Friday, April 28, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Body and loaf, blood and bottle
This is the bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever.
Sitting on my desk is a bottle of Prosecco Rose, product of Italy, ready to be included in a honeymoon care basket for our friends George and Anne, who are tying their knot on Saturday morning at 7 am at a nearby Lutheran church. I imagine they (and we) will take communion that morning, as often happens at Catholic and Lutheran weddings. The prosecco is for later!
I hope they find a fresh-baked loaf of bread to share with each other too, once they settle into their honeymoon haven. Bread and wine, blood and flesh, the true food and the true drink. Jesus speaks with deep reverence of what eventually came to be called the Eucharist. His understanding of the sacrifice he and his Father are making reaches far beyond ours. His is visceral. He has placed every bit of his skin in the game. And he’s inviting us to do our part.
Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.
So here is what happens when do our part:
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in me.
I don’t think these words about flesh and blood allude to an analogy or metaphor or representation or symbol. If they are not literally true, what good are they? I guess that’s why I appreciate the efforts, however minimal, of Catholics, Lutherans and Episcopals to transubstantiate or consubstantiate the bread and wine. We must allow their reality as flesh and blood, as best we can.
Because the suffering of Jesus matters in every way to us. John Stott says this is true:
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the Cross.” In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us.
Peter Kreeft calls this story of Jesus’ body and blood “the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs … he sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water … he sinks with us. How does he look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn.”
There is so much more. The death of Jesus will always send us astonished into our own resurrections. This is just the third week of Easter. Oh, what glory in the air these 49 days!
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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