In today’s first reading we hear the instructions for Passover’s celebration. I am always particularly taken by the simple, yet complex, verse: “This is how you are to eat it: with your loins girt, sandals on your feet and your staff in hand, you shall eat like those who are in flight. It is the Passover of the LORD.”

When Jews celebrate Passover, they were not merely commemorating a long-ago liberation, the way Americans might keep the Fourth of July. As the rabbis said in the “Mishnah,” “In every generation a man must so regard himself as if he came forth himself out of Egypt.” The ritual meal of the Passover, the “seder,” brought about a “real presence” of the past deliverance from Egypt. It was a symbol, a sign — but it accomplished, with divine power, the event that it signified. What the rabbi is describing is the Hebrew “zikkaron” which we weakly translate into English as “memory.”

For us, memory is a psychological act. It’s the faculty the mind uses to keep and retrieve information. When we hear the word in sentimental pop music, it usually means nostalgia for a “then” that is irretrievably past. But none of these brings us close to the Hebrew “zikkaron.” “Zikkaron” is a term associated with sacrifice — the offering of the flesh and blood of animals. By the act of sacrifice, the person who made the offering entered into remembrance before God – not as if God ever forgets. God is all-knowing and eternal, and so all of time is present for him. Zikkaron expresses the way that biblical religion empowered Israel to share in God’s experience of the events of sacred history — the Exodus, the wandering in the desert, the giving of the Law. The sacrificial liturgy did not merely call those events to mind. It reactualized them. Thus, the people of Israel celebrated the Passover not as a past event, but as a reality of the present time. They participated in the Exodus.

Of the Passover “seder,” the modern Jewish scholar Yosef Yerushalmi observed, “whatever memories were unleashed by the commemorative rituals and liturgies were surely not a matter of intellection, but of evocation and identification. … Both the language and the gesture are geared to spur, not so much a leap of memory as a fusion of past and present. Memory here is no longer recollection, which still preserves a sense of distance, but reactualization.”

And that is the point at which we need to begin to understand what Jesus meant when he said, “Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24). And what we mean when we repeat those words at the consecration during every Mass/Eucharistic Liturgy

St. Pope John Paul II spoke at length of this at a General Audience in October 2000. He said the Eucharistic memorial was “a biblical theme of primary importance.” And he cited the Catechism of the Catholic Church as his witness: “In the sense of Sacred Scripture the memorial is not merely the recollection of past events but the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men. In the liturgical celebration of these events, they become in a certain way present and real.”

And so we speak of a “Real Presence” that commences from the moment we “do this in memory” of Jesus, just as he commanded. In every Mass, then, the remembrance is a true participation — and the present reality is also real and substantial. And yet there is more.

In every liturgical memorial, there is also a future dimension, an anticipation of greater fulfillment to come. That was true of the Jewish Passover, which pointed forward to the coming of the Messiah and the restoration of Jerusalem. But it’s true as well of the Mass.

And just as the participation in the past is real, so is the anticipation of the future. The Mass brings heaven  to earth, actually and sacramentally. Thus, past, present, and future — the span of sacred history — converge when we receive holy Communion. We truly participate in events of long ago. We truly anticipate the glories of the future. Yet we never leave the present moment.

That’s a lot to take in, and it’s a lot to remember — especially if “memory” is the best word we have to say it with.

Inspired by “Memory: At Mass, it’s more than you think” by Mark Aquilina

Image credit: “The Last Supper,” by Ugolino da Siena, circa 1325-30, Italian. (Metropolitan Museum of Art) | Public Domain