Tag Archives: Breaking of the Bread

Worshipping Like the Early Christians

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One of the ironies associated with the proliferation of Protestant sects is that it has been marked by a certain antiquarianism in which the various groups try to return the style of worship that marked the early Church.  Often lampooned as a “dude starting a church in his garage”, the number of “house churches” in various forms continues to multiply as they try to recapture the spirit of the early Christians.  But none of them can quite get it right, partly because in rejecting Tradition, they can find no touchpoint from which to launch their liturgical crusade.  Their nostalgic zeal is certainly laudable, but once we look closely at the early Church we find that the early Christians themselves would most certainly have shunned these new “house churches”.

According to Acts 2:42, early Christianity was anchored by two buoys: “the teachings of the Apostles and the breaking of the bread and the prayers.”  These two elements really formed a single whole such that they could not be put asunder.  Those who tried were branded heretics.  Writing in 107AD, on his way to be martyred in Rome, the disciple of John the Evangelist, St. Ignatius of Antioch told the Philadephians (4), “Take heed, then, to have but one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup to the unity of His blood; one altar; as there is one bishop, along with the presbytery and deacons, my fellow-servants: that so, whatsoever you do, you may do it according to [the will of] God.”  This theme of unity, founded on the connection to Apostolic teaching (one bishop) and the breaking of the bread (one Eucharist), is merely a recurring theme that started on that same day of Pentecost described in Acts.  We find it repeated in St. Clement of Rome’s letter to the Corinthians (c.f. Ch. 37, 44) and St. Paul’s first letter to that same church in Corinth (c.f. 1 Cor 10:17, 11:17-28).  These two anchors were exactly what set Christianity apart from Judaism in both belief and practice.

Orderly Worship

The Church Fathers of the first and second centuries, those who still had “the voices of the Apostles echoing in their ears” firmly believed and taught that communal worship of God was to follow a certain form.  Anyone who has attempted to plod their way through Leviticus and Numbers would have to admit they had a point.  This certain form, “this reasonable worship”, was given to them by God because it was pleasing to Him (and thus sanctifying for them).  This orderly worship did not cease with the New Covenant (as the Last Supper shows us) but continued in a new form.  The call to order in worship is at the heart of St. Clement’s letter to the Corinthians as a response to their liturgical revolution.  He told them “We must do all things that the Lord told us to do at the stated times in proper order”(Letter to the Corinthians,40).  He who knew the Apostles personally firmly believed that the ordering of the liturgy was something revealed to the Apostles and therefore ought to be passed on.  It is this “proper order” that the various sects are trying to capture.

This spirit is praiseworthy even if, ultimately, they fail for reasons we shall see shortly.  Praiseworthy because most Protestants and many Catholics who want to hijack the liturgy see worship as a form of communal self-expression.  This attitude is entirely misguided.  As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, “real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship Him.  In any form, liturgy includes some kind of ‘institution’.  It cannot spring from imagination, our own creativity—then it would remain just a cry in the dark or mere self-affirmation.”  Worship is always both reflective and formative of belief.  For God to reveal what to believe while at the same time leaving worship up to man is to risk losing revelation. 

To illustrate his point, Pope Benedict XVI uses the example of the golden calf.  He points out that there is really a subtle apostasy going on.  It is not that they are worshipping a false god, but that they have made their own image (something they were prohibited from doing) of the True God.  “The people cannot cope with the invisible, remote, and mysterious God.  They want to bring Him down into their own world, into what they can see and understand.  Worship is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own world” (Spirit of the Liturgy, 22).  If we are to approach the unapproachable, then we must be given the path by which we might mount Jacob’s ladder.  This, my Catholic readers, is why you must never muck with the liturgy.  This my Protestant friends is why you should rethink the form of your “praise and worship” services.  How do you know they are acceptable to God?

The Early Mass

That being said, what did the first Christian worship services look like?  St. Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, gives us an outline in two places in his First Apology (65,67).  Rather than quote it in full, we can look at it in outline form:

  1. Lessons from Scripture of indeterminant number
  2. Sermon
  3. Dismissal of Non-Christians and Prayers
  4. Kiss of Peace
  5. Offertory
  6. Eucharistic Prayer
  7. Memory of Passion including words of institution
  8. Great Amen
  9. Communion under Both Kinds (Deacons take to those absent)
  10. Collection for the Poor

Fr. Adrian Fortescue in his book, The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy, offers some details of each of the elements which are summarized below.  First, it is worth mentioning that at certain times, what they called the synaxis and we would call the Liturgy of the Word (elements 1-4) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (5-10) would be celebrated at different times.  But it wasn’t long before it was a single celebration.  Because the Church thought it was always fitting to preach the Gospel, elements 1-4 were always open to anyone.  But once the community began to pray together, the non-Christians were dismissed.  This was done both out of reverence to the Eucharist and because to the uninitiated it would have been very difficult to understand and easy to mock. 

With very minor differences, mostly with respect to the Kiss of Peace, a Catholic of today would feel at home in such a liturgy.  Likewise a Catholic in the first Century would feel at home in ours.  There is a certain corollary that is attached to this and it is the fact that all the liturgies of the early Christians were marked by uniformity.  They looked the same whether you were in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria or Jerusalem.  And this was because they believed the form was directly from the Apostles.  There was nothing like a GIRM, but when we find liturgical manuals in the 4th Century from the various Churches they are almost identical even in the text of the prayers.  There is of course a practical reason for this.    The Church began in Jerusalem.  Every Church that was a missionary Church of Jerusalem would follow the rubrics of the Jerusalem Church.  By the middle of the 1st Century, every Church is connected directly to one of the four patriarchies—Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria.  If there is uniformity in those four then you would expect it to occur in all the missionary Churches as well.  As a young bishop succeeded an older bishop, he would be expected to follow the way the older bishop did things. 

There is a second aspect as well that follows from the desire for order.  The liturgy was uniform and orderly because it allowed for the laity to participate.  They knew when to respond and how.  They knew when it was time for the Great Amen and when it was time for Communion.  The Church Militant was a well-disciplined and well-practiced army.

Finally, just as in Israel, Scripture was first and foremost a liturgical book.  They drew many of the prayers and forms of those prayers directly from Scripture.  The early Christians, even those who were not literate, regularly imbibed Scripture in the liturgy and were far from ignorant.  This connection between Scripture and the Liturgy is often overlooked, even though down to our own day we are exposed to it throughout the Liturgy (and not just in the readings).

The Breaking of the Bread, what the Latin Church would later call the Mass, stood at the center of the Church’s early life.  This legacy, rather than covered in the dust of history, is found in the Mass of today, a fact that becomes obvious once we study the early Church.  

The Imitation of Christ

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The story of St. Ignatius of Antioch is well known.  Martyred in the early second century, the disciple of John the Evangelist turned himself over to the Emperor Trajan while the latter was visiting his diocese of  Antioch.  Why he turned himself over, whether for an opportunity to preach the Faith to the Emperor or as a ransom for his sheep that were being attacked by gnostic wolves or even both, is not known.  What is known is that the Emperor had him sent to Rome to be a part of the “entertainment” of the Roman Circus.  Along a truly prolonged Way of the Cross from Antioch to Rome, the Bishop of Antioch wrote seven personal letters to the churches that he passed through including a moving letter to the Romans asking them not to hinder his martyrdom in any way.  His letters have been preserved in their entirety for us and offer us an important glimpse into the life of the early Church.  But even more valuable is the spiritual patrimony the sainted Bishop left in what each of these exhortations  have in common—a deeply moving Eucharistic spirituality.

Ignatius’ Faith

St. Ignatius offers us one of the earliest professions of faith in the Real Presence.  In his letter to the Smyrnaens he declares that “the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father in His loving-kindness raised from the dead” (7).  While statements such as these abound throughout the each of the letters, it becomes clear that this is no mere intellectual assent on the part of St. Ignatius.   Instead it is a real faith; a faith that sees Jesus in the “breaking of the bread” and knows Him through it.  For Ignatius, the Eucharist is simply the visible presence of the Son of God, no less real than His presence as Jesus of Nazareth was some 70 years prior.

How do we know this?  Because he repeatedly expresses his desire to be martyred in Eucharistic terms.  Summarizing his desire in his last letter to the Romans he says, “I write to the Churches, and impress on them all, that I shall willingly die for God, unless you hinder me. I beseech of you not to show an unseasonable good-will towards me. Allow me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ” (4).  In short St. Ignatius desired to imitate Christ—not just His bodily crucifixion—but in the manner he knows Him, the Eucharist.  And in this regard, the Saint offers us a stirring example of how to imitate Christ.

The Imitation of Christ

At the heart of the Christian life is the imitation of Christ.  We are to “put on Christ” and to be more and more conformed to His likeness by imitating His virtues.  The problem however is that we did not witness His specific acts of virtue.  We know of them, but we do not necessarily know what they looked like, making imitation difficult.  Imitation without sight is very difficult, if not impossible.  Perfection is found in the details.  It is impossible except for one thing.  We do witness Christ’s virtues.  We witness them each and every time that we encounter Him in the Eucharist.  And this is what St. Ignatius found.  He did not see Christ in His human nature, but he did see the same Christ in His sacramental garb.  He didn’t just see Him, but He witnessed His actions.  He did not see the Eucharist as a poster of Jesus, but a living and acting Person.  And seeing Him this way, Ignatius desired to imitate Him.

St. Peter Julian Eymard, the great saint of the Eucharist, writing centuries later summarizes what Ignatius intuitively grasped. 

“This Eucharistic manifestation must be the starting point of all the actions of our life.  All our virtues must come from the Eucharist. For instance, you wish to practice humility: see how Jesus practices it in the Blessed Sacrament. Start with this knowledge, this Eucharistic light, and then go to the Crib if you wish, or to Calvary. Your going thither will be easier because it is natural for the mind to proceed from the known to the unknown. In the Blessed Sacrament you have our Lord’s humility right before your eyes. It will be much easier for you to conclude from His actual humility to that of His birth or of any other circumstance in His life…Let our sole spiritual concern be to contemplate the Eucharist and find in it the example of what we have to do in every circumstance of our Christian life.”


(The Real Presence, 35).

St. Peter Julian says we start with the known, Christ’s virtues in the Eucharist, and then proceed to the unknown, His virtuous acts throughout His earthly sojourn.  In a very real way, the Eucharist is given as a display of those virtues so that we may imitate them.  Not only that, but through the Eucharist, we commune with Christ and His same virtues are infused into us.  So it is not just that we imitate Christ under our own impulse, but the Eucharist empowers us to do so.  And this is why St. Ignatius saw himself not just as imitating Son of God made man, but Son of God made man made Eucharist.

All of Christ’s virtues are on display and available to us, but there are three that are most manifest and worthy of particular mention.  It is not an accident that these three are the same three upon which the spiritual life hinges: humility, meekness, and poverty.

Just as Our Lord made Himself subject to the laws of human nature in order to come to us, He now makes Himself subject to the laws of food in order to do the same.  He is the absolute model of humility in the Eucharist.  He suppresses His divinity even more than He did during the Incarnation; for who could believe that the God of the Universe would make Himself food!  He becomes lifeless and motionless.  He allows Himself to become a prisoner and makes Himself so tiny that He becomes “trapped” in even the smallest particle.  He does not shout out His presence and allows Himself to be completely forgotten, even by those closest to Him.  He can be carried away wherever someone else wills, even to places where He does not will to go.  See for yourself if Our Lord does not put flesh to the Litany of Humility in His Eucharistic abasement! 

It is His humility that yields the fruit of His meekness.  “The meekness of Jesus,” St. Peter Julian says, “scored its greatest triumph in His virtue of silence.”  He “suffers” in silence as He is ridiculed and mocked.  The “bruised reed He will not break” when He suffers sacrilege by those who receive Him unworthily or by those Prelates who allow or even encourage repeated sacrileges.  The “smoldering wick He will not extinguish” when the King of the Universe is met by indifference and laxity in approaching Him.  He waits patiently inside dark and empty churches for visits from those who love Him.

The Eucharistic Poverello  appears with absolutely nothing but Himself.  He suppresses all the powers of His glorified humanity and paralyzes His human powers.  He chose what was poorest and most simple, bread and wine, for His garb.  Then He “traps” His divinity inside their appearance.   His throne is tiny, so much so that many people don’t even acknowledge it.  He is not just poor because He has nothing, but because He shed it all to make us rich.  He gives us something of our “own” so that we have something to give to God.  That is true poverty.

The imitation of Christ is the summation of the spiritual life.  Let us learn to imitate Him by imitating Ignatius imitating the Eucharistic Jesus!