Part 2 of 4
Category Archives: eucharist
The act, not the object
I can’t let Corpus Christi go by without my annual rant.
We worship a God who is known in relationship, who is within himself, relational.
Wouldn’t the principal form of worship of said God therefore, surely, be relational too?
That is – we meet God, we come into the real presence of Jesus Christ, through the re-enactment of certain sorts of behaviour, within which reconciliation and adoration are combined?
So as we are welcomed to share in the bread and wine, so we are welcomed to the taste of heaven?
So Jesus is met in the action of a shared meal – not in the object of a piece of bread.
Jesus is not a commodity.
Jesus is not produced at our command.
That is the spirituality of western consumerism.
That is the spirituality that has ravaged the world and despises the poor.
That is the symbol of all that has gone wrong in our faith.
Grrrr…..
Incarnational worship
Joe and Peter took issue in the comments with the previous post and I wanted to expand on my perspective (ie why I liked the article I linked to).
On the one hand we have worship that is centred on holiness, the mysterium tremendens et fascinans, the provoking of awe and (in the strict sense) ecstasy. This is more associated with the Anglo-Catholic style of worship.
On the other hand we have worship that is centred on being human, relational, relaxed and informal. This is more associated with the Evangelical style of worship.
Pushed to an extreme, is this not a failure (on both sides) to be incarnational? In other words, the Anglo-Catholic tendency is to err in losing the humanity, the evangelical tendency is to err in losing the divinity in worship?
Whereas Jesus unites the two; and therefore so must our worship.
My worry with what Peter and Joe argue is that when we are worshipping, we are specifically worshipping God, and our relationship to Jesus must contain – I suggest – more of the woman clutching his cloak or Thomas exclaiming ‘My Lord and my God!’ than simply gathering to share a glass of wine with a community of friends (and it is that, of course). We need to find the place of balance, the sweet spot of the Spirit.
Peter said “The assumption in the article is God/Jesus is only present in church, specifically at every communion…” – it’s not so much that God/Jesus is ONLY present in church, but that he is indeed especially present in communion, there is a real presence which is significant. That is what lay behind my comment about the place of Old Testament worship (on which topic John Richardson has an excellent point here).
In other words, I think there is a further permutation of the evangelical error above, which is to flatten our experience of God. To say that God can be encountered everywhere and worshipped anywhere is true. Yet it is also true that we are a) sinful, b) therefore need to be taught how to worship and relate to God, and c) need to take account of the Scriptural witness that God is to be found and worshipped in particular places at particular times in particular ways. What has in fact happened, as a result of that evangelical emphasis (Protestant emphasis) upon God being worshippable anywhere, is that God ends up being worshipped nowhere – because we no longer know how to worship. The historic desire to avoid sacerdotalism has eviscerated the holy and we now live in a culture full of the spiritually starving who see what goes on in church as irrelevant to their hunger. The one leads inexorably to the other.
It is indeed possible to be mystically united with God at all times and in all places. Yet I suspect that any human beings like me need training and assistance (the what, the why and the how) in order to attain such an exalted spiritual state. This is exactly what communion does – it is our principal spiritual medicine which heals us and enables us to share in Christ’s life. After all, Jesus didn’t just come to abolish the Temple; he came to abolish it and replace it, with his Body. If we fail to take that seriously, ie with sufficient awe and reverence, then I believe that we are not keeping the faith, and we are not growing in the Spirit.
Mysterium Tremendens
Loved this:
(From another blogging vicar with a daughter called J_)
Normal service will hopefully resume here before too long (Ollie hopes). I’m convalescing from something, I think it’s exhaustion, my wife thinks it was ‘flu (but not swinish).
Worship in the Best of Both Worlds (Philip Greenslade)
One of those books that began life as PhD and it shows; but basically a very good exploration of how liturgy should be done, from an evangelical-discovering-the-wonders-of-catholicism perspective. Some excellent chapters, some where the academic apparatus drowns the point being made. Not sure I’d recommend it to anyone not already a theology graduate, which is a shame as it contains good material.
Corpus Christi: The Greatest Theological Mistake in Western Christian History
The phrase ‘the Body of Christ’ can refer to three things – 1. the body of Jesus of Nazareth before he was crucified; 2. the community of believers; 3. the bread consecrated during the Eucharist.
In practice we can ignore 1 as it never figures in debates about communion. What is significant is the way in which the other two senses have been understood in Christian history.
Let’s call those two senses of ‘the body of Christ’ ‘the church’ and ‘the host’.
In Christian understanding, one form of the body was ‘real’ or ‘true’. In other words it was something that could be touched and handled, and was therefore worthy of reverence and immense – total! – respect. This was called the ‘corpus verum’.
The other form of the body was only perceptible to the eyes of faith, it could only be received and understood mystically, in the context of prayer and worship. This was called the ‘corpus mysticum’.
For the first thousand years or so of Christianity, the ‘corpus verum’, the body that could be touched and handled with reverence, referred to the church, ie the community of the baptised. So, your neighbour in the community was worthy of reverence and respect. Harming your neighbour, eg murder, wasn’t just immoral, it was blasphemy. Correlative with that, the ‘corpus mysticum’ – that which could only be perceived with the eyes of faith – was the host, that which was consumed in the context of Eucharistic worship.
In the course of the twelfth century, in the Western church, these meanings were reversed, with awful consequences.
To begin with the more trivial, the ‘corpus verum’ began to be used to refer to the bread used in the Eucharist. Instead of this bread being something that could only be seen as holy by the faithful (and which didn’t have a particular tangibility as the body) the host became _itself_ the object of worship. This can be seen through the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi in the mid-thirteenth century, and the associated development of eucharistic devotions, eg exposition, seen through the use of the monstrance – the Body of Christ is being _demonstrated_ in this rite.
I happen to see this as a profound distortion of Christianity, but I needn’t detain you with that, for the really malefic consequences of this shift came with the other side, ie that instead of all the baptised being the ‘corpus verum’, now the baptised were the ‘corpus mysticum’ – which had the consequence that church membership was no longer something public, it was something private, and only accessible to those with the eyes of faith. Of course, those ‘eyes of faith’ became identified with the institution, so, whereas harming a baptised believer would once have been utterly unthinkable theologically, with this shift in understanding you end up with the Inquisition – abuse of the body to try and establish the state of the soul. You also lay the seeds for the Reformation, and the whole gamut of western history that sees faith as something ‘private’ and personal, rather than public and visible.
It would be no exaggeration to say that everything that has gone wrong with Western Christianity since the 1200s can be traced to this shift.
Crackers and Corpus Christi
Stephen Law links to this (amusingly bad) article. This is the comment I left on his blog:
Well…
First off, people might like to read this post and follow the link through to this one.
I want to disagree with one aspect of Myers’ post. He writes: “It’s like Dark Age superstition and malice.” Now I’m not certain of his meaning, but I think he means that the Roman Catholic beliefs lying behind this story are a product of the Dark Ages. If that is his meaning then he is incorrect.
The phrase ‘the Body of Christ’ can refer to three things – 1. the body of Jesus of Nazareth before he was crucified; 2. the community of believers; 3. the bread consecrated during the Eucharist.
In practice we can ignore 1 as it never figures in debates like this. What is significant is the way in which the other two senses have been understood in Christian history.
Let’s call those two senses of ‘the body of Christ’ ‘the church’ and ‘the host’.
In Christian understanding, one form of the body was ‘real’ or ‘true’. In other words it was something that could be touched and handled, and was therefore worthy of reverence and immense – total! – respect. This was called the ‘corpus verum’.
The other form of the body was only perceptible to the eyes of faith, it could only be received and understood mystically, in the context of prayer and worship. This was called the ‘corpus mysticum’.
For the first thousand years or so of Christianity, the ‘corpus verum’, the body that could be touched and handled with reverence, referred to the church, ie the community of the baptised. So, your neighbour in the community was worthy of reverence and respect. Harming your neighbour, eg murder, wasn’t just immoral, it was blasphemy. Correlative with that, the ‘corpus mysticum’ – that which could only be perceived with the eyes of faith – was the host, that which was consumed in the context of Eucharistic worship.
In the course of the twelfth century, in the Western church, these meanings were reversed, with awful consequences.
To begin with the more trivial, the ‘corpus verum’ began to be used to refer to the bread used in the Eucharist. Instead of this bread being something that could only be seen as holy by the faithful (and which didn’t have a particular tangibility as the body) the host became _itself_ the object of worship. This can be seen through the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi in the mid-thirteenth century, and the associated development of eucharistic devotions, eg exposition, seen through the use of the monstrance – the Body of Christ is being _demonstrated_ in this rite.
I happen to see this as a profound distortion of Christianity, but I needn’t detain you with that, for the really malefic consequences of this shift came with the other side, ie that instead of all the baptised being the ‘corpus verum’, now the baptised were the ‘corpus mysticum’ – which had the consequence that church membership was no longer something public, it was something private, and only accessible to those with the eyes of faith. Of course, those ‘eyes of faith’ became identified with the institution, so, whereas harming a baptised believer would once have been utterly unthinkable theologically, with this shift in understanding you end up with the Inquisition – abuse of the body to try and establish the state of the soul. You also lay the seeds for the Reformation, and the whole gamut of western history that sees faith as something ‘private’ and personal, rather than public and visible.
It would be no exaggeration to say that everything that has gone wrong with Western Christianity since the 1200s can be traced to this shift.
And it’s because it is traceable to the 1200s that Myers is incorrect to link this with the ‘Dark Ages’. In the Dark Ages they had a different theology.
Bread of Life (5): The offence of John 6
John 6 begins with the feeding of the 5,000, then there is a little break and movement and then Jesus gives a sermon in Capernaum. Jesus says, “Unless you eat the bread which is my flesh you have no life in you.” Is this a reference to the Eucharist or is this to be understood symbolically? Is it, for example, a question of beliefs, that eating the flesh means coming to him and drinking his blood, drinking wine is about believing in him?
Generally, when Jesus realises that he is being misunderstood, he is not an incompetent teacher! He does correct people when they get the wrong end of the stick. For example with Nicodemus, Christ says “Unless you are born again then you don’t enter the Kingdom” and Nicodemus says, “How can you be born again, can you come again from your mother’s womb?” So Jesus goes on and says “Unless you are born from above.” He clarifies what he means. When the disciples ask him ‘what do you mean avoid the leaven of the Pharisees?’, again he unpacks what he means, that here he was speaking in a figurative fashion. However, there are other occasions when he is at first understood to be saying something literally and people take offence. For example, in John 8 when he says, “Before Abraham, I am” – he was there, he was saying he is ancient and the Jews object, they take offence. Jesus sees that they take offence but he re-emphasises it to drive home the point, which is when then says “Before Abraham was, I am,” which is such a bold and provocative and virtually blasphemous thing for him to say in the context, because he is expressing his identity with the Father. When Moses says to God, “What shall I say to the people so that they know I come from you?”, God says, “Tell them I am.” This is the name of God and so when Jesus says “Before Abraham was, I am,” he is expressing something powerful, he is emphasising. When Jesus is misunderstood as being literal when in fact he is being figurative, he corrects the mistake; but when he is understood as being literal and people take offence because he is telling the truth, then he really redoubles the point, he emphasises it, he escalates it.
So what is going on in John 6? Is it that he is being misunderstood and then he corrects, or is it that he is being understood rightly, the people take offence and then he redoubles his emphasis? After the feeding of the five thousand, after all the themes have been set in motion and when the Jewish people take offence (as have some of his disciples) Jesus repeats and redoubles the emphasis on what he is teaching. He says four times, “Eat my flesh”, and as he is re-emphasising it he changes his language. In Greek the word for eat is phago, and as he is re-emphasising he changes the word to use the Greek trogo, which means chew. He doesn’t just say “Unless you eat my flesh,” he says, “Unless you chew my flesh.” So you can see how he is really just hammering this home.
There’s another factor to consider, that the figurative language of ‘eat my flesh’ did have an existing meaning at the time – as it still does – and it meant something very, very hostile. To say to someone “I will eat your flesh,” is to say to someone, “I will kill you.” There is an existing figurative meaning that’s in Scripture, e.g. in Micah 3. But that was the figurative sense. I am persuaded that Jesus meant himself to be taken literally, which is why the Jewish people take offence, because in Leviticus it says, “You shall not drink the blood because the blood has the life.” That’s even for animals, let alone a human being. So it is doubly offensive, and those who take offence at it fall away. This is the only example in Scripture when disciples turn away from Christ over a matter of doctrine. Jesus is teaching them and they find it impossible to cope with. It is also where Judas turns. There are all sorts of things embedded in this narrative!
Bread of Life (4): a real process
Jesus says “This is my body.” Now what might that mean? I will devote an entire session to that question, but for now let us just ponder that when Jesus predicts that the temple will be cast down, he says it will be rebuilt in three days, and then when the local people say, ‘how can he rebuild the temple in three days?’, the answer given in John’s gospel is ‘he was talking about his body’. Communion is the new temple: the temple has passed away, has passed to the Old Testament and that which the temple accomplished in terms of atonement, in terms of wiping away sin, reconciliation with God, those functions of the temple are now enacted within the body. Christ’s body is now the temple.
Jesus also says, “Do this in remembrance of me”. Now the ‘in remembrance’, the word is anamnesis. It is only used in one other place in the Bible, that’s in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, in Leviticus, so there is some debate over exactly what is meant. A key element, however, is this sense that just as with Passover, it is not just a memorial. It’s a re-enactment, you are taking part in the events as you re-enact them. It is a present tense process. In particular there is a sense in which, or a suggestion of, invoking, that Jesus becomes present in the anamnesis. So to do this in remembrance of me, it is do this to bring me amongst you, it has that shade of meaning in it.
St Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 says ‘this bread that we share, is it not a sharing, is it not a participation, is it not a communion in Christ’s blood?’ Paul is arguing about eating meat from pagan sacrifices, whether it is acceptable for the community in Corinth to do this, and also to eat the supper of the Lord. He says ‘well, when you are eating those sacrifices, you are sharing, you are becoming part of the body of the pagans. And you can’t do that because when you are having the Lord’s supper you are becoming part of the Body of Christ’. His argument doesn’t make sense if the process is just a symbolic process, you don’t become a part of the body of pagans if it is just a symbolic act. It’s a real act, there is something real going on. St Paul has a very robust sense of the reality of what it means to share the body and the blood, to share the bread and the wine. Not least because, as he goes on to talk about in 1 Corinthians 11, those who eat unworthily, those who don’t take it seriously, those who are frivolous (which is about not actually believing, not believing in the process, not believing that this is something real going on) – those who eat unworthily are guilty of the body and the blood, which is an expression meaning that they share in the murder, they acquire the guilt of the killing. So they crucify Jesus again. It is saying they are still bound up with the values of the world, the worldly values which crucified Christ, those which put him to death. If you don’t understand what’s going on in communion, if you don’t take it seriously, treat it as this real substantial process, then you are still sharing in the values of the world, and therefore you are still sharing in what murders. It is what kills Christ but it is also what destroys our own inner life.
Bread of Life (3): two more roots
Two further roots to the meal are worth mentioning: temple ritual and the order of Melchizedek.
Once the people of Israel had got established in the Promised Land and the Ark of the Covenant was in Solomon’s temple various processes of worship were developed, through the temple. One central ritual was the ritual of atonement, when the sins of the community are wiped clean. The people gather for the ritual and there is a process by which the high priest slaughters a bull as atonement for his sacrifice so he becomes ritually pure, he goes into the Holy of Holies, he puts on the robe of God, the mantle of God (and he is then called ‘Son of God’) and he comes out and there are two goats, one is the scapegoat, one is the Lord, and he slaughters the lamb representing God and he sprinkles the blood in order to cleanse creation: it is the blood of the lamb that cleanses creation. Then he lays his hands on the scapegoat and it gets driven out and so that the sins are put away and creation is renewed. You can see how the Christian liturgy draws on this language and imagery: we are washed clean by the blood of the lamb. It is a renewing of the community and the whole creation.
One other precursor worth mentioning is referred to in Psalm 110, and in Hebrews in particular, that Jesus is our high priest for ever, after the order of Melchizedek. When I first came across this it was rather mysterious, but Genesis 14 is the source. Abraham has been involved in a battle and he gives a tribute to the local king (it could mean that he was the king of what became Jerusalem, because it is that sort of area). But Melchizedek offers a sacrifice and brings bread and wine and this is the blessing, he is acting, he is described as acting, as a priest, and this is a blessing for Abraham. So one of the keys things about this is that this is a priesthood (he is described in Genesis as a priest of the Most High God) that comes before the Levitical priesthood. As Jesus wasn’t a member of the Levitical priesthood, how can he have been a high priest? The answer is that he is a High Priest of the order of Melchizedek, which pre-dates the Levitical priesthood and is more powerful, there are all sorts of references to it being an eternal priesthood and so on, but I don’t want to go into this in too much detail as I will get out of my depth very quickly! It does seem to have been an important factor coming into what was understood.
So what does Jesus say about this meal? He says: “This is the new covenant.” He is deliberately establishing something, and it is drawing on the existing language, this old covenant, this Old Testament. (The word translated as testament is simply covenant, ie an agreement, in fact there were several agreements between God and the people of Israel.) Cultural forms like Passover and the temple ways of renewing the agreement, that covenant between God and the people – what Jesus is doing is saying this is the new agreement, God is acting again, God is renewing this process, there is a new agreement, you don’t have the old agreement any more, the old legal contract, there is a new one and this is what it is: it is the sharing of the bread and the wine.