Every year, there’s a late November harvest of Catholic articles (perfectly timed for Thanksgiving), explaining how the Eucharist is the first Thanksgiving. After all, the word eucharist means thanksgiving, don’tcha know? But this year, I thought it might be good to put some meat on those turkey bones. What does it actually mean to say that the Eucharist is a “thankgiving” sacrifice?
As Christians, we’re called to “continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name” (Heb. 13:15). And one of the ways that we do this is by presenting the “sacrifice of praise” that is the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The Catechism of the Catholic Church has a beautiful description in paragraph 1359:
The Eucharist, the sacrament of our salvation accomplished by Christ on the cross, is also a sacrifice of praise in thanksgiving for the work of creation. In the Eucharistic sacrifice the whole of creation loved by God is presented to the Father through the death and the Resurrection of Christ. Through Christ the Church can offer the sacrifice of praise in thanksgiving for all that God has made good, beautiful, and just in creation and in humanity.
Through Christ, we give praise to the Father for every good gift. But where is this sacrificial theology coming from? From both the Old and New Testament.
In The Feast of Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger quotes the German scholar Hartmut Gese, who points out that “strangely enough, one particular form of the ritual meal which is deeply rooted in the Old Testament and which also played a prominent part in Judaism at the time of Jesus (according to the Mishnah) has been neglected by scholars: the tōda, ‘thanksgiving sacrifice.’” The Hebrew word tōda (or todah), like the Greek eucharistia, simply means “thanksgiving.” So it makes sense to read the New Testament thanksgiving offering in light of the Old Testament thanksgiving offering.
These Old Testament sacrifices are first mentioned in Leviticus 7:12-15, and are the backdrop for many of the Psalms of praise. As Michael Patrick Barber explains in Singing in the Reign, “the todah is the only sacrifice in which bread is offered as sacrifice. The sacrifice was then eaten in a celebratory meal. This is also the only time the Levitical law code permitted consecrated bread to be eaten by lay Israelites.”
So who offered a todah sacrifice? The Jewish Talmud (an often-helpful resource for understanding Jewish religious practices) quotes Rav Yehuda (an influential Jewish leader from the 3rd century A.D.) as saying that certain groups “must offer thanks to God with a thanks-offering and a special blessing,” including those who travelled by sea or desert, as well as “one who was ill and recovered, and one who was incarcerated in prison and went out” (b. Berakhot 54b). In short, if you been saved from danger, sickness, or captivity, it is right that you should respond to God with praise. And this is precisely where we find ourselves, having been “ransomed” by Christ (Mark 10:45).
As the Talmud suggests, there are two ingredients to the todah: you thank God, and you offer him something as a sign of your gratitude. In the first place, we give God our thanks through “the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.” This is what the various todah psalms are doing. For instance, Psalm 18 is ascribed to David, after he was freed from the hands of his enemies, and particularly the hands of King Saul. In it, David describes how “in my distress I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help. From his temple he heard my voice, and my cry to him reached his ears” (Psalm 18:6), and God delivered him.
But the second part of the todah is an offering. Originally, that offering was the flesh of an animal, along with unleavened bread (Lev. 7:13). But this is fulfilled in Christ. As the University of Bonn’s Hermut Loehr explains, “with regard to the sacrifice, in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper the self-sacrifice of Jesus himself replaces the animal sacrifice of the Old Testament todah” (The Eucharist and Jewish Ritual Meals: The Case of the todah). Our gift of unleavened bread is, by the words of the priest and the action of the Holy Spirit, transformed into the true flesh of Christ, and offered in gratitude to the Father. With this we unite our sacrifices of praise to God for all of his goodness to us (individually and collectively). This is our todah, our eucharistia, our sacrifice of thanksgiving. So let us give thanks to the Lord our God. It is right and just.