Feasting on Jesus (Lest We Devour One Another) We Too Become True Food and Drink
The Rev’d Theophus “Thee” Smith
Mikell Chapel, Cathedral of St. Philip
August 20, 2006
How would you explain today’s gospel keyword, “eternal life,” in contemporary terms? For years as a college professor I have been trying to figure out how to talk to my students about traditional religious terms like “eternal life,” “heaven” and “hell.” The best framework that I have been able to come up with is provided by the popular Christian author, C.S. Lewis, in his cleverly written fantasy novel, The Great Divorce. The novel is about a supernatural bus trip that the protagonist takes one wondrous day from the gray dullness of “hell” to the bright borderlands of “heaven.”
During the course of his adventures he observes a man being slowly consumed by a demonic spirit in the form of a mannequin. The mannequin is tethered to the man by a chain, and he is led around by the man the way a monkey grinder walks around with his pet monkey. In this case however the man only appears to control his mannequin, by pulling on its chain and speaking through its voice like a ventriloquist.
Rather, as the reader slowly begins to perceive with horror, the humanity of the man is shrinking every time he rattles the chain and uses his theatrical voice to speak through the spirit. For every time the man projects his voice through the mannequin, the demonic strength of the mannequin increases just a little bit more. As the man keeps posturing and vaunting himself, slowly but surely the mannequin grows larger and larger until it begins to dwarfs the human being who supposedly controls it.
At the end of this process there is a final, horrible moment when there is no human being left. Observing the vacancy left by the consumed man the demon simply takes the chain, pockets it, and walks triumphantly away.
When I end the telling of this story in class I hasten to emphasize the term ‘soul death.’ (1) Soul death is a way of talking about a loss of one’s humanity that is so abysmal—so major—that there is nothing left to ‘save’ or recover. There is no longer any humanity left that is capable of experiencing heaven or eternal life. Instead there is a kind of psychic vacancy; a void or, better, an evacuation that is incapable of truly human experience. That is a portrait of hell, of the eternal loss of one’s true self, that college students are able to fathom with a real shudder.
Today’s scriptures, however, are about the “good news” of eternal life rather than the bad news of its opposite! But there’s one more thing I can offer before I move on to that kind of heavenly life. How about a more light-hearted description of ordinary human life? Such a description came to me this week from a priest colleague in Nigeria who calls it his “Joke of the Week.” This joke will help us transition to the extraordinary nature of eternal life, by beginning in a humorous way with the ordinary nature of human life. And so it is fitting that it begins with this opening line:
Let me Explain Life To You . . .
On the first day, God created the dog and said: "Sit all day by the door of your house and bark at anyone who comes in or walks past. For this, I will give you a life span of twenty years."
The dog said: "That's a long time to be barking. How about only ten years and I'll give you back the other ten?" So God agreed.
On the second day, God created the monkey and said: "Entertain people, do tricks, and make them laugh. For this, I'll give you a twenty-year life span."
The monkey said: "Monkey tricks for twenty years? That's a pretty long time to perform. How about I give you back ten like the Dog did?" And God agreed.
On the third day, God created the cow and said: "You must go into the field with the farmer all day long and suffer under the sun, have calves and give milk to support the farmer's family. For this, I will give you a life span of sixty years."
The cow said: "That's kind of a tough life you want me to live for sixty years. How about twenty and I'll give back the other forty?" And God agreed again.
On the fourth day, God created man and said: "Eat, sleep, play, marry and enjoy your life. For this, I’ll give you twenty years."
But man said: "Only twenty years? Could you possibly give me my twenty, the forty the cow gave back, the ten the monkey gave back, and the ten the dog gave back; that makes eighty, okay?"
"Okay," said God, "You asked for it."
So that is why the first twenty years we eat, sleep, play and enjoy ourselves. For the next forty years we slave in the sun to support our family [like the cow]. For the next ten years we do monkey tricks to entertain the grandchildren. And for the last ten years we sit [like the dog] on the front porch and bark at everyone.
. . . Life has now been explained to you. (2)
Now I am most interested in the last part of this humorous account; the part that ‘explains’ why we human beings tend to “bark at everyone” after a certain age—not necessarily old age, right? Of course the scriptures do not explain life in such amusing and picturesque terms as we find in this Joke of the Week. Yet they do indeed give us deeper clues about why we human beings tend to bark at one another and, more viciously, to “bite and devour one another” (Gal. 5.15).
For in today’s gospel we encounter the archaic image of cannibalism. It’s Christianity’s most ancient scandal, cannibalism, and it’s specter arises from the language of John’s gospel in which we Christians are literally described as ‘eating Jesus’ flesh’ and ‘drinking his blood’ in the sacrament of Eucharist or Holy Communion.
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (Jn. 6.52) That was the voice of horrified scandal that we hear in today’s gospel. But now let me suggest a very different kind of cannibalism, one that is only hinted at in the reading from Ephesians appointed for today. More explicit is this passage from St. Paul ’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 5:
For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
But if you bite and devour one another take heed that you are not consumed by one another.
[So] I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5.14-16).
Here, I propose, the early Christians’ Eucharistic experience of ‘eating and drinking Christ’s flesh and blood’ provided an antidote to the “biting and devouring one another” that St. Paul exposes in this graphic depiction. In the Eucharist and in its related practices the early churches learned how to defer to one another with forbearance and respect and to “bear one another’s burdens, thus fulfilling the law of Christ” (Gal. 6.2).
Thus they found in the sacrament of Eucharist a kind of antidote to the ‘devouring one another’ that St. Paul warned about and that typically plagues all human communities.
Indeed we might say that they ‘feasted on Jesus lest they devoured one another.’ Thus in addition to the positive expressions of Eucharistic eating and drinking—the eating of wisdom in today’s reading from Proverbs, and being Spirit-filled instead of drunk with wine that we read about in Ephesians, we have this therapeutic and preventative (prophylactic) renunciation in the Galatians passage; the renunciation of devouring and consuming one another.
In this connection the 17 th century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal wrote, It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false (Pensées, 81).
When correlated with our scriptures for this week and next, this means that we will inevitably feed on and consume each others’ spiritual and psychological vitality and life energies. However, only God is fully capable of satisfying, gratifying and rewarding our infinite appetite for each other’s spirit—each other’s beauty or talents or creativity or virtues, etcetera.
Another author has stated this idea in terms of idolatry and transcendence, and suggests that Christian faith aims at redeeming us from the pathology of a “deviated transcendence,” of a desire that should be aroused from a truly transcendent spiritual source but instead is aroused by the immanent neighbor. The biblical name for this is idolatry, and its antidote is faith in the unseen God. (3)
With this [the] use of the word “antidote” we come finally to another ancient representation of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. It was Ignatius of Antioch in the 1st or 2nd century who described Holy Communion as break[ing of] one bread, which is the medicine of immortality, the antidote that we should not die, but live forever. (4)
However rather than a metaphysical rendering of this “medicine of immortality,” I propose the following social rendering; a rendering that balances the emphasis on transcendence in the previous quotation with an emphasis on immanence or groundedness as the opposite of transcendence. It comes from Psalm 133:
Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity!
It is like the precious oil upon the head, running down upon the beard, upon the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes!
It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the LORD has commanded the blessing, life for evermore.
In this Old Testament vision of eternal life people live in a harmony in which they neither ‘devour and consume’ one another, nor idolize and worship one another in place of God. Rather as “brethren” they are members of a unity that is “good and pleasant” and that “falls” like the grace of God—like the anointing oil of Aaron the first priest, or like the dew of Mt. Hermon .
This anointing is indeed a graciousness of God that cures or heals us from all the ways we routinely devour and consume one another. A healing oil is an apt metaphor of the “medicine of immortality,” a medicine that is the antidote to all the ways we diminish or degenerate our lives by our endemic inhumanity to one another. Like manna from heaven that falls with the graciousness of God, is not our loving one another as Jesus loved his brethren all the antidote we need to nourish our co-humanity and secure our co-eternity in one another’s hearts?
Perhaps then this Eucharistic table is not only a banquet table for feasting on the delectable sweet things and nourishing food of the Spirit. Perhaps it also provides us with a site for spiritual medicine or, better, a clinic in which I get to diagnose my cannibalism of others and thus the diminishing of my humanity.
Where have I failed to love my neighbor as myself? Where have I idolized others in the form of envy or fear or resentment or shame? And where has all this resulted in the diminishing of my humanity? Could there already be so little of me left that I might become an evacuated soul, pocketed in the void somewhere and lost for all eternity except in the mind of God and the memory of some few others?
Heaven forbid it. God forbid it. And may the “medicine of immortality” that is found at this holy table prevent it ever happening to you and to me. But there yet remains an even greater prospect. What if my own body and blood, and your own body and blood, and yours and yours and yours and yours [gesturing randomly around the four corners of the room], what if your body and blood has also become or could also become a life-giving sacrament for nourishing the humanity of someone else.
It doesn’t always ‘have to be about me,’ you know, or about you or about you. Some things that happen to me or to you might well be for the sake of someone else, and God has entrusted us and granted our lives to become broken bread and poured out wine for the life of someone else. In that case, maybe we should be interrogating you the way his fellow countrymen interrogated Jesus in today’s gospel:
Dear Christian friend, how can you give your flesh to eat and your blood to drink for the life of the world?
In the name of God: our Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, and Friend. Amen.
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1. Another version of ‘soul death’ is portrayed in that classic film familiar to many of us, “The Portrait of Dorian Gray.” Also a supernatural fantasy, the film features a monstrous immoralist who has found a painting that can transfer the moral evidence of his sins onto his portrait. Dorian Gray then proceeds to commit the most heinous crimes and misdeeds with apparent impunity, because their consequences on his character and his soul are featured on the face of his portrait rather than showing-up on his own actual face. Pristine in self-presentation and gorgeously handsome, he manages to fool everyone but himself until the final scene in which the transference is terminated and we see in his demise the full consequences of his immoral life.
2. Fr. Munachi’s “Joke of the Week,” accessed 8-18-2006 at www.munachi.com/jokes.htm
3. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, “Religion and the Thought of René Girard,” Curing Violence, eds. Mark I. Wallace, Theophus H. Smith (Sonoma, Ca.: Polebridge Press, 1994), p. 6.
4. "Os estin pharmakon athanasias, antidotos tou ma apothanein" Eph. 20, 2. Lietzmann, p. 210, observes that Ignatius most probably borrowed the expression from the liturgy of Antioch . Accessed 8/18/06 : “The Real Presence of Our Lord’s Body and Blood in the Sacrament: Its Benefit as the ‘Medicine of Immortality,’” by Rev. David Schoessow at: http://www.confessionallutherans.org/papers/medicine.html
Comments? Contact The Rev. Thee Smith: tsmith@stphilipscathedral.org