Flesh and Blood

The scriptures referred to are Exodus 12:1-14 and 1 Corinthians 11:23-26.

With our 24/7 world, with crazy work schedules and instant dishes and fast food, we may be seeing an end to the big homemade family holiday meal. It's a lot of work. And what's more, such meals don't have the meaning they used to.

A Jewish joke about the description of all their holidays goes like this: “They tried to kill us; we survived; let's eat!” Yet the Passover is not just an excuse for Jewish families to get together and eat. It has a serious meaning. God says, “This day will become a memorial for you, and you will celebrate it as a festival to the Lord...So you will keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because on this very day I brought your regiments out from the land of Egypt, and so you will keep this day perpetually as a lasting ordinance.” (Exodus 12:14, 17) The meal—the unleavened bread and the whole roasted lamb—was a form of thanksgiving for what God did when he took the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt.

Over time the meal became more elaborate and the foods took on specific meanings. Besides the lamb, an egg represents spring and new life, bitter herbs represent the bitterness of slavery, salt water represents the tears of the slaves, a kinda applesauce made with nuts, wine and apples called haroset represents the mortar the Jews used to build for the Egyptians and so on. The cracker-like matzah represents the unleavened flatbread the Israelites had to eat because there would be no time for it to rise before they left Egypt. There are 4 cups of wine, plus an additional one for the prophet Elijah should he return. The meal comes with a liturgy called the Haggadah, which leads the family through the meal and explains the rituals. There are questions for the children to ask and songs to sing.

We don't know how much of this had developed by Jesus' time but we know there was at least the lamb, the bread and the wine. And Jesus takes the last two elements and repurposes them.

John the Baptist called Jesus “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29) This is obviously a reference to the Passover lamb. This perfect male lamb was killed at sunset. God says, “They will take some of the blood and put it on the two sideposts and top of the doorframe of the houses where they will eat it....The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, so that when I see the blood I will pass over you, and this plague will not fall on you to destroy you when I attack the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 12:7, 13) Yet Jesus doesn't do anything with the lamb, possibly because the people had not smeared the blood on their doorframes since the original Passover. (After all, for the first 40 years after leaving Egypt, they lived in tents.)

But bread was considered the staff of life (Leviticus 26:26) and wine was called the “blood of the grape” (Deuteronomy 32:14) and Jesus used them. And just as the descendants of the people at the first Passover have continued to celebrate their covenant with God, Christians have continued to celebrate the meal Jesus used to inaugurate his new covenant. (Acts 2:42, 46; 20:7)

It was so important that Paul was concerned that as long as it was just another part of a communal meal called the Agape or Love Feast, its significance was being lost. Everyone was eating as much as they could and in some cases not leaving enough for others. This is hardly in the spirit of Jesus giving his body and blood for all. So Paul says, people should eat at home before coming together for the Lord's Supper. Paul writes in his first letter to the Christians at Corinth, “For every time you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. For this reason, whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself first, and in this way let him eat the bread and drink of the cup.” (1 Corinthians 11:26-28) Partaking of the Lord's Supper in a manner inappropriate to its true value is a sin. Which sounds like this meal is much more than merely symbolic.

The church at large got the message. By the time the 1^st century Christian manual called the Didache was written, the Lord's Supper or Eucharist (which is Greek for “thanksgiving”) was a separate sacred meal of just the bread and the wine shared every Lord's day (Sunday). It was accompanied by confession of sins, specific prayers for the cup and for the bread and a prayer of thanksgiving after Holy Communion. That's been the pattern ever since.

Why is this act of eating bread and drinking wine so important to Christians? Well, in addition to being commanded by Jesus, the elements of bread and wine were basic foods of that day. In one sense, the Eucharist reminds us that Jesus is as vital to our spiritual health as food and drink are to our physical health.

But if it is just a metaphor why don't we simply talk about it, like we do the parables, rather than actually consume food and drink?

Again, there was precedent in the Passover, a physical meal with a spiritual meaning. Paul calls Christ “our Passover.” (1 Corinthians 5:7) As the lambs' blood saved the Israelites from death, so the blood of Jesus shed on the cross saves us from eternal death or separation from God. Jesus says of the bread, “This is my body” and of the wine, “This is my blood.” Most of the church for most of its history has taken this to mean that Jesus is really present in the meal, though they differ in their explanations of exactly how.

But I also think this was reinforced by the church's reaction to Gnosticism. This was a philosophy that said that the physical is evil and only the spirit is good. So our physical creation was made by an ignorant or even bad god, which was usually identified with the God of the Old Testament. Jesus represented a different god, a good god. But because the physical is evil, Christ did not really become a flesh and blood man. It was an illusion for our sake. And so, of course, was his death. According to the secret knowledge (gnosis in Greek) which Gnostic teachers claimed to have gotten from Christ, it wasn't faith that saved you; it was secret knowledge, available only to the elite. So it wasn't important what you do in this evil material world but what you know. A lot of people, even in the church, were attracted to this kind of thinking

But if the physical world is evil and only the intangible is good, why would Christ command us to eat bread and drink wine for our spiritual benefit? Why would his body, or anyone's body, matter? Some Gnostics became ascetics, trying to eat and drink as little as possible and minimize their involvement in the physical world. Other Gnostics, figuring the physical world is irrelevant to being a spiritual person, overindulged their physical appetites, to mock the ignorant creator.

But from the beginning Christians believed God created the world and all its inhabitants, including humans, and pronounced them good. God gives us good gifts in creation. We have misused, abused and neglected those good gifts, turning the paradise he gave us into hell on earth. By entering into his own creation in Jesus, God reaffirms the underlying goodness of the physical world and our bodies.

He encountered violent opposition and was killed—for real, not in an illusion. And he rose again—for real, not as in a dream. By rising he validated who he is and the validity of what he said and offers redemption to all who trust him. And rather than let his decisive physical sacrifice live on as mere words, Jesus took bread and wine and imbued them with meaning and spiritual power. In the Eucharist, we are not merely hearing about his supper with his disciples, we are participating in that meal. We are eating the bread which he said was his body and drinking the wine he said was his blood and which sealed the new covenant between God and us. We are in his presence as we partake of the meal in which he is both our host and our sustenance.

In baptism God imbues real physical water with real spiritual power. In Holy Communion he does the same with bread and wine. The God who made us both physical and spiritual beings communicates his grace to us in acts that are both physical and spiritual. We are not simply spiritual beings like angels or simply physical beings like animals. We are, as C.S. Lewis put it, amphibians, at home in both realms.

In the sacraments, God shows that he cares about all of us, both our physical and our spiritual sides. If we were merely spirits imprisoned in bodies, why should God or we care about poverty or violence or abuse? The sooner we die and get free of these bodies, the better. If we are merely beasts, programmed to live according to our instincts and urges, why should God or we care how we treat others or ourselves in pursuit of those physical appetites? Animals mate indiscriminately and kill and each eat other. Why is it wrong for humans to do so?

Because we, though flesh and blood, are made in God's image. We have inherent worth which must be respected. But we are not images carved in stone, forever static. We are living growing creatures. And we are finite. We are not perfectly complete images of the infinite God. We are meant to continually grow to be more like him, day by day. And to grow we need sustenance, which he gives us in our daily bread and in the Living Bread, Jesus.

We like to play God, which is to say, we want to be like God in terms of power. But God is love and so we are meant to be like him in his infinite love for us. And we see the extent of that love in how God in Christ sacrificed himself to save his ungrateful creatures. And every time we eat the bread that Jesus said was his body given for us and drink the wine he said was his blood poured out for us, we are reminded what the God who is love is really like and the real way in which we are to be like him.

And as God in Christ shows his love in a physical act, so we are to show his love to others in physical ways. We are not to tell the hungry and poor and suffering only that our thoughts and prayers go with them but we are to go to them and help them. God feeds us; we are to feed others. God sacrifices for us; we are to make sacrifices for others. God gives us good gifts like minds and bodies to help one another. We are to share them and use them as he intended.

Passover is not a solemn meal; it is joyous. And I imagine the last one Jesus celebrated with his disciples was as well. Until Jesus announced his impending betrayal and took the bread and wine and gave thanks and gave them to his friends, saying they were eating his broken body and drinking his shed blood, something deeply shocking to them as Jews. But he asked them to do this in remembrance of him. And we who are his friends, who are redeemed at immeasurable cost by him, continue to do as he said.

Things got serious when Jesus took the bread and wine. They would only get more serious that night and get deadly serious the next day. And they would mourn the day after that. They could not see then that on the third day, everything would be different. And in the light of Easter, this meal, though still serious, would no longer be sad but one of hope and joy and love.