The Anglican Benedictine monk & priest, Dom Gregory Dix, a great mid-century liturgical scholar identified what he called “The Shape of the Liturgy” in a four-fold action echoed throughout the Gospels and Apostolic writings: to be in communion with God, we are called to “take, bless, break, and give.” Those four steps are a common thread in so much around not just the Eucharistic celebration but about so much the church is called to do.
In a formal liturgical sense, the “Fraction” is where the bread is actually broken. The more churchy terms used in place of “take, bless, break, and give” are “offering, prayer, fraction, communion.” Confusingly (to me) it often comes later in some service orders than during what I’m used to calling “the words of institution,” but there’s a tension here in language and action which echoes a larger debate around the sacrifice of Christ and the witness of the church, having to do with breaking the bread, the broken body which is spoken of so often in this time of year, and brokenness in general.
The issue is that there’s a prophecy from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, used in the Gospels, that not a bone of the Messiah’s body would be broken, and that Jesus did not have his bones broken, though the other two crucified with him had their legs broken to speed up the execution before sunset.
This also comes up in the scriptural accounts around the Last Supper, in the synoptic Gospels and Paul’s description of the communion practice to the church in Corinth:
While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it[a] he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” (Matthew 26:26).
While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” (Mark 14:22).
Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19).
and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24)
You’ll note at no point does it have Jesus say “this is my body, broken for you.” The bread is broken, the sign of the body in the bread is broken, but not “my body, broken.”
But there is a textual variation for 1 Corinthians 11:24. It is included in the King James Version translation of the verse —“Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you.” From this comes a not-uncommon practice at the communion table in many Protestant churches for the presider to say, often as they are physically breaking the loaf as they say the words: “this is my body, broken for you.”
At the risk of vastly oversimplifying a broad and complex theological controversy, it’s a fairly Reformed group (whether they know it or not) who make a big deal about NOT saying “this is my body, broken.” I will note two qualifications for my own comments here: I was indirectly trained to NOT say “broken” but “this is my body, which is for you” well before I knew the roots of the controversy, and simply was told “this is more in line with the Scriptural witness” — which for me as a Disciples of Christ member and minister was really all I needed to hear. Bible names for Bible things and all that, okay, so “this is my body, which is for you” or “given for you” was and continues to be how I roll. Yet I don’t think it’s a big deal if someone else says “broken for you.”
However, I’ve served in multiple settings where someone in the congregation where I was ministering had major concerns about it — and keep in mind, I have never used “broken” when I’m presiding and speaking the words of institution.
Before I ever first presided at a new church, I’ve had people ask me “do you know not to say the body of Jesus was broken at communion?” We’ve had conversations, which I suppose ended with the concerned person thinking they’d convinced me, where I tried to communicate through their worries that this wasn’t the heresy they seemed to think it was, while explaining no, I didn’t say it that way.
And I’ve had people, both elders and other ministers, say at the communion table “this is my body, broken for you” which led to a distraught parishioner (usually the same one described above) asking me to intervene and correct the presider speaking incorrectly (in their opinion), or even to explain to the congregation at a subsequent service the mistake that was made. Sometimes these conversations carry over into a leadership meeting of some sort, and I have to admit while I’ve tried not to minimize the concerns as spoken, I’ve never seen a critical mass at (for instance) an elders’ meeting really see this as a topic worth further action.
As you can tell, in my tradition, which is very loosely Reformed at best, the “body, broken” debate is not a major issue. But I know from colleagues that the few who are tuned into it as a concern, again I’d say from roots in a more rigorously Reformed perspective, can be extremely insistent and persistent. It’s something I’ve had to think about because, pastorally speaking, it clearly is a major issue for some, and that’s reason enough for me as a parish minister to want to be able to address it with some clarity and candor.
My problem is that while I have no intention of changing how I do the words of institution at the communion table, I am suspicious of why certain folk get so wound-up about saying the body of Jesus was broken. Pastorally suspicious, if you would; a hermeneutic of suspicion meant to understand better why this phrase is seen as such a problem.
I think it has to do with our ambivalence towards brokenness in general.
Now, I will repeat, I don’t mean any of this to suggest we should change from “my body, which is for you” or “given for you” to “my body broken.” The texts seem to point us towards the more complete, even wholly given phrasing, a more holistic giving of Christ Jesus through the bread of communion as “my body, which is for you.” Yet I think we need the “Fraction,” a visible breaking of bread in our communion observances, because the brokenness is there, and not something to be tidied away out of sight.
Because I would add in one more text to the usual four in the “body broken” debate. Acts 2:42, which outlines the earliest Christian assemblies in their activities:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.
“To the breaking of bread.” An act with particular significance in their meetings, between the teaching & preaching and the praying. Not “remembering over the bread” or any other allusion to “this do in remembrance of me” but to the act of breaking the bread. In that act, the early church seems to be saying to us, they see that Body of Christ in action, in being broken.
The Dix formula of “take, bless, break, give” is worth further consideration, too, as he applies it more broadly to how the Church of Christ is at work in the world. You can relate the four-fold formula to calling of persons in ministry, to discernment of missional activity, to planning in general. Always there comes a phase of “breaking,” just as you take a freshly baked loaf of bread, a lovely thing, you pause to pray or say grace and to bless what you’ve been given, then of necessity — if anyone is to eat, you know — you have to break it up, and without that breaking of bread you cannot give it.
An unbroken loaf is really of no use to anyone; a person whose assumptions or expectations can’t be broken is not really much of a subject for transformation. Break the bread and the hungry can be fed; let your head or heart be broken, and that may be the necessary preface to learning, to understanding, to change for the better. It’s not brokenness for brokenness’s sake, but making a break with the past is still a break all the same.
The idea that the claims, the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are proven by his fulfillment of ancient prophecy is not something I dismiss, lightly or otherwise. The hopes for the coming of a “long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free; from our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee” are woven deeply into the fabric of Christian belief (hat tip, Charles Wesley). Some details of how a line out of context in the Hebrew prophets predicts particular acts around the cross make me raise an eyebrow; perhaps you can carry such questing too far. The place of the unbroken bones of a sacrificial lamb in the Passover drama and its re-valorization in the Passion narrative I take a bit more seriously, and again, as a Restoration Movement Christian, the observation “that’s not how it’s said in the Bible” carries great weight with me.
However, the allergy to the use of “broken” anywhere in the act of communion or in reference to Jesus is something I fear is rooted more in an unhealthy modern precisionism than a constructive Reformed theology. A good Reformed theologian would want any reference to the sovereignty of God or the divinity of Christ to be kept pure and undefiled: got it. Yet even if I concede the significance of the unbroken bones of the sacrifice as a holy parallel between the lamb that was slain and “The Lamb That Was Slain,” you have to look at the crucifixion and all that surrounds it and concede the body, the very person of Jesus, was torn and pierced and broken. Yes, his spirit was not broken; surely his bones were not broken as those of the others executed were. But to avoid any speech around “brokenness” in reference to Christ’s sacrifice seems over scrupulous, even extreme. And I would add pastorally mistaken.
Fairly or not, I would sum up most of the objections I’ve heard to saying at the communion table “broken for you” as coming from a need to hold Jesus together as intact, un-dismembered, entire, whole. I don’t want to say a “tidy Jesus” but I hear a plea for a Jesus whose entire experience of crucifixion was from a place of confidence, certainty, and fulfillment. Jesus was being crucified, but he was in charge. Look, I’ve read “The Dream of the Rood” in Old English: I know there’s a strong strand of Christian belief and theology which portrays the entire Passion narrative from that stance. Jesus let things happen, but nothing happened to him unless he allowed it. He went to the cross utterly certain of the outcome, confident, victorious.
My view of the atonement is probably best described by the “Christus Victor” school of thinking, which is itself a subject for another day. On this Good Friday, though, I’d simply want to affirm that the sequence, the process of atonement is more than any one act or day in the Triduum. I anticipate both on Easter of this year, and on my day of judgment in person, celebrating the victory Christ has won over death and sin and evil. Somehow, Christ Jesus was able to accept suffering and pain and brokenness in their reality, and in accepting that burden take the full weight of it from me.
Which means I think the breaking of a loaf at the communion table, and speaking clearly of how Jesus experienced true brokenness and not just the outward impression of it, is powerfully, even painfully important for people to hear about today. The urge to keep Jesus intact and whole and untouched is to put him high on a shelf, not all the way up to heaven but nowhere near where people on the ground can get to him. A distant, impassive Jesus, whose suffering was only an appearance: this gets dangerously close to Gnosticism, in my opinion.
We live in a broken world. This is a commonplace of Christian theology. My own tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have taken up an identity statement that says “We are Disciples of Christ, a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world. As part of the one body of Christ, we welcome all to the Lord’s Table as God has welcomed us.” It does make sense to be clear that it is the world which is broken, not Christ.
Yet I want people to know that the One making the invitation to the table understands brokenness, accepts us in our brokenness, and invites us broken as we are, with the promise of healing and hope and wholeness to come. So I will continue, when the occasion demands, to preside with the words “this is my body, given for you,” but seeking out ways to show and to say that my Lord is one who is familiar with brokenness, and who knows we all need to be able to accept a certain amount of brokenness if only so that we might be able to give ourselves to one another, like that loaf of bread which is, for now, the center of our visible worship. Broken, that we might be made whole by eating together of it; to become, perhaps, the Body of Christ at work in the world.
And I pray for all who read this a fulfilling and healing and life-giving Easter celebration.
Thoughtfully offered. I’m grateful. For what it’s worth, liturgically speaking, in my more thoughtful Sundays (and certainly on those rare occasions when I offer a Great Thanksgiving) I do not break the bread along with the Words, but after the prayer (usually in silence). I think it is closer to both the early liturgical practice and keeps clear that Jesus didn’t say “broken,” but our experience of/as the body of Christ is one of brokenness, as was his experience of ministry. Just a thought from the grandstands. I will offer this article to a few people with whom I try to journey on pastoral formation, including my elders. Thank you!