Eat his flesh - Conflict and Communion

Today, I delve into the complexities of conflict and the profound teachings of Jesus on the Eucharist. Reflecting on personal experiences, I discuss how some thrive in confrontations while others, like myself, avoid them. I then transition to Jesus’ bold declaration that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood, highlighting the visceral and transformative nature of the Eucharist. This sacrament, far from being mere symbolism, invites us into a tangible encounter with God’s divine presence, fostering our spiritual growth and deepening our relationship with Him. Join me as we explore this sacred mystery together.

00:00:00  So what’s your reaction when you’re in the middle of a fight or an argument? You know, I think there are a whole range of different people, some love fights and arguments and will go in full swing into any kind of situation to try and get to the end of the situation. I’m not one of those. I don’t like conflicts. And you know, I will try and avoid them as much as I possibly can. I’m getting better at recognizing what’s going on and being able to make an assessment of the situation. Remember some years ago, a friend of mine said that whenever she kind of experienced this sort of confrontation, she would just begin by saying, “Oh, honey, it must be so hard being where you are in the situation that you’re facing.” You know, having that sense of release, having some empathy with the person and what they’re experiencing, what’s going on through their mind, what’s their background, what’s the wounds and all of that, that brings all of that to the situation.

00:01:05  It seems that Jesus takes a different stance tonight when we hear that opening part of the gospel, when it says that the Jews began to argue with one another, the Greek is way stronger than just arguing. It presumes that it’s not just a verbal discussion. It’s not just a rallying back and forth between different ideas. The presumption is that it’s a very physical fight. People are grabbing each other. Perhaps there are punches being thrown, there are fists flying around. It’s a scene of violence that is presented to us. And you think that with all of that kind of erupting around him, Jesus would kind of backpedal and say, oh no, no, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m just taking you should be just taking all of this as a spiritual sense, a metaphorical meaning. But instead he ramps it up even further because until this point, he’s been talking about bread and the bread of life and things that are very beautiful, very wonderful images. But now he takes it way further by saying, well, no, the bread that I want you to eat is in fact my flesh, and I want you to drink my blood.

00:02:25  I mean, can it get more explicit, more plain than that, in his teaching about what is being offered here, what is at the heart of this experience that he’s inviting us into that very encounter, not just in a spiritual sense, a metaphorical sense. It’s not just something that’s meant to warm ourselves as we kind of ponder upon these beautiful thoughts. But he’s inviting us into this very human experience of eating and drinking. And when he says to eat my flesh. The word there is not a word that you would use in polite company. It’s not the form of eating that you might do when you’re in public or in company or at a restaurant. You know, you don’t tend to, you know, chew and munch and kind of Norway at your food. Some people do. But, you know, in polite society where it cut a train that you should be very gentle and, you know, chew and masticate as much as possible each of the bites and all of those kinds of things. But the word he’s using here is more like what an animal would do when it’s, you know, an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger kind of feasting on an animal that it’s just captured and is killing.

00:03:41  That’s the sense? So he’s wrapping it up by using the word flesh. He’s ramping up by the description of the kind of eating that is involved. But then he’s also telling us to drink his blood. And thankfully, in most human societies, we are generally not comfortable with people eating flesh and drinking blood, especially the flesh and the blood of other humans. We kind of say cannibalism isn’t to be encouraged. You know, we don’t want to wake up with one arm missing because our neighbour has got hungry during the night. You know, we think, no, we don’t want to encourage cannibalism. And so this language that Jesus is using is able to be interpreted clearly like that. And we see it in some of the polemics, some of the writings that were directed against the church in the early centuries. That’s one of the things that they accuse Christians of being, of being cannibals, of teaching the practice of cannibalism. So clearly this is the way that we’re meant to understand this, that we’re meant to approach this in a very physical reality.

00:04:52  But what we are invited into within our church, thankfully, is the whole sense of a sacrament what it is to live this mystery in the sacramental way, to be invited into this experience and encounter with the God who makes himself available to us, the God who delights to be present in our lives, the God who wants to be there in every situation that we face ourselves. And so to know that when we come forward in the communion procession, later on, when we gather in procession to come and to receive from the altar of the Lord that even though the bread will still look like bread, that sacramentally the Lord has changed that very presence, so that the bread has become his body, his flesh to be eaten, so that we can indeed take it and receive it, so that we can receive the gift of the life of the age to come, that breaking in of that future reality of God being able to be brought into our present experience, that when we receive that bread now become the body, we are able to receive the very presence of God.

00:06:06  And just as we’re told that we become like what we eat, you know, we know that we shouldn’t eat too many fatty, sugary foods because that’s the way that we will end up. So also, we’re invited by taking the very body of the Lord to become like the Lord that is meant to change us and transform us, that we’re meant to become more like God. You know, there’s this sense, particularly within the Eastern Church of divinization, that slowly we are changed to become more like God. And so that’s what the Eucharist is all about, this desire to offer our thanksgiving, this gift of the Lord making himself available to us so that we can receive, we can be changed, and we can be slowly transformed to become more like God.