At one of my first children’s chapel
services at St. Mark’s, after I had lifted and blessed the paten full of thin
communion wafers, a very alert and confident four-year-old interrupted me and
proclaimed knowingly to her peers, “That’s not
bread—it’s cardboard!” After it “snapped” in my hands at the fraction, she
raised an eyebrow and murmured with satisfaction, “See? Cardboard!” When I told
the rector about the embarrassing incident, he spoke from experience:
“Sure--the difficult part is not to convince imaginative children that bread can
become Jesus’ body; the difficult part is to convince them that those little
wafers are bread!”
If our clean, crisp wafers don’t
resemble bread, they resemble even less the food that Jesus describes in John’s
Gospel: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you feed on the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” he challenges us in today’s
lesson. Being an orderly person, I love the orderly choreography of the
Eucharist. I like that it follows a clear pattern, and that there is a place
for everything, and everything has its place. I like the gleaming silver, the
beautiful, flowing gestures, the flickering candle flames, the deep purple of
the wine, and the neat way that the wafer snaps in two. But despite the words
that I say about body and blood, it is easy for us to forget that flesh and
blood and death have anything to do with our beautiful ritual meal. However, if
I had read John’s version of the Words of Institution that day in children’s
chapel, I doubt that my four-year-old friends would have been thinking about
cardboard. I imagine that I would have heard a resounding chorus of “Ewww,
gross!” from my honest young parishioners, instead.
With his talk of eating flesh and
drinking blood, Jesus is purposefully being disgusting. For devout Jews like
Jesus and his disciples, any kind of blood was a most sacred thing. According
to the clear proscriptions of the Law, blood is not to be consumed, and meat
should not even contain animal blood when it is eaten. Human flesh being
devoured is a metaphor for hostile attack in the Old Testament, and the devil himself
is called an “eater of flesh.”[1]
Yet, here we have Jesus talking about us eating human flesh and drinking human
blood! With this vocabulary, it is no wonder that early Christians were accused
of cannibalism by outsiders. Such language even sounds shocking to our modern
ears. After all, even the handsome vampire in the popular Twilight series only drinks animal blood, for goodness’ sake! There
is more to worry about, in taking communion, than drinking your neighbors’ backwash
in the chalice.
To make the phrase even more jarring,
the Greek verb translated in our text by “eat” is a word often used in other texts
to describe the slurping, gnawing way that animals eat. English is actually the
only language I know that doesn’t commonly make a distinction between human and
animal eating. I learned my lesson about the difference one day as a new
French-speaker in France, when I sweetly asked my husband’s colleagues at a
dinner party if they would now like to “chomp on” on some dessert, not
realizing that the slang word for “animal” eating that I had heard him use at
home was not acceptable for educated humans in polite company. In our text,
Jesus doesn’t mind at all using the Greek word for “chomping” in polite
company--and on purpose: “Those who gnaw on my flesh … Those who devour my
flesh will abide in me and I in them,” he says. Instead of picturing the nice
clean loaf of bread and cup of wine offered at the Last Supper, instead of
picturing the silver vessels and freshly-starched fair linens of our own
churches, it seems as if we are supposed to picture ourselves at the Eucharist
slurping up the blood from a raw arm bone, attacking muscle and fat in the
voracious way that my dog Buck dives into leftovers from the grill.
Why must Jesus get so earthy and graphic
and even disgusting in his language here? Why does he want to shock and upset
us with these images? First of all, we must remember that Jesus always changes
the way that we think by shocking us with his strange ways of acting and
talking. He is constantly breaking
accepted conventions and purity laws: eating with tax collectors, refusing to
make his disciples wash their hands before eating, healing on the Sabbath,
hanging out with prostitutes. He gives us outrageous commands that seem impossible
to follow, like loving our enemies and plucking out a lustful eye. And of
course his strange parables are all meant to shock us and shake us to our
foundations, so that we can be free of our boxed-in thoughts and rigid ways.
Jesus does not teach by rules but by exception to the rule. Jesus’ outlandish
language shatters all of our rules and activates our powerfully transforming
imaginations, rather than our weak and rule-bound wills. It is in opening our
eyes to see the world differently that he transforms us from the inside out.
In telling us to devour his flesh and to
drink his blood, Jesus is using the language of sacrifice, turning it upside
down and inside out in his typically shocking way. Jesus and his disciples were
used to the sacrifices of animal flesh and blood in the Temple in Jerusalem.
They knew how Moses had built an altar and made burnt-offerings, splashing and splattering
blood on the altar and on all the people present, before receiving the Ten
Commandments on Mount Sinai, fixing God’s Law in the “blood of the Covenant” and
thereby uniting the community. (Exodus 24) Ancient sacrifices were a way of
drawing close to God by giving God the precious blood of life, but in so doing,
they served to purify, to set apart, the community or the individual making the
sacrifice.
According to Richard Beck, Jesus confounds
our quest for purity by mixing it with our natural disgust for devouring flesh
and drinking blood.[2]
Instead of purifying ourselves and drawing close to God through the sacrificing
of animal flesh and blood, Jesus “grosses us out” by telling us to find life in
consuming his own flesh and blood. After eating his flesh and drinking his
blood, the breaking-down of other culturally-constructed barriers can follow.
Why not open ourselves up to people
who normally disgust us? Why not let sinners and rule-breakers, the lost and
the impure, into our fellowship? Amy Frykholm tells the story of a man who barges
into her church service during the Eucharist, drunk and bleeding heavily from his
hand. Leaving bloody handprints on his way up to the altar, he blurts out at the
altar rail, “I have hepatitis C.”[3]
Would you let him drink with you the cup of blood, the Cup of Life? Is Jesus’ blood
really any safer than his?
Moreover, Jesus’ stomach-turning words will
not let us forget that God became flesh--bloody, mortal flesh--flesh that
allows itself to be eaten up, a “piece of meat” to be mishandled and consumed. Not
only do Jesus’ strange words mess with our idea of purity, they mess with our idea
of power and control, as well. Rowan Williams points out that, in presenting
himself as flesh that is to be eaten, Jesus makes the new creation “an act of
utter withdrawal.”[4] By
renouncing power and control, Jesus breaks the world’s system of power and
control, binding the betrayers and the betrayed into a community held together
by God’s promises. Bread and water, flesh and blood, body and soul, life and
death—all abide in Christ, as Christ abides in God. Jesus shows us that real
power is in the divine abiding, an abiding that begins in Jesus’ renunciation,
giving himself over to the power of death.
These days, wherever we turn, we hear,
“If I am not on top, then I will be trampled.” We hear, “Make way for me and
mine!” We hear, “I am afraid, give me security!” We hear, “I am afraid, let me
be in control!” We hear, “I am afraid, others are out to get me!” We hear, “I
am afraid, give me rules and certainties.” Jesus says, “Rules and certainties are
only cardboard. What you think is power, is really nothing. What you think is
secure, is empty. The ones whom you think are out to get you are really your
brothers and sisters. What you think is valuable, is but dust. What you think is
pure, winds up in the sewer. If you are afraid, let go. Open your hands for the
food of vulnerability. Share the cup that overflows with the deep red promises
of God. Abide in the bloody flesh that is
the life of the world.
[1]
Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to
John I-XII (The Anchor Bible 2006), 284.
[2]
Amy Frykholm, review of Unclean:
Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality by Richard Beck, Christian Century, June 27, 2012.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
Rowan Williams, “Sacraments of the New Society,” in On Christian Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 216.
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