page_title: Eucharist in the Catholic Church
section_title: Old Testament prefigurings
hierarchical_section_title: Eucharist in the Catholic Church / Old Testament prefigurings
context_page_description: Eucharist here refers to Holy Communion or the Body and Blood of Christ, which is consumed during the Catholic Mass or Eucharistic Celebration. "At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his Body and Blood, ... a memorial of his death and resurrection: a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, a Paschal banquet 'in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us.'" As such, Eucharist is "an action of thanksgiving to God" derived from "the Jewish blessings that proclaim – especially during a meal – God's works: creation, redemption, and sanctification."
  Blessed Sacrament is a devotional term used in the Roman Catholic Church to refer to the Eucharistic species. Consecrated hosts are kept in a tabernacle after Mass, so that the Blessed Sacrament can be brought to the sick and dying outside the time of Mass. This makes possible also the practice of eucharistic adoration. Because Christ himself is present in the sacrament of the altar, he is to be honored with the worship of adoration.
context_section_description: Early medieval block-printed Catholic prayer books or psalters contained many illustrations of pairings of prefigurings of the events of the New Testament in the Old Testament, a form known as biblical typology. In an age when most Christians were illiterate, these visual depictions came to be known as biblia pauperum, or poor man's bibles. The Bible itself was predominantly a liturgical book used at Mass, costly to produce and illuminate by hand. The custom of praying the Liturgy of the Hours spread to those who could afford the prayer books required to follow the textual cycle that mirrored the pastoral seasons of Jewish temple worship.
  Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that the most obvious Old Testament prefiguring of the sign aspect of the Eucharist was the action of Melchizedek in Genesis 14:18, that all the Old Testament sacrifices, especially that of the Day of Atonement, prefigured the content of the sacrament, namely Christ himself sacrificed for us, and that the manna was a special prefiguration of the effect of the sacrament as grace; but he said that the paschal lamb was the outstanding type or figure of the Eucharist under all three aspects of sign, content and effect.
  Concerning the first of the Old Testament prefigurations that Aquinas mentioned, Melchizedek's action in bringing out bread and wine for Abraham has been seen, from the time of Clement of Alexandria (c.150 - c. 215), as a foreshadowing of the bread and wine used in the sacrament of the Eucharist, and so "the Church sees in the gesture of the king-priest Melchizedek, who 'brought out bread and wine', a prefiguring of her own offering" (in the Eucharist).
  The second prefiguration mentioned by Aquinas is that of the Old Testament sacrifices, especially that on the Day of Atonement. Other theologians too see these as foreshadowing the Eucharist. They point out that Jesus "himself said, as he committed to the Apostles the Divine Eucharist during the Last Supper, 'This is my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins'."
  The manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness is also seen as a symbol of the Eucharist. The connection between that sign and the Eucharist is seen as having been made both in John 6 and also in the version of the Lord's Prayer in the Gospel of Luke: where the version in the Gospel of Matthew speaks of epiousios bread, the Lucan version speaks of "bread for each day", interpreted as a reminiscence of Exodus 16:19-21, which recounts that the manna was gathered in amounts sufficient only for a single day. Saint Ambrose saw the Eucharist prefigured both by the manna that provided food and by the water from the rock that gave drink to the Israelites.
  The ritual of Passover night described in Exodus contains two main physical elements:  a sacrificial lamb  "male and without blemish" and unleavened bread (Exodus 12:1-10).  In addition to this ritual for Passover night itself, Exodus prescribed a "perpetual institution" associated with the Passover that is celebrated by feasts of unleavened bread (Exodus 12:14-20).  The New Testament book of 1 Corinthians represents the Passover in terms of Christ:  "... For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed.  Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. (1 Corinthians 5:7-8"  Christ is the new lamb, and the Eucharist is the new bread of the Passover.
  Among the many proscription of the Old Testament Law that affirm the covenant, one stands out, being called "most sacred among the various oblations to the Lord " :  a sacrifice of bread anointed with oil.  "Regularly on each Sabbath day this bread shall be set out afresh before the Lord, offered on the part of the Israelites by an everlasting agreement. (Leviticus 24:5-9)"  Since the time of Origen, some theologians have seen this "showbread" as a prefiguring of the Eucharist described in Luke 22:19.
caption: The Speculum humane salvationis contains illustrations of related scenes from the Old and New Testament
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