Saturday, August 24, 2024

Early Eucharistic Controversy? A Food Fight?

14 Pentecost Cycle B proper 16 August 24,2024
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18 Psalm 34:15-22
Ephesians 6:10-20 John 6:56-69


In a cursory reading of church history, one can find lots of meanings that have accrued to what we call the Holy Eucharist.

Every culture has its own culinary practices and meals of identity with preferences of local available food and inherited traditions of how to prepare and serve the meal.  Living in our country, we have the privilege and the opportunity to have quite a smorgasbord of all the cultures of people who have come to reside in our country.  And while we have our preferences for varieties of food, we can agree that it is most important "that people have enough to eat," than being precisely precisely prescriptive about what and how one should eat.  How absurd would it be to say that that you can only eat barbecue ribs and white bread and nothing else and you have to fix them in a specific way?  Why would anyone put a limit on how and what one should eat?

The Gospel of John was written in the years 80-100 or so.  By this time the church of the Gospel of John was a Eucharistic church, meaning that following the early custom members gathered on the first day of week for the breaking of the bread and the prayers.

As a Eucharistic church, the leadership was teaching about the value and meaning of this central rite of church gathering which encapsulated the crucial memorial events of the life of Jesus.

Apparently within the church of the Gospel of John, there were people who could not embrace the substantiality of the Eucharistic words, even to the point of leaving the fellowship.  They were offended by the words of the Eucharistic tradition.

The writer of John's Gospel interweaves a narrative about Jesus and the apparent "food fight" within the Johannine community.

How does the Gospel writer resolve the controversy about eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood?

Remember in John's Gospel, Jesus is presented as the Word of God made flesh, Jesus is Word personified.  And what does Jesus say about his own word?  My words are spirit and they are life.  Christly words are spirit or the interior essence of how life is constituted.  Words are what makes the physical world known to be substantial.  Words are embedded so as to be one with the physical in how we appropriate and interact with the physical.

John's Gospel is about the substantiality of the Word and in John's Gospel the physical world is used a metaphor of substantiality of the Spirit-Word world.  John's Gospel teaches us we cannot separate invisible from the visible or the spirit from the natural or the word from the flesh.  John's Gospel is about indivisible life.

The Eucharistic controversies of the church, the church's food fights, have to do with the attempts to separate Word from flesh.

How is Jesus present in the bread and wine?  Some say it's a physical thing whereby the bread and the wine are miraculous transformed into a physical body of Jesus in the receiver?  Others say the bread and wine and the presence of Jesus happen at the same time in the receiver.  Others say the bread and the wine are only a symbolic presence.  

The secret of reading John's Gospel is about not dividing word from flesh or the spiritual from the natural.  They co-inhere with each other.

So, we don't have to have food fight about the meaning of the Eucharist.  We don't have to have a Eucharistic controversy if we appreciate how the Word co-inheres with the Flesh.  One cannot say that physical is substantial without also assuming the substantiality of Word or language.  So, don't try to separate Word and Flesh.

In the poetry of St. Paul, Christ is all and in all.  In the event of Eucharistic, a dynamic remembering of making the all in all Christ particular in the person who participates in the rite of communion.  And the writer of John, channeling the words of Jesus tells us,"don't argue about how Christ is realized as present within you, just accept that Christ is present in you in such a way that Christ becomes physically present within you as you let your body language speak the language of the love of Christ."

The consubstantiation and transubstantiation is proven when those of us who receive the bread and the wine go forth into our lives becoming the energizing actions and words of Christ in our lives.

The teaching of John's Gospel is an exhortation for us to instantiate Christly words and deeds in our bodily lives as the proof of the continuing presence of Jesus in our world.  If we do this we can cease from our Eucharistic controversies and our Christian food fights.  Amen.





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