Thus, the ritual memory of Jesus’ death and resurrection is not Christian unless it is veri-fied in an existential memory whose place is none other than the believers’ bodies… To wash one another’s feet is to live existentially the memory of Christ that the Eucharist makes us live ritually.
It is precisely because the ritual memory sends us to the existential memory that the sacraments in general, and the Eucharist in particular, constitute a “dangerous memory,” in the words of Metz. It is dangerous for the Church and for each believer, not only because the sequela Christi (”following Christ”) leads everyone onto the crucifying path of liberation (as much economic as spiritual, collective as personal), but because this “following of Christ” is “sacramentally” the location where Christ himself continues to carry out through those who invoke him the liberation for which he gave his life. The ritual story at each eucharist, retelling why Jesus handed over his life, sends all Christians back to their own responsibility to take charge of history in his name; and so they become his living memory in the world because he himself is “sacramentally” engaged in the body of humanity they work at building for him.
Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Translated by Patrick Madigan, S.J., and Madeleine Beaumont, pg. 260-261.
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