We have a very significant statement in the Acts of the Apostles following the gathering of the first people who heard the words of Peter and became Christians (Acts 2.37-41).  The statement is the following: These remained faithful to the teaching of the apostles, to the brotherhood, the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.” (Acts 2.42).

This is not a mere incidental statement, it is about the things that are necessary to be and remain a follower of Jesus. It is about how to maintain contact with Jesus once his followers can no longer have the immediate contact with him that his disciples had during his tangible life among them.

In our place and time, the equivalents of the four things above are as follows.

We find ‘the teaching of the apostles’ in the four gospels, and like the apostles we see them in the context of the scriptures that went before them.

We find ‘the brotherhood’ in the community of faith, that is the gathering of the disciples in the Church.

We find the ‘breaking of the bread’ in the Eucharist. The breaking of the bread was one of the terms used to describe the Eucharist in new testament times. It is the name particularly favoured by St Luke who wrote the Acts of the Apostles.

We find ‘the prayers’ in prayer without which our contact with Christ cannot be reciprocal. Prayer is the atmosphere in which the other three live and breathe.

In the Mass we have all four of these ‘things to which we need to be faithful’. Therein we have the gospel, the gathered community, the Eucharist and prayer. In the Mass we have all four of these means of contact with Christ. We can have some of them outside the Mass but it is in the Mass that we have all four in relation to each other.

One of the things which will become clearer as these new times we are living in develop is that what makes us Christians is our remaining in contact with Christ himself by means of those things that he has left us to do in his memory. The new testament makes this explicit in the phrase “Do this in memory of me’ with regard to the Eucharist, but we also have to listen to the gospel, gather together and prayer ‘in memory of him’.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin