Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer examines the martyrdom of St. Tarcisius and what it reveals about the early church.
Transcription:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to explore the idea of Eucharistic martyrs, people who died for the Eucharist in the early church. I want to look at one of them in particular, St. Tarus, who’s believed to have been a young boy, maybe 14 years old, who died for the Eucharist. Now, a few things to know kind of at the outset here. We know some about him from ancient sources, but there’s other parts that we’re less sure of. And Pope Benedict the 16th in preaching on him in 2010 acknowledged this fact. He says, we do not have much information about him. We’re dealing with the early centuries of the church’s history more precisely. We’re in the third century, this is the two hundreds, but the story that’s come down to us, and I’ll get into where we have a firmer footing and where we have a less firm footing, but the broad story is more or less as follows.
There’s a boy named SIUs. He regularly went to the catacombs of St. Kati. This is at the time when Christianity is illegal, and so the Christians are celebrating in Rome and the catacomb. So he’s there and he has a great love for the Eucharist and was probably an acolyte, meaning like Antar server, although even that is a little unclear, we do know this. Number one, this is during the period of the emperor Valerian who was harshly persecuting Christians. And number two, this is a period in time in which it was customary for the deacons to bring communion aftermath to those who were unable. So prisoners and the sick, those who were unable to go to mass themselves. And we don’t know exactly why a deacon wasn’t sent. There’s a story. Basically, there were no deacons available. And so tarsia volunteers to go and is instructed by the priest and then sent on his way.
But we at least know, we know that time period. We know that this custom of taking the Eucharist to prisoners is dangerous at this point, one way or the other. SIUs ends up carrying the Eucharist, taking it to those who are sick. And along the way, he sees some of his pagan friends and they want to know what is it he’s carrying? What’s he being so secretive about? And he won’t tell them. They then try to take the Eucharist away from him in the bag that he’s carrying it in, and they eventually seemingly realize he’s a Christian and start to kick him and throw stones at him as he is dying. A member of the Pretorian guard, who’s apparently secretly a Christian, brings him to the priest, but by the time he gets him there, he’s already dead, still holding a small linen bag containing the Eucharist.
And he’s then buried in the same catacombs, the catacombs, the St. Calsus in which he had gone to mass, in which there had been kind of the religious center of his life. And so this happens in the two hundreds. He apparently died in the year 2 57. In the next century, in the three hundreds, Pope de Masses has a special inscription written for him. He writes a poem honoring him and comparing him to the deacon St. Stephen, because remember, the role this boy is serving is traditionally a deacon’s role. And so he compares him to St. Stephen, who was also martyred, also even stoned to death. And the part about Tarus says the following, this is a very ancient inscription. This isn’t like some later legend. This was next to his burial spot. The inscription on it said, when the evil band was oppressing with its wickedness, Saint Tarsus, as he was carrying the sacraments of Christ, he wished when attacked to give up his own life rather than to surrender the celestial body to the rabid dogs, the celestial body, of course, meaning the body of Christ.
It’s a beautiful witness of someone who would rather die than see the Eucharist, be desecrated or treated disrespectfully, taking very seriously. Christ’s admonition do not give what is holy to the dogs. And as I’ve sort of intimated, this gives us a little bit of insight as well, not just for his own love of the Eucharist or the love of the Eucharist. His fellow Christians apparently shared that they would celebrate this, but also it gives us a little bit of liturgical insight into what this looked like. Now, I want to go back even earlier than Tarsus. So remember, Tarsus die about 2 57, about a hundred years before that. St. Justin Martyr is writing in what’s called the first apology, first defense. He’s defending Christianity to the Pagans. And so he’s trying to explain a little bit about what Christianity is all about. And in the portion where he talks about what goes on on Sunday in Christian worship, he says the following, he says, when the president that is the presider has given thanks, and all the people have expressed their ascent, those who are called by us deacons give to each of those present to partake of the bread and wine mixed with water over which the Thanksgiving Eucharist was pronounced.
And to those who are absent, they carry away a portion. And then he explains the next line, even though he’s just described it like bread and wine over which Thanksgiving was pronounced, that probably doesn’t make sense to a Pagan. He says, in this food is called among us, Eucharist, the Eucharist of which no one is allowed to partake. But the man who number one believes that the things which we teach are true. And number two, who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins and under regeneration. And number three, who is so living as Christ has in joints? You have to believe what the Catholic church teaches. You have to have been baptismal, regenerated. And number three, you have to be in what we would now call a state of grace. You have to be living a Christian life. You could believe the right things, you could be baptized and you could still be living a life of sin.
But the three criteria that he lays out is very clear. The early Christians in the one hundreds aren’t practicing open communion. Fascinating for all of those reasons. But I’m actually going to leave all of those things aside and just say, just look at that other part. The party said right before that, that after the mass, the deacons customarily were the ones who would bring the Eucharist to those who couldn’t make it, which would be of course, the sick, the home bound, the physically disabled, the imprisoned, whatever the case may be. Those who were not able to join at the Sunday mass, the Eucharist would be brought to them. And I want to actually contrast that with the way Eucharistic practice or practice from the Lord’s Supper looks among many non-Catholic Christians because there’s a wide diversity on this. It isn’t like there’s one standard norm.
In fact, there are entire books like, oh, Wesley Allen’s book, Protestant Worship, that look at different approaches to worship within the world of Protestantism. But Alan makes a really fascinating point that among those who reject the idea of the Lord’s supper involves a unique access to Christ’s presence. And instead interpret the ritual as an expression of human action or those who emphasize divine action in the sacrament, but locate Christ’s presence in the liturgical act of communion with God and with one another. That is in short, those who believe the bread and cup remain simply bread and wine or bread and juice. Feel no compunction about simply throwing the leftover bread in the trash and pouring leftover wine or juice down the kitchen sink. And look, on one hand, you can certainly empathize if it’s just bread. If it’s just wine, man to hell with it, you can dump it down the sink.
You can throw it in the trash, fine, no problem. But of course, we should recognize that’s in glaring discontinuity with what we see in early Christians like St. Justin Martyr or Saint SIUs. But we can go even beyond that and say, obviously not all Protestants fall in that category. There are some Protestants, historically, Lutherans and Anglicans who have a much higher view of the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper. But even here, I would point to Roland Ziegler’s article in the Concordia Theological Journal. He’s a Lutheran professor and theologian who has an article called Should Lutherans Reserve the Consecrated Elements for the Communion of the Sick? In other words, should we do what Saint Tarsus did? I mean, he doesn’t say that, but that’s the basic question, because should we be bringing the Eucharist from a liturgical celebration to those who were not able to attend?
And he acknowledges at the outset that this is the universal custom in Roman Catholicism and an Eastern Orthodoxy, and that’s just straightforward. You can look at 2000 years of history. He says it’s a universal custom for the priest to do that. But you can go all the way back to Justin Martyr and see it wasn’t just the priest. It could also be the deacon or an acolyte, someone delegated by the priest to bring the Eucharist to the sick because why it’s already been consecrated. It isn’t like a lay person is taking ordinary bread and turning it into the body and blood of Christ. No, the priest has already done that. And so what is now already the body and blood of Christ isn’t brought to the sick. But here’s the thing, traditionally in Lutheran theology, Christ is present in with and under the bread and wine during the liturgical celebration.
And so this idea of bringing Jesus to the sick outside of the liturgical celebration doesn’t actually work within a traditional Lutheran framework. And so he actually makes this observation. He says, from the perspective of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Senate, this is more like Conservative Lutheran. You’ve got the ELCA, you’ve got the LCMS, and you’ve got the LCWS. So this is kind of a middle conservative, if that makes sense. So among conservative Lutherans, the Catholic and Orthodox practice would be regarded as an innovation to them. Obviously, it’s not an innovation historically, it’s 2000 years old, but it doesn’t make sense from a Lutheran perspective. You’ve got Lutherans who’ve started to do this, and he’s pointing out, this doesn’t really work with our theology. And he points to CFW Walter, the first head of the Lutheran Church of Missouri Senate, a very influential Lutheran theologian who gave detailed instructions about what the pastor should do.
So the pastor, if somebody’s sick, you go to their home and you basically just celebrate what we would call the mass right there at the bedside. But the idea that anyone other, the pastor other than the pastor could commune the sick is just unheard of. This is not something that he gives instructions for. And it’s not like he overlooked this either because Walter, remember the 19th century, first important, he’s the president of the LCMS 19th century influential Lutheran theologian. He’s quoing an 18th century Lutheran theologian who says that the holy elements consecrated by the pastor can neither be reserved nor sent to those absent, which he describes as a bad habit of some in the early church. So that’s what I really wanted to kind of touch on because it seems to me that the early Christians neatly disprove that, or at least stand in clear opposition to this because either Saint Tarsus is just an example of a bad habit from the early church and Justin Martyr’s first apology, we’d have to say he’s just describing bad habits. These are bad liturgical practices that never should have arisen. But remember, this is in the one hundreds and the two hundreds, the idea that these people don’t understand Eucharistic theology or liturgy in the apostolic.
Think about it this way. We know that the apostles worshiped. We don’t get a ton of details about the nature of their worship. We don’t see, no one just lays out from start to finish. Here’s what everything looked like. No one does. In other words, what Justin Martyr does about Christian worship of his day in the first century. So then the question becomes, who’s in a better position to tell us what first century worship is like the Christians of the second and third century or the Christians of the 18th and 19th century? And I would suggest that the earliest Christians, those closest to the time, are probably in a better position. Tell us not just what the apostles said, but what they did and what they gave instructions to do on the ground. So when we look at early Christian models of worship, they don’t appear to be just making stuff off the fly.
They appear to think that they’re all supposed to do certain things in certain ways. If you look about think Justin Martyr, he’s able to say, here’s what Christian worship looks like across the church, across Christianity. He’s not saying, here’s what I do in my local church on Sunday. No, he treats this as something they’ve received. So I would suggest that there’s good evidence that this isn’t a bad habit. That the practice of bringing the Eucharist to the sick and home bound of reserving the Eucharist, even after mass is well established, if you understand the Eucharist, really is Jesus Christ. And he gives us his abiding presence. He doesn’t leave us orphans and that these actions make sense. So I’d leave you with that, that you can try to figure out what do I think we should do? Or you can look at, well, how did the earliest Christians live and for what did they die? And I would suggest that they died for the fact that the Eucharist really is Jesus and continues to really be Jesus even after the celebration of the mass has concluded. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.