Honest Anachronism about the Holy Eucharist

11 Pentecost Cycle b  Proper 14 August12, 2012
1 Kings 19:4-8  Psalm 34:1-8

Ephesians 4:25-5:2  John 6:35, 41-51

 Lectionary Link

  Anachronism is the presentation of history with chronological inconsistencies where an artifact or idea is inserted out of its originating context.  In some ways the practice of anachronism is unavoidable.  How so?  If I were to present the Palm Sunday story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem in something like the so-called “Pope-mobile;” that would be a rather blatant anachronism:  Taking cultural practices and products from a later era and using our imagination to introduce them into a previous era.

  But why is anachronism unavoidable?  In some way we are always prisoners of the “present” because in actuality we can be nowhere else.  The past is but a present “reconstruction” and so the past reconstruction cannot be free of our present concern.  As “true” to the past as we think that we are or want to be, we were not there and so our reconstructions are but present imaginations.  And yet we have standards of judging what is regarded to be a “reputable” reconstruction of a previous era.  We also know that propagandists will present the past in a way to support what they want us to believe in the present.  Film makers sometimes seek authentic costuming and artifacts in their cinematic reconstructions of a particular period but sometimes they will also try to present, for example,  a “modern” version of Shakespeare as a deliberate attempt to find correspondences between Shakespeare in his time and Shakespearean meaning in our time.

  Fundamentalists read the Gospels as a mirror image reproduction of what happened during the life of Jesus.  And even if we assumed that were the case, how would we avoid being ourselves in our time in interpreting this “mirror” image?  Fundamentalists have a naivete about there being a self-evident meaning that would be obvious to you the reader, if you have the right spirit to know that self-evident and obvious meaning.  If it’s obvious to me and not to you, then you don’t have the Spirit. 

  The writer or writers of the Gospel of John wrote like all of us do about the past, “they wrote anachronistically.”  We write about the past from the present.  And yes, I am preaching about the writer of John’s Gospel from my present time and I do not deny that but I am trying to make the case as to why I think that what is written in John is relevant to our lives today.

  What was one thing that the writer of John’s Gospel was anachronistic about?  The community of John was a Eucharistic community; they practiced the community liturgy of the Holy Eucharist.  This Eucharist had its root in the Jewish religious meal practices but since the church became increasingly Gentile in congregational participants, the Eucharist attained a significance beyond the significance of the Passover Meal and other meal traditions of Judaism.  If the writer of John’s Gospel was teaching the catechism to the community, how did the writer teach the importance of the Holy Eucharist?  The writer of John used the bread of heaven tradition from the Hebrew Scriptures and the oral traditions about Jesus to present a teaching about how the Eucharist became regarded to be important to the practice of the Christian community.

  In Judaism the Torah or the inspired writings were regarded to be like the gift of manna from heaven.  Torah or Word of God was regarded to like bread from heaven.  In the Gospel of John, Christ is regarded to be the new Torah or Word of God but in actual human form.  And so Christ is the living bread that came down as a gift of God’s word from heaven.  Reading God’s word was the way to integrate the teaching about God into the depth of one’s life and practice.  So reading and eating are modes of consumption whereby one receives sustenance for one's life.  There is natural bread and spiritual bread; Manna was the gift of physical bread that the people of Israel collected and ate for their survival.  Torah was the spiritual bread that Moses gave them for their spiritual lives.  These teachings were expanded in the community of John.  Christ was presented in metaphor to be the eternal Word of God in human form.  And as we partake of Christ through his words then we partake of the life of God as our spiritual and everlasting life.  In this way the Church that produced John’s Gospel taught about Jesus as the living bread of heaven.  The Eucharistic bread and Christ as Word of God cannot be separated; if they are separated then we can be involved in making physical bread but an idol.  In Holy Eucharist we understand a real presence of Christ because we understand the fullness of Word of God that is associated with the receiving of the bread and wine of communion.

  The writer of John’s Gospel understood how important the Eucharistic gathering was in the experience of the church.  They believed deeply that Eucharistic practice was inspired and taught by Jesus who expanded a family Passover Meal or Jewish meal tradition to become the constitutive meal of a community of people that would invite people of all ethnicities throughout the world.

  Let us practice Holy Eucharist today as both constituting our social identity but also bearing an important aspiration of our lives.  Do we want to be fearful people eating alone behind closed doors?  Do we want to be exclusive in regulating who is worthy enough for our fellowship?  Or do we want to be a welcoming community?  Do we aspire for peace and reconciliation among all?   Did you ever think about how much the food of the world divides us?  Many people have but regional stomachs; they tolerate only the diets of their own familiar upbringing.  We in our global world have the delight of being exposed to so many different foods from many different cultures.  And fortunately we can be delivered from our very provincial tastes in what we like to eat.  Fortunately we've been introduced to new cuisine.  But even in our appreciation of variety, we know that we will never unite the world over one taste in food.

  The Holy Eucharist is an aspiration that beyond our local and individual taste there is something that can unify us as people of this world.  That we all need food, is “catholic” or universal to all humanity.  Heaven as the goal and aspiration is imagined as a great banquet.  Imagine all the people of the world sitting down at meal together in a feast of peace and love.  If one can grasp this image, one can understand why we put our bodies, minds and spirits through the ritual play of the Eucharist each Sunday in our gathering.  This is our aspiration for world peace.  This is what we want to be expressive of human relationship.  This is why the Eucharistic bread is living bread.  God in Christ tells us that humanity is valuable.  What is a greater statement of value than to say God became human in Christ?  And if humanity is raised to incredible value in Jesus Christ, we as human beings need to respect the dignity of value that God has placed upon and within all of us.  And we respect that human value by living in peace and in fellowship.  If the entire world lived Eucharistically, we would make sure that everyone had food, clothing, shelter and health care, whether through the public sector or the private sector.

  We gather for Eucharist because it is a confession that we need living bread from heaven, even Jesus Christ, to coax beyond our egotistical tendency to hoard regular bread to the exclusion of others having enough.  Let us live our Eucharistic aspirations and be as sure as the writer of John’s Gospel was, that the Eucharist was worthy of Christ’s Real Presence.  Amen.