this is my body

There's bee a bit of discussion lately in the blogsphere about Eucharist, also known as communion or the Lord's Supper. More specifically, much has been said about coming to a deeper understanding of the bread & wine as Christ's body & blood. You can see what I'm talking about here and here and here and finally here. I lead a discussion on this topic with our community last week.

This can be a touchy subject. Those of us raised in Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox backgrounds have a much different take than those raised in Fundamentalist, Evangelical, Anabaptist or Reformed backgrounds. As I shared with our community, and some of my blogging compatriots have pointed out, somewhere along the line in history we lost the ability to accept as mystery certain elements of our Christian faith that go beyond rational understanding. Too often this has resulted in us trying to codify and define things that are beyond our ability to comprehend let alone explain. Naturally this results in a war of words and meanings and we lose the forest for the trees. This is precisely the case with the Eucharist--literally "Thanksgiving".

There can be little serious doubt that the earliest Christians understood that Christ was truly and really present in the bread & wine as his Body & Blood. Any honest reading of early Christian writings reveals this to be true. What is not so clear, and this is more to the point, is how the bread & wine become and are the Body & Blood of Jesus. There was no formal philosophical or doctrinal statement or explanation to describe the process. It was taken on faith as a mystery, just as the Trinity or the Incarnation of Christ was understood as a mystery. In fact many early Christians saw a parallel between the Incarnation, God becoming flesh, and the Eucharist, flesh becoming bread or more properly bread becoming God's flesh.

I think a key to understanding the Eucharist is to keep it within its original context of Passover. The first Eucharist, the Last Supper, was Jesus' final Passover meal with his disiples. For the Jews Passover is a memorial--a re-living--of the original Passover when God delivered the Israelites from captivity in Egypt. To receive deliverance the Jews had to take a spotless lamb, shed its blood, cover their doorways with the blood, and finally eat the lamb. It is clear from the Gospels that Jesus's death on the cross was the fulfillment of what was foreshadowed in the orginal Passover event. He was the sinless Lamb of God. His blood was shed. We are covered by that blood through relationship with him. Finally, he gave us his flesh--the Lamb--to eat as spiritual nourishment.

Do I understand how Jesus is present? No. Do I need to understand it? No. I do believe he is really present, that the bread & wine are somehow his Body & Blood, because he said so, and because the witness of scripture and the testimony of the early church attest to it. It is a mystery to me, but that doesn't make it any less real. It is an avenue, some would say the avenue, of grace. It gives me strength, I don't know how, but I know it does.