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Eschatology and the Eucharist in Anglican Liturgy

CATHERINE ELIZABETH REID
THE REV’D Dr Catherine Reid was the winner of the 2013 AECA Travel Award
in commemoration of the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan. The award
made possible a visit to St Elizabeth’s Convent, near Minsk in Belarus (See the
account in the Ascensiontide 2014 edition of Koinonia) and furthered her
Masters dissertation entitled The Sacrament of the Kingdom: The relation between
eschatology and the Eucharist in Anglican and Orthodox Liturgy.

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IT IS commonly understood that the early Christians expressed their
eschatological hope of Christ’s return in glory when they gathered together on
the first day of the week, the Day of the Lord, to celebrate the Holy Eucharist.
The Eucharist symbolized the messianic banquet of the kingdom described in
Isaiah, and their liturgies expressed both in prayer and posture their hope for
1
the Lord’s parousia or Second Coming. Schmemann, too, writes of the
Eucharist for the early Christians as the Sacrament of the Kingdom, where the
‘the whole newness, the uniqueness of the Christian leitourgia was in its
eschatological nature as the presence of here and now of the future parousia, as
the epiphany of that which is to come, as communion with the “world to
2
come”.’ Wainwright also, in his study on eschatology and the Eucharist,
considers the eschatological dimension of the Eucharist as most evident in the
Eucharist being understood as a sign of the meal of the kingdom. So it seems
there is general agreement on the Eucharist, firstly, as the principal means of
the early Church’s expression of its hope and, secondly, that the Eucharist is
connected with the kingdom in some way, which is both present and in the
future. As regards the current state of our Western liturgies, it seems there is
also general agreement of a loss or weakened sense of this eschatological hope.
Consequently, it can be argued that our theology of the Eucharist, and
liturgical experience, as expressing this hope is significantly diminished and
narrowed. Thomas Rausch in his book, Eschatology, Liturgy and Christology,

1 Rausch, Eschatology, Liturgy, and Christology, p. 1.
2 Schmemann, The Eucharist, p. 43.

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