Even on the satanic hellscape known as amazon.com, one can find God—and a great deal. Communion wafers go for $0.02 cents a count. Is the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ included in prime shipping? This cynical attitude is one that is pervasive in our day and age, and one that I myself held for a very long time. How could this piece of bread and the accompanying wine be the body and blood of both a man and a God? It doesn’t look like a body or taste like one (I assume). It is strange to believe that a cracker and wine is God, it is even stranger to believe that He wants us to eat him.
Yet (despite what Calvin and Zwingli may have said), its exceedingly evident that Christ himself establishes the Eucharist in both Matthew 26-28 and Mark 22-24. If we take all of Christ’s other words so seriously, why can we not accept these? Why must the Eucharist be purely a symbol when the crucifixion is more than the cross, when holy water is more than hydrogen oxide? Furthermore, if we can accept God’s extraordinary and mysterious creations in our universe, what makes the Eucharist any different than other acts of God that are difficult to explain through modern reasoning?
In class, we made the important distinction of considering why it is hard for us in modernity to accept the Eucharist, compared to why it would have been difficult for people in the past.
In Jesus’ time, indeed in almost every time and place up the present day, magic was to be expected. Pagan gods were capable of it, mysterious acts of magic that transformed the world were accepted by early peoples. Yet as we discussed, the Eucharist is more than an ordinary magic trick, for both the ancients and the moderns. For example, the Saxons were hesitant to accept the Eucharist—it had no magical carvings or evident material power, only the word of the Priest that it was indeed holy. It had no appearance of flesh and blood, like the human sacrifices they made (and perhaps ate). The Eucharist, therefore, relied on a deep faith in the power of Jesus’ words: that because He said them, they are true, even if we cannot see how they work.
This necessity of faith is true in the modern world as well. It is easy enough to believe that Jesus turned water into wine. We were not there, there is no way we could ever witness it, we do not have to take part in it. On the other hand, the Eucharist requires us to accept a mystery: to concede that the cracker and wine are indeed the flesh and blood of Christ, even though they do not appear that way to us. Furthermore, the Eucharist is more than a story we can hear and read: we are actors in the continuing story, following Christ’s words as we continue the tradition of the disciples. The unwillingness to have faith in that which we cannot see or rationalize is evidently reflective of our larger milieu today. If we cannot even appreciate the divine beauty of God’s creation in each other and in the nature that surrounds us, if we are blind to signs and symbols because they do not fit our narrative, then of course we are unwilling to have faith in a practice like the Eucharist, which requires us to engage with a holiness and spirituality outside that of our day-to-day lives.
Yet whichever vein of misunderstanding we are in (a belief in different magic, or a belief in no mystery at all) we still must come to find the truth. Hugh of St. Victor can help us here. Personally, reading and re-reading his writings on the sacraments clarified in my mind that there is no doubt the Eucharist can exist in a world where God sends his only son to die for our sins. Hugh of St. Victor writes that “we eat the flesh of the lamb when by taking His true body in the sacrament we are incorporated with Christ through faith and love. Elsewhere what is eaten is incorporated. Now when the body of Christ is eaten, not what is eaten but he who eats is incorporated with Him whom he eats. On this account Christ wished to be eaten by us, that He might incorporate us with Him.” (307)
For me, this is the power of Christ’s love. We are already blessed to be a part of God’s creation, but we are all the more so when Christ allows us to incorporate Him with ourselves, to figuratively and literally bring Him into our bodies so that we might be better and holier.
Just as we discussed when reading the Song of Songs, the most spiritually difficult and mysterious parts of the Christian faith are those with the greatest reward. It requires us to go above and beyond our normal world to see or to taste God, but the result is all the greater because of that faith. Yet the Eucharist is particularly extraordinary because it is not just for those who can devote copious time to prayer. We can all take part in the love of Christ, so long as we are willing to listen to His word.
SHM
Lovely articulation of the difference between the pagan Saxon response to the Eucharist ("it's not magic, there's no writing!") and ours ("there's no such thing as magic, but if there were, it would be obvious!"). Perhaps we are not as far from the pagan Saxons as we would like to believe! I agree, it is curious which of Jesus's sayings people want to take literally and which not, particularly when things he says literally require believing something we cannot see—including his love for us.
ReplyDelete