THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD

Photo from Piqsels

The Celebrant breaks the consecrated bread.  

The Book of Common Prayer (1979), p. 364 

The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) mandates precious few of the Eucharistic pieties that you are likely to see in an Episcopal church. It passes over the placement of the celebrant’s arms, customarily stretched wide in the ubiquitous “orans” position, in silence, leaving them free to assume whatever position the celebrant chooses. Likewise the use of Sanctus bells, the mixing of water with the wine, and bowing to the elements are, despite their widespread use, entirely matters of personal preference. The BCP allows them by its silence, but that very silence indicates that they are not essential. 

The BCP’s rubrical silence is evident even in the most central Eucharistic elements. For example, when it comes to the bread, the BCP makes only three demands of the celebrant: the bread must be touched, it must be reverently consumed, and it must be broken.  

A priest’s work includes among its many blessings several heartbreaking responsibilities. I have, for the most part, reconciled myself to them – except the need to break the consecrated bread. 

I can still remember in vivid detail the fraction at the church of my childhood: Father Jim lifting the circular wafer overhead, the echoes of the Lord’s Prayer dying as we all fixed our eyes on the tiny locus of divinity he cradled in his hands; then came the sudden snap as the host was broken in two, and the Sanctus bells began their long mournful tolls – the kind used for a funeral. To my young mind they signaled not just the presence of Christ among us, but also the presence of his death. No sooner was Christ made present in the bread than the bread was broken, just as Christ’s own body was broken after his last supper.  

Then as if to drive the point home, Father Jim would make the solemn pronouncement: “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” I have often wondered why the BCP uses the present tense, as it could be taken to imply precisely what most Anglicans have vigorously denied since the English Reformation: that the Eucharist is a literal re-sacrificing of Christ, perpetually offered for the sins of the world, rather than an event once accomplished at Cavalry and gratefully commemorated in the Eucharistic feast. Yet I have always found, both as a layperson and as clergy, that the Eucharistic Prayers make Christ’s last meal so vivid, so present to me, that only the present tense will do. The prayer does not transport Christ’s death forward in time so much as transport us back in time so that we experience the heart-rending events of Holy Week as our present reality. It is a credit to the strength of our liturgy that it remembers Christ’s last meal so well that it could make a small boy, two millennia and an ocean removed from those events, feel as though Christ was addressing him personally with the words: “Take, eat: This is my body.”  

I have carried that sense of the unutterable realness of the Eucharist throughout my adult life and, I hope, into my priestly ministry. It is my duty and privilege to tell the Eucharistic story, to do whatever I can to make it real to those people who come to the altar seeking its solace. Which means, at the appointed time, it is my responsibility to make Christ’s death real to them – and to myself – all over again. 

And I feel in my bones, all over again, the tragedy of the story.  

Jesus Christ, the invisible Logos from whose form galaxies and suns, mountains and forests, humans and mitochondria take their shape like dim reflections of an impossibly bright light, shall now have his incarnate form tortured, mangled, and left for dead on a cross. Jesus Christ, Truth and Justice incarnate, is condemned by a kangaroo court. And Jesus Christ, the foundation of all life and hope, vanishes into the nothingness of death and hell.  

All of that comes into the room when the bread is broken.   

It has to be done, of course. After all, the Eucharist is a memorial of the Last Supper (whatever else it may be), and Jesus himself broke bread at that fateful meal. And on a purely practical level, if the bread is to be shared, it must be broken. There can be no common meal, no communion in the proper sense, if the bread remains whole and unblemished. 

This is the paradox of the fraction that I have yet to reconcile myself to. The fraction itself is a tragedy-in-miniature, a reminder of the horrific fate that awaits Love inhabiting the world it made. Yet if the bread is not broken, it feeds no souls and conveys no benefits – just as Christ’s body could only atone for sin and triumph over death and hell once it was broken. 

As is typically the case with paradoxes, we tread on dangerous ground here. It would be all too easy to read the fraction as a glorification of suffering for suffering’s sake, a paroxysm of perverted praise for victimhood that forgets Christ went to his death, like all the oppressed, desiring life (Luke 22:42). And yet the opposite error – that Christ’s death was a superfluous addendum to the divine plan, intended not by God but by Roman realpolitik, which Christ’s life and resurrection overcame rather than complemented – is equally pernicious. Surely God did not intend the torture and murder of the Word as a “Plan A” for creation. Yet if there is no rhyme or reason to the breaking of Jesus’ body, if it stands in complete contradiction to God’s work in his teachings, miracles, and resurrection, then there can be no spiritual benefit to his death. The Eucharistic narrative becomes fragmented; we hear of Jesus’ love and generosity toward his friends in the Last Supper, then of a series of atrocities that should never have happened and from which we can derive no lessons except the capacity of our species for profound cruelty (a lesson we already know too well), and then of a life beyond the grave which cements our hope. There is no power in the fraction if everything it symbolizes was simply God-forsaken.  

Another memory stirs, not from childhood but from adulthood. It is mid-February. I am standing at the altar by force of will alone. I intone the words of Eucharistic Prayer A, but today I cannot feel them. They remain just out of my heart’s reach. I recite the words of institution and make a profound bow, as is my custom. As I do so, something in my heart breaks open, and my soul begins to whisper to God, rapidly and quietly and repeatedly, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” The love of God has touched me, and stirred up a love I had forgotten I had. I say the rest of the prayer as if in a trance as my newly warmed heart clings to God with all its power. I raise the bread high and break it, feeling not the weight of tragedy but the joy of the sacred heart of Jesus, so full of love that it can be broken and divided and given to tired and cold hearts like mine over and over again without losing an iota of its power.  

Perhaps that is as much as we can say about the miracle of the fraction – that God is not broken so much as multiplied and made plentiful in the very division and separation that destroys mortal flesh. God’s wholeness makes each broken piece of bread a new whole unto itself, carrying the full body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ to each communicant. God’s life makes even symbols of death into icons of a self-giving divinity so infinite and immutable that it can pour out goodness on us even from the void of death itself.   

I confess that I am still not fully reconciled to the breaking of the bread. Perhaps that is as it should be. God has defeated death, but death is still a robbery – still the greatest and most terrible symbol of unredeemed evil that pollutes the cosmos. On this side of eternity, it probably behooves us not to become overly cozy with our own mortality. Until the terrible conflict between life and death is visibly resolved, we must content ourselves with the paradoxes the fraction makes manifest: the breaking of the bread that signifies our own wholeness, the scars that heal our wounds, the blood that cleans instead of stains.  

For me, that is enough.