“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.”
We will hear those very verses next week again. Jesus inviting us to “eat his flesh’” and “drink his blood”. This is a rather crude way to put it, and yet these are also the very words the priest pronounces each time the Eucharist is celebrated – when we recall Jesus’s last supper with his disciples with the blessing and sharing of the bread and the wine.
I said earlier I wanted to use the long reading from John we have this season as an opportunity to consecrate time to talk a bit more about what we do when we celebrate the Eucharist – and also to think a bit more about the challenges of celebrating the Eucharist in a time of pandemic and the different questions it has raised in our minds. Of course, as you probably know, there have been two thousands year of conversations and also controversies on the Eucharist, so I would like to be clear that, first of all, my intention is not to cover all that have been said about the subject, even in our own Episcopalian tradition (For example, you may know that the Holy Eucharist has started to be the main service in our church only about 30 years ago, it used to be Morning Prayer). I would also like to be clear on the fact that the teaching I would like to share with you today is mainline Protestant theology and is still a topic in debate. I like to think that I have been formed by many readings, conversations and reflections, yet this teaching is offered from my own limited understanding – an understanding that you are surely invited to analyze for yourself and discuss respectfully with one another and with me. My main references for this sermons series are the books “A guide to The Sacraments” by John Macquarrie and “Sacraments and Sacramentality” by Bernard Cook – both of them being used for the training of clergy and laity as main references in Episcopalian seminaries.
This said, for today, back to our Gospel first and I would like to point out to you how interesting it is that in John’s Gospel, there is no mention of Jesus’s last supper with his disciples – oh, actually there is, when Jesus washes his discipleship’s feet – but there is no mention that Jesus blessed the bread and the wine and asked his disciples to do the same in memory of him. The story is told in Matthew, Mark and Luke, but for most scholars this is this very chapter (Chapter 6) that “replaces” the account of Jesus’s last meal in John’s Gospel. Chapter 6 in John’s is very likely, in Jesus’s mouth, John’s theology on the Eucharist, the way John and John’s community understood what happened when they blessed and shared the bread and wine.
And so to me, this is very important to notice that in the Gospel there is sort of an “interchangeability” between Jesus’s acts and Jesus’s words in regard of the Eucharist, and it is especially important to notice that in a time of pandemic, or whenever we are not able to receive the sacrament (because of disease, travel, lack of an ordained minister and so on). It is also important to notice these things when we are not able to receive the sacrament in full or the way we used to (which is our case these days, receiving the bread only and not the wine). We see here in Chapter 6 that John does not focus so much on the way we celebrate, or on the concrete signs of the celebration, but John focuses on the mystical, or if you prefer, on the spiritual meaning of the Eucharist as a participation in the life of Christ. Theologians define a sacrament as “a visible sign of an invisible grace”. They say that, for example, the water of baptism is a sign of the forgiveness of sins – it is also, more deeply, a sign of the passage (through the water) from death to life (as the Hebrews crossed the red sea from the land of slavery to the promise land). Sacraments are a sign of moving from a place of death (separation from God) to a place of life (union with God through Christ) and to make it concrete, or rather to manifest this reality of grace and salvation, we use signs, yet what really matters, and this is what John reminds us of, is the meaning we put with the sign, not so much the sign in itself.
During this time of pandemic, when we have to worship on line, we have been talking about “spiritual communion” – we say we do “spiritual communion” when we say the prayer but don’t receive the bread and the wine. Well, I don’t really like this term of “spiritual communion” because of course communion is always spiritual, even when we do receive the bread and wine – if it isn’t a spiritual act for us, then it has very little value, it isn’t the small amount of bread we eat, or the small amount of wine we drink that is going to satisfy us. Now those signs are important, but they are important not so much in themselves, rather they are important because of the meaning they carry, the intention that comes with them – we do not just share the bread and wine, we pray over them to manifest our intentions and God’s intentions through Christ’s promises. It is important to manifest our faith in concrete ways, in the same manner that we would manifest our love in a concrete way. When we offer flowers to someone we love, our love isn’t in the flowers themselves and yet our flowers carry the affection we have for that person, and it matters to them that we offer this sign of our affection. . In the same way, when we have the occasion, it is very wonderful to be able to celebrate the Eucharist with bread and wine that can be eaten and drunk, but it is not magical either, the bread and the wine do not contain the grace in itself as surely as a bouquet does not contain our love in itself. Communion with God through Christ is spiritual, and also manifested in concrete signs, sacraments. The bouquet is a way of manifesting love, of making this love present and actual, for the person to whom it is offered. In the same manner, when we celebrate the Eucharist, we ask God to pour God’s spirit on the bread and the wine, so these elements may be, to us, the body and blood of Christ, so they may make Christ present unto us through the bread and the wine.
Bread and the wine are not a mere symbol, of course. Jesus’s insistence on “eating his flesh” and “drinking his blood” reminds us that our faith is embodied, Jesus didn’t just give us teachings and instructions or a moral way of life but gave his body and his blood for us. In the same way, we are to respond to his love with our whole being – it’s not something that just happens in our heads – and that’s why we gather to receive the Eucharist. Spirituality encompasses our whole being, body, heart and mind. Jesus gave himself for us and we have to give ourselves to him, not just send our good thoughts or good intentions! We also have to live out our unity with Christ in our flesh and blood, in our daily life, way beyond what happens at church only. The Eucharist we celebrate at church is a sign that our faith is concrete and requires a commitment of all our being.
Now what happens when we worship on line? I don’t think it annihilates the way Christ becomes present to us. There are many ways of being present, and we all had a lot of opportunities to experience that in the past 18 months. Even when we could not gather in person, calling friends and family has been our way of being with them. Of course, we much prefer meeting in person, but there is no lesser love or value in our affection when we meet this way – it possible that meeting on line only will affect the relationship in the long term because of course meeting on line does not allow us to have the same level of experience than when we meet in person, but when it’s our intention to spend time and relate to people we love, we know that it’s still very valuable to meet on line. I think it is the same with church. When we have the intention to be united with Christ, Christ will come to us. The sacrament isn’t magical, Jesus isn’t “contained” in the host itself. The sacrament of the Eucharist is the vessel in which Jesus comes to us at church, it is a wonderful thing to be able to do the rite in full as we did before the pandemic, but certainly our relationship with Christ does not depend on our ability to perform the rite. Communion is beyond the rite. The rite makes manifest a spiritual communion. John does not describe how the sacrament in supposed to happen for his community, but he wants them to understand what’s going on when they share the bread: They manifest their longing to be wholly united to Christ, and also to one another. If we are all united to Christ, we are also all united to one another.
To me, that’s another aspect of this pandemic: When there is a contagious disease, we are forced to realize that our flesh and blood, our bodies aren’t only our own body and so we can do whatever we want to do with them. Our own body depends on other people’s bodies and the way they treat them, or the way they are affected. Having different bodies, we are united in sharing in the same human flesh. In the same way, there is a deep and invisible unity for Christians that goes beyond what meets the eye. It is nice, enjoyable to be with one another in the same space, but if there is much more to our being together, a deeper unity in the flesh of Christ and we’ll talk more about that next week.
I don’t know if you remember from before I left for vacations, I told you that the feeding of the 5000, and moreover the discourse that follows, are a “test” for Jesus’s disciples – a test not being a pop quiz, a trial or a punishment, but an opportunity to go from one level of faith to another. To me, this is what this pandemic could be to us, an opportunity to go from one level of faith to another, to go, with John’s, beyond the visible, the tangible, what we can see but also touch or eat, to experience a deeper and broader presence of Christ. It could actually be for us one very meaningful thing we could do in a time where there are so many things that we cannot do the way we used to.