Tag Archives: Real Presence

Eating a Story

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Corpus Christi is an odd feast. Almost all of the other feasts celebrate an event in the life of Jesus or the life of a saint. Corpus Christi is focused on the doctrine and devotion to the Eucharist. Only the Feast of the Trinity has a similar focus insofar as it celebrates a doctrine fundamental to Christianity. The trouble with celebrating either feast as primarily doctrinal is that doctrines in themselves seem lifeless. Who besides mathematicians can get excited about the paradoxes of one and three, and who but scholastic theologians can get excited about what the Real Presence in bread and wine is all about?

The Trinity, of course is not a doctrine, and it isn’t really a mathematical puzzle for that matter. The Trinity is a story of creation and redemption and sanctification. Not that each person of the Trinity is confined to one of those roles. All three Persons do all three and much, much more. The sacrament of the Eucharist also celebrates a story, the same story that is told about the Trinity. (See Trinity as Story and Song.) The Institution of the Eucharist, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, is one important incident in the story of Jesus coming to earth as a helpless child, living a life of a human vulnerable to whatever other humans choose to do to him, dying on a cross when that is what humans chose to do, rising from the dead, and being seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavenly places. We have celebrated this story one step at a time, starting with the expectations of Advent all the way through to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Trinity Sunday puts the whole story together in one big celebration and then Corpus Christ does the same from a different angle.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that God relates to God’s creatures according to their mode of reality. In the case of humans, this means that God relates to us, material creatures that we are, through the material world in time and in history. The Eucharistic rite takes place in time. It incorporates past times, most particularly the times when Jesus suffered and died and then rose again, but also the time when the Israelites were delivered from the Egyptians at the Red Sea, an event recalled at the Passover for the Jews. The Eucharistic rite also takes place in the present moment when it is celebrated. Whatever events on both local and world fronts are incorporated into the celebration and offered to God. Moreover, God’s promises for the future when all will be made one in Christ are present as well. That’s a lot of time and history to be contained in a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

Discussions of real presence and dolling the sacrament up in a monstrance for Benediction both have some danger of reifying the Body and Blood of Christ. However, use of one’s intelligence to perceive some intelligibility in the holy Mysteries is part of what it means to be an embodied human being. This is salutary as long as one is willing to allow what intelligibility that emerges to remain surrounded by mystery. Dressing up to celebrate is another facet of our embodied way of living. It is the kind of celebration we engage in to honor people we love and respect. The important thing to realize is that we are eating and drinking some powerful stories when we partake of the bread and wine, and we are celebrating these same stories deep in our hearts as we pray before the dressed-up sacrament. These stories of deliverance from slavery and the suffering of the Prince of Peace inform the way we prayerfully incorporate contemporary events and they prepare us for how we should live out our stories as parts of the greater stories embodied in the sacrament. These same stories have prompted many liturgical theologians to stress the importance of social concerns and outreach as necessary outcomes of the Eucharistic celebration.

There is a human expression about eating our words. The implication is that our words come back to haunt us in some way. It is perhaps worth thinking about whether or not what we say is worth consuming for others, let alone ourselves. In any case, eating the words of Jesus is profound nourishment, nourishment to eternal life. When we receive the bread and wine at the altar and consume it, we are swallowing the story of Christ hook, line, and sinker. By swallowing this story, we live our own life stories within the life story given us by the Word made Flesh.

Christ’s Dynamically Wild Presence

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corpus christi processionThe Feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharistic host. One of the events that inspired the institution of the feast was a vision granted Fr. Peter of Prague in 1263. He had doubted the presence of Christ in the sacrament until he had a vision of blood dripping from the host as he consecrated it. This vision, along with earlier visions of St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon, led Pope Urban IV to order the institution of this feast. Of other Eucharistic visions I’ve heard of, it is better to be silent rather than ruin today’s celebration.

I happen to have a high devotion to the real presence of Christ in the sacrament and the two great hymns that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote for the feast are edifying. But the problem with focusing on the presence of Christ in the Sacrament is that it circumscribes the consecrated host and seems to imprison Christ in it. This is to take the Eucharistic mystery out of context. After all, the phrase Corpus Christi is used in the New Testament to refer to the Church and not the sacrament by itself. Benediction has the danger of re-creating this isolation and its origins aren’t reassuring. It derives from a devotion to see the elevation of the Host at Mass, which is fine, except that this viewing was in place of receiving the Host or even of worshiping in community. There are stories of people who would rove from Mass to Mass to see as many elevations as possible! My theology professor in seminary, Arthur Vogel, railed against Benediction because it treated the sacrament as an object rather than an integral part of a dynamic celebration.

Corpus Christi processions have the same danger, but they do bring a communal aspect to the feast. Just a few years ago I found the custom alive and well in Innsbruck. I attended Mass at the cathedral where it was standing room only. After the Mass, there was a procession throughout the town with devotions read by the mayor and other dignitaries and the Landwehr fired off salutes with their rifles.

In John 6 Jesus speaks of his presence in the bread from Heaven in a dynamic way where those who eat his flesh and drink his blood abide in him as he abides in us. In isolation, these verses suggest a relationship with individual believers but the broader context is the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, which was a communal event if there ever was one. Jesus, then, does not abide in us on an individual basis but abides in all of us as a sharing community. If we eat the Body of Christ, we are eating the very generosity and self-giving of Jesus. If we don’t give of ourselves, we have missed abiding in the community that abides in Jesus.

St. Paul’s recounting of the Last Supper begins with the solemn words that he is handing on the tradition as it was handed on to him. He then quotes what are called the Words of Institution, the words traditionally believed to change the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus. When put this way, we again have the sacrament restricted to a few words and Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic elements. St. Paul, however, provides many more words to the social context of the Eucharist, namely that the Corinthians should be sharing the food they bring to the celebration with the poorer members of the congregation rather than flaunting their feasting in front of those deprived. That is, it is not enough to discern the presence of Christ in the sacrament; it is also necessary to discern the body in all of God’s people.

The leaders of the Liturgical Movement of the last century, Lambert Beauduin in Belgium and Virgil Michel in the United States, grounded their liturgical principles, featuring engaged participation of the laity, with a theology of the Church as the Body of Christ. More importantly, they argued that the Eucharist is a sign and dynamic of social change, especially in ameliorating life for the poor. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement worked very closely with Michel to this end. Far from being trapped in the bread and wine or in a monstrance, Christ is running wild throughout the world, changing not only bread and wine, but people and the whole fabric of society.

Eucharist (2): Feeding in the Desert

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eucharist1The feedings of the multitude in the wilderness give us a vision of the new life that baptism initiates us into and which the Eucharist sustains. (See Divinely Created Abundance) The multiplication of food through both divine and human generosity is quite the opposite of the accusatory, slave-driving society of Egypt or the chaotic violence before the Flood. All six Gospel accounts remind the reader of God’s gift of manna in the desert after the escape from Egypt. It is John’s Gospel that makes this connection most explicit. Just as the manna needed to be renewed each day, we need to be renewed by the Eucharist on a daily, or at least weekly, basis.

It is also John’s Gospel which warns us of how easily we fall away from living by mutually gifting back into contention and rivalry. First, John says that after declaring Jesus the prophet who was to come, the crowd tried to seize Jesus and make him king. Jesus had not modeled a way to rule over other people. Quite the opposite. Jesus had modeled a way of self-giving without rivalry. This is the way of life that should rule us. Making Jesus a political ruler could only drag him and his followers (us) back into the violently competitive life that baptism delivers us from. Then, the people (i.e. us) murmur against Jesus when he tells us that he himself is the bread come down from heaven. We murmur a lot more when Jesus says that we must eat his body and drink his blood. Murmuring is the very same word used of the Jews who contended with Moses and God in the desert.

We could take the murmuring as referring to the bitter arguments over the Christian centuries as to whether or how Christ can be present in the bread and wine. It seems to me that we should take Jesus at his word here and accept that he feeds us with his death and resurrected life. That’s the hard point; not the metaphysics of the “real presence.” We balk at the idea that Jesus’ death and his ongoing resurrected life can feed us. It’s like Jesus body and blood are poison to the kind of life we’re accustomed to living, which they are.

It is typical of John’s slantwise means of conveying the Gospel that he puts Jesus’ discourses about eating his body and drinking his blood in a context outside of the meal in the upper room. This has the advantage of stressing the ongoing nutrition Jesus offers in the Eucharist. Curiously, this separation also seems to spiritualize the Eucharist in terms of Jesus dwelling in us to give us life, but this comes with a shocker that English translations cannot convey. The Greek word for “eat” is trogein, a very strong verb that doesn’t mean dining nicely with good manners. It means to chew, gnash, grind. Jesus comes right in our faces with our eating as a sacrificial act. We are to be painfully mindful of the sacrificial way of life we left back in Egypt but, unfortunately find ourselves carrying with us through the desert.

The sixth chapter of John ends with most of Jesus’ followers leaving because of these hard words. By being food that nourishes us by reminding ourselves of how sacrificial we tend to be, Jesus is indeed refusing to be the king who fixes everybody else’s wagons that we want him to be. We have wandered far from the community of sharing and giving that began this chapter, the place where Jesus wants us to be.

See Eucharist (1) See Eucharist (3)