrifice of Christ warps our flattened conceptions of time, extends the static confines of modern citizenship, and re-embeds values in a distinctive Christian narrative, the liturgy represents a hopeful practice and a resource to help us imagine new possibilities outside the confines of our political status quo. 1 Matthew John Paul Tan is a lecturer and doctoral graduand in Theology at the Brisbane campus of the Australian Catholic University. Currently he is a Russell Berrie Fellow in of Interreligious Studies at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. 2 Time is not a self-evident given. According to Robert Gibbs, our conceptions of time are µstructured through social practices¶ and Scott Bader-Saye reminds us that µthe ways we experience, name and interpret time contribute to the kinds of communities we imagine and inhabit¶. See Robert Gibbs, µEternity in History: Rolling the Scroll,¶ in Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption, ed. Randi Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), 127-8; Scott Bader-Saye, µFiguring Time: Providence and Politics,¶ in Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption, ed. Randi Rashkover and Pecknold and C.C (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), 98. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 2006). Franz Rosensweig, The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 308. Ibid., 304. Heb 10:11-13 Scott Hahn, The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 117. Heb 12:22-4 Rev 19:9 10 Steven Kepnes, µRosensweig¶s Liturgical Reasoning,¶ in Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption, ed. Randi Rashkover and C.C. Pecknold (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), 117. 11 12 Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 1954), 153. Bader-Saye, µFiguring Time,¶ 96, William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a Political Act in an Age of Global Consumerism (NY: T & T Clark, 2004), 118. 13 14 15 Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 51. G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 63. Arturo Escobar, µDevelopment Violence and the New Imperial Order,¶ Development 47, no. 1 (2004): 15-8, Ronald C. Kramer, µPoverty, Inequality, and Youth Violence,¶ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 567, no. 1 (2000): 124-6. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 154. Rita M. Joseph, µPopulation Doublespeak,¶ in The New Imperialism: World Population and the Cairo Conference, ed. Michael Cook (Crows Nest: Little Hills Press, 1994), 44, Jacqueline Kasun, The War against Population: The Economics and Ideology of World Population Control (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 107-20. John S. Aird, µPopulation Control and Human Rights,¶ in The New Imperialism: World Population and the Cairo Conference, ed. Michael Cook (Crows Nest: Little Hills Press, 1994), 59-67, Arthur E. Dewey, One-Child Policy in China: Testimony before the House International Relations Committee (2004). 19 20 21 18 17 16 I am grateful to Elizabeth Strakosch of the University of Queensland for enlightening me on this point. Catherine Pickstock, µLiturgy, Art and Politics,¶ Modern Theology 16(2) (2000): 171-2. Graham Ward, µA Christian Act: Politics and Liturgical Practise,¶ in Liturgy, Time and the Politics of Redemption, ed. Randi Rashkover and C. C. Pecknold (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2006), 43. 22 23 24 25 Dorothy Day, The Mystical Body of Christ (1939). Ward, µA Christian Act,¶ 42. Isa 2:2-4 Bader-Saye, µFiguring Time,¶ 98, Philip Goodchild, µCapital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology,¶ in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 127. 26 27 Bader-Saye, µFiguring Time,¶ 99. James K. A. Smith, Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault to Church, The Church and Postmodern Culture (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 67. Stanley Hauerwas, µVision, Stories and Character,¶ in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright (Durham: Duke University Press, 1973), 166, Scott M. Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 91. 29 28 Talad Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 54, Bader-Saye, µFiguring Time,¶ 104. 30 31 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 17. Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 122. 32 33 34 35 Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, 234. Bader-Saye, µFiguring Time,¶ 100. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 517. D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God: Theology, the Church, and Social Order (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2001), 159.