The story of our Eucharistic Prayer begins with the blessing of creation. It continues with the messiness of the Fall. And it culminates in the ongoing story of redemption. But there’s just one problem: the story it tells isn’t really our story at all.
Eucharistic Prayer 1 from Enriching Our Worship, the prayer we’ve been using for the last few weeks, reminds us of a millennia-long series of acts in which God rescues the people again and again.
It begins with Abraham, with whose family the narrative arc of the whole Bible really begins:
Through Abraham and Sarah
you called us into covenant with you.
It continues with the Exodus, the people’s years of wandering in the wilderness, and the generations of prophets who reminded recalled people’s attention to the need to love God and their neighbor:
You delivered us from slavery,
sustained us in the wilderness,
and raised up prophets
to renew your promise of salvation.
The prayer finally culminates in the life and death of Jesus:
Then, in the fullness of time,
you sent your eternal Word,
made mortal flesh in Jesus.
Born into the human family,
and dwelling among us,
he revealed your glory.
Giving himself freely to death on the cross,
he triumphed over evil,
opening the way of freedom and life.
What I notice in this prayer is that it’s not about us, but it is for us. We are not the characters of the story, but we have been invited to make it our own story. God didn’t actually call “us” into covenant; God called Abraham and his descendants, the people who would become known as Israel. God didn’t deliver “us” from slavery or sustain “us” in the wilderness; God rescued the descendants of those Israelites and guided them through the wilderness. God didn’t send prophets to “us,” but to the people who lived around them, with very concrete messages for their own days and times. The eternal Word of God became flesh in Jesus and dwelt among “us,” but only in the broadest, human sense.
The Bible is not a set of rules or laws to apply to our lives. It’s not a compendium of thoughtful sayings about the nature of the universe. If it were, it would be easy to understand its relevance for us. Universal truths, after all, are universal truths. But the Bible is not a rulebook. It’s not an abstract philosophy. It contains these things, at points. But mostly it’s a series of stories about other people, written in a language we don’t speak by people we don’t know in places most of us have never been and will never go.
But this strange old story has a mysterious power: it invites us into itself. When we say that Jesus “opened the way of freedom and life,” we mean many things. But one thing that we mean is that Jesus opens the way for all people to join the people of God. Jesus invites us to make their story our own. Jesus invites us to walk in their way of love, and to become part of the story ourselves, and the promises God made to those ancient, far-off figures become promises God makes to us.
Every week, our Eucharistic Prayer—whichever words—retells this whole story, giving thanks to God for things done long ago and far away. It reminds us of the good things God has done for God’s people in the past, and then, in Communion, it unites us to the Body of Christ, to the whole body of God’s faithful people before us, and sends us out to continuing living the story of God’s love, for generations to come.