Tag Archives: Communion wafers

The Cup of Blessing That We Bless

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On the left, a Russian bishop prepares the one Bread and one Cup, adequate for a large number of communicants, who will all receive from the same loaf and chalice. On the right, a priest places the “fermentum” in the chalice, signifying the unity of the Eucharist which he celebrates with the Eucharist which the bishop celebrates elsewhere that day.


Judge what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not communion in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread we, the many, are one body, for we all share in one and the same bread. (1 Cor. 10:15-17)

Because the parish in Corinth–wealthy members, poor members, Gentile Christians, Jewish Christians, the “weak”, the “strong”–all partake of the one bread and the one cup at the Eucharist, they are one body. One fellowship. One community united in faith against the temptations and allurement of the fallen world. Although many, they are one–manifesting and revealing the Kingdom of God to all those willing to look and see.

That chalice, or rather, what the chalice holds, consecrated by the word of God, is the blood of Christ. Through these elements the Lord wished to entrust to us his body and the blood which he poured out for the remission of sins. If you have received worthily, you are what you have received.

St, Augustine of Hippo, Easter Sermon

St. Augustine reminds his congregation of what St. Paul told the Corinthians: they must partake of the bread and cup worthily. If they do not partake in a worthy manner, the Holy Gifts will destroy them rather than enliven them.

But St. Paul didn’t say the Corinthians had to be pure or sinless. He said they had to be worthy. Worthiness is a very different thing. To be worthy to touch, to be worthy to consume the Body of Christ does not mean to be sinless. As several English theologians in the 1600s and 1700s pointed out, to be worthy is to be committed to self-examination, committed to repentance, committed to always turning around, changing direction, re-orienting myself towards Christ. So I must always prepare to approach the Table by examining myself, reviewing what I have done and who I have been during the time since I last approached the Holy Table. Examine myself, measure myself against our standard—which is Christ—and determine how I might, in perhaps some single small way, turn my back on that person that I do not want to be and take some small step closer to being the person I was made to be in Christ.

To be worthy of receiving Holy Communion, to dare to touch the Corpus Christi, I must be committed to self-examination and repentance. One of those English theologians, Simon Patrick[1] in 1660, suggested using a phrase from the Gospel that Greek and Russian Christians use as they approach the chalice: “Lord, remember me when you come in your kingdom.” The thief crucified with Christ acknowledged Jesus as Lord and reoriented his life—turning his back on his image of himself as a victim who was owed whatever he could take from other people—and he asked Jesus to make a place for him in the Kingdom. What was Jesus’ answer? “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” If we approach the chalice with the self-examination, the reorientation of our lives, the words of the thief—Remember me in your kingdom—Christ makes the same promise to us: Today you will be with me in paradise. Today you will begin to live forever.

[1] Bishop of Ely, Mensa Mystica, or a Discourse concerning the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. (Prayer Book Spirituality, p. 283)

Yeast, Sincerity, and Truth

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Bread for the Eucharist with yeast (on the left) as the Orthodox use; on the right, Western hosts without yeast.

Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the entire mound of dough? Get rid of the old yeast so that you may be a new mound of dough, because you are unleavened; for Christ, our passover, was sacrificed. Hence let us celebrate not with the old yeast, not with the yeast of evil and sexual immorality, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Cor. 5:6-8)

The apostle Paul urges the Corinthians to expel the man who has a sexual relationship with his stepmother before his immoral behavior spreads and destroys them all. No one’s behavior is “private,” even if it is something a person does when no one else is there to watch.

The apostle mentions the passover sacrifice and the passover bread because the Passover feast was about to be celebrated (1 Cor. 16:8). He compares the man’s bad behavior to the yeast that must be thrown away before Passover starts. He urges the parish to not be contaminated by the man’s immoral behavior when they celebrate Passover; the apostle wants them to celebrate with the new bread of sincerity and truth, unspoilt by the “yeast” of insincerity, dishonesty, and lies.

According to Jewish practice, bread without yeast would only be used once a year–i.e. during the Passover. When the first Christians–who were Jewish Christians–would have known that and would have used leavened bread for the weekly celebrations of the Eucharist. Eastern Christians still maintain the practice of using bread with yeast for the Eucharist. Western Christians also used bread with yeast but began to use bread without yeast sometime in the 10th century.

The Eastern Christians saw the yeast in the bread that they used as a sign of the Resurrection; they could not understand bread without yeast as anything except a denial of the Resurrection. They also saw the use of bread without yeast as the rejection of the 4th Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon as the Armenians, who rejected Chalcedon, also used bread without yeast in the Eucharist.

Yeast gives life to dough that is totally dead–grain harvested, ground into flour, pounded and kneaded, passed through fire. Yeast can mean resurrection.

Yeast gives life to grape juice that is also totally dead–cut from the vine and harvested, crushed beneath feet, dead. The yeast makes the grape juice come alive and ferments it, making it wine.

But if there is too much yeast or the fermentation goes on too long the wine goes sour. It becomes vinegar. The bread can grow mold. Too much yeast can make the wine and bread corrupt. Rotten. Uneatable and undrinkable. The moldy bread and sour wine must be thrown away. Yeast means Resurrection but it can also sometimes mean corruption.

See my popular 2019 blog post about Communion wafers here.

Corpus Christi: Wafer vs. Bread

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Contemporary hosts made for Holy Communion are often whole wheat and do not appear as glistening white as wafers produced with white flour.

Wafers have been used for Holy Communion by Western Christians since the late 1200s. Before that, unleavened bread–made without yeast–was used. (Western Christians adopted the use of bread without yeast in imitation of the matzah–unleavened bread–used at Passover and the Last Supper in the Gospels. The matzah was not like the crackers now sold in grocery stores; matzah and the unleavened bread used by Western Christians was more like tortilla or gyro bread.) Eastern Christians have always used bread made with yeast.

I remember in the 1970s how people joked, “It takes more faith to believe that a wafer is bread than it does to believe that it becomes the Body of Christ!” This was because the wafers do not look like anything most people think of when you ask them what bread looks like. It turns out this is because wafers are NOT technically bread at all! Both are baked goods made with flour but they are not the same just as cake and crackers are also baked goods made from flour but are not bread. Bread, by definition, is made from dough and must be kneaded and formed by hand; wafer is made from batter and is never touched until after it is baked. The first reference to Western Christians using wafers instead of bread are from the late 1200s and many people objected precisely that wafers were “not real bread.”

People also objected that the wafers were not made by monks as priests as the unleavened bread used at Mass had been. People did not think that layfolk–even nuns–should be baking the bread used for Holy Communion. (It did become common later for nuns to make wafers for churches to buy and this was a way for nuns to support themselves. Since the 1960s, making wafers for Holy Communion has become a big business that you can read about here.)

It is unclear how rapidly wafer-use spread among Western Christians but they became used uniformly across Europe by the late 1600s. Why did wafers become so popular? One reason might be that wafers did not spoil as quickly as real bread, even if it was made without yeast; this made it easier to keep the Blessed Sacrament reserved. Also, some people thought the bread or wafer used for Communion should be glistening white and it is easier to control the color of wafers than bread. Some people thought that the wafers never being touched until after they were baked was emblematic of Christ’s birth from the Virgin Mary; these people favored the use of wafers rather than bread that was touched as it was kneaded and formed.

It became standard to make a large wafer for the priest to elevate for people to reverence at the Elevation and just before Communion; the wafers that would be consumed by the layfolk were much smaller discs that were coin-sized. Preachers suggested that the coin-size wafers should remind people that God was like a vineyard owner who could hire people all day long and would pay all the workers the same coin at the end of the day (Matthew 20:1-16).

Want to know more? There are three books about the different kinds of bread used for Holy Communion:

1. Fractio Panis by Barry Craig (Germany, 2011).
2. Bread and the Liturgy: The Symbolism of Early Christian and Byzantine Bread Stamps by George Galavaris (Wisconsin, 1970).
3. The Bread of the Eucharist: Early Christian Eucharist and the Azyme Controversy, by Edward Martin (Rome, 1970).

The elevation of the Host in a contemporary celebration of the Solemn Mass by Dominican religious.