13 Pentecost proper 15 August 19, 2018
Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm 34:9-14
Ephesians 5:15-20 John 6:51-58
Perhaps you heard about the experience of Christ in the
Mass referred to as "transubstantiation." In Roman Catholic
tradition this is defined as the change of the substance or essence by which
the bread and wine offered in the sacrifice of the sacrament of the Eucharist
during the Mass, become, in reality, the body of Jesus Christ. Where did
this tradition come from? Well, today we've read the words of Jesus and
the response of the literalist Jews. Jesus said, "the bread that I
will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” The Jews then disputed among
themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus
said, "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life."
The Protestant Reformers reacted against this Eucharistic literalism and they proposed other ways to understand how Christ is present in the Eucharistic event. They said that Christ was symbolically present or metaphorically present or spiritually present. Anglicans tended to say we don't know precisely how Christ is present but that Christ is mysteriously present in a Real way.
It is ironic that people who call themselves Biblical fundamentalists and read the Bible literally, tend to understand these words in a figurative sense and not a literal sense. After substantial development within Roman Catholic Church history the theologians came to define this doctrine of transubstantiation which involves taking these words of Jesus in a very literal way. The plain sense of the words.
Words become different in meaning depending upon the context of their writing. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the ecclesiastical meaning of the words was prominent as it related to the exclusive role of the priest in confecting the bread and the wine in the Eucharistic offering. The bread of the Eucharist became divorced from bread for physical hunger. The consecrated bread became a holy bread that was reserved and displayed in be-jeweled monstrances. Separate rites developed to view the consecrated bread of the Mass. In the rite of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, a priest would lift the Monstrance which displayed the host and turn to kneeling devotees and bless those who revered the holy bread. In actual practice at certain times in church history, the most numbers of Masses became votive Masses said on behalf of the departed to be an intercessory assistance to them in their afterlife and the church came to know with precision the purgatory journey of the afterlife even as they did not know about Tokyo or how to get there. The sacrament was reserved in the tabernacle which was included in the altar reredos and the priest would celebrate the Mass in the presence of Christ in the reserved sacrament.
We are in a different age; we had the Enlightenment and Reason dethroned theology. Explorers went around the world and found Tokyo and many other places and the church became less interested in exact and precise knowledge of the afterlife, in purgatory.
And yet the church always returns to the Bible, to the Gospel and the Gospel words. And we've even got historical and linguistic methods of appreciating the Gospels in a different way and in a way that makes modern sense and post-modern sense.
We read the Gospel of John and appreciate it as a text that was written decades after Jesus. It was written by writers who were ministering to their community and teaching them about the liturgies of their community. What is the origin of the Eucharist? Why do we practice it? What does it mean? How does it fit into the symbols of the churches continuity with the traditions of the Hebrew Scriptures?
How can the origin of the Eucharist be best taught? It can best be taught as an oracle of Jesus in the church decades after he left in the preaching, teaching and writing of those who are possessed with the mind of Christ and speak and write in his Name.
What we can understand today is to avoid some of the disagreements about the Eucharist. The early church realized and practiced the fact that the Eucharist was a new family meal. It was a meal which was offered to people who had been alienated from or left their flesh and blood families, sometimes at great personal cost, but also in a personal nomadic adventure of a relocation forced by politics, war and economic realities.
The Eucharist was a unifying meal, a public meal for the Christian family. It was an actual meal when people could verify that everyone present was getting enough to eat, but beyond the eating there was the experience of a fellowship presence that occurred in the gathering of In-Christed people.
The early church believed in the reality of the presence of Christ in their lives. They believed that it was really Real. People who could only believe in the priority of sensorial perception, were crassly literal people and they were people who were offended at the literary, artistic, and aesthetic use of plain and literal language. John's Gospel is about Word. The Word is God and everything comes into being or human understanding because of Word. And Jesus also said that his word was spirit and it was life.
So eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus is a very literal image but it was used literarily to say that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist has profound and significant meaning among people who already feel a deep identity with Christ and because we exist in time, the Eucharist is a renewal event in time to remember the presence of Christ into our lives in a deeply meaningful way. How close do you get to your food? You get so close to your food it becomes you and you it. And this is the dynamic that is celebrated in the Holy Eucharist. We eat the designated bread and wine, so designated by the word of Jesus, and we become one with the bread and the wine and in so doing, we dynamically remember our oneness with Christ.
This was the Real Presence which was being taught in the community which wrote the Gospel of John. We have gotten sidetracked by bad science in our theology about the Eucharist and tried to defend the wrong reality in the wrong way.
Do not be embarrassed by the poetry of the Gospel of John or the poetry of the meaning of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But don't try to defend the Eucharist as a discourse of the scientific method.
If we appreciatively understand the Gospel of John at all we understand ourselves first as literary being. In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and all things came into being because of or through Word.
Once we understand the literary basis of human life itself, we can then appreciate the diverse ways in which language works to imparts lots of different meanings to express the diversity of human experience. We can do science and poetry at the same time and be the same persons.
The Gospel of John and the celebration of the Eucharist is proof that we can be spiritual poets and people who express close fellowship with one another even while we can have our feet firmly on the ground in the "brute" facts of science.
The Eucharistic words of Jesus as an oracle in the Gospel of John celebrates the presence of Christ as the eternal Word which always already is present within us and re-creates us into each new moment of our lives. And Word is very close to us, it is us and it becomes for us again in the Bread and the Wine Event. You and I can receive the Presence of Christ again in the bread and wine now because it never left us. We receive again what we already have. Amen.
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