After Noah, the human race became one more a dysfunctional family. Chapter 11 of Genesis tells us that the whole earth had only one language and that the people joined together in a great project to build a city at the center of which would be a tower reaching up to challenge the heavens. This Tower of Babel functions as a neat biblical image of the aggressive, self-aggrandizing, and imperialistic tendencies of human beings once they have lost contact with God.

An elemental biblical truth is that in a world gone wrong, there is no communion without sacrifice. Since the world has been twisted out of shape, it can be straightened only through a painful process of reconfiguration. It is practically impossible to read any two pages of the Bible in succession without coming across the language of God’s anger, but we mustn’t interpret this symbolic expression literally, as though God passes in and out of emotional snits/ The divine wrath is a theological symbol for the justice of God—which is to say, God’s passion to set things right.

The Mass signals this transcendent dimension in a number of ways. In the Confiteor, the liturgy invokes another world: “I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God,” and the great Gloria prayer calls to mind the song of the angels early on Christmas morning. From the beginning of the rite, therefore, we are situated in a properly heavenly context that stretches beyond that of the community gathered immediately around us.

Next, through the power of the words of the Eucharistic Prayer, the elements of bread and wine are transfigured into the Body and Blood of Jesus, and the people are invited to come forward and feast on the Lord. This, once again, is the Christ of the Bethlehem manger, offered for the sustenance of the world. The participants in the Mass don’t simply listen to the teaching of Jesus’ they don’t merely call his memory and spirit to ind.

After the Gloria prayer, participants in the Mass are seated for the proclamation of the Word of God. Since Christ is, as St. John insisted, the Word of God made flesh, the entire scripture—Old Testament and New—is the speech of Christ. Having been gathered by Jesus, we listen to him, as the crowds did who heard the Sermon on the Mount. In the ancient world, the meal, at which convivial friends reclined in easy company, was the place where philosophical conversation often took place. (Think of the Symposium of Plato, an account of a festive supper during which the conversants discoursed on the nature of love.)

When she was considering the possibility of becoming a Roman Catholic, Dorothy Day commented that what impressed her the most about the Mass was that the rich and the poor knelt there side by side in prayer. A community that would never exist in the harsh world of 1930s America strangely existed around the altar of Christ, God’s desire for the world becoming incarnate even in the midst of sin.

After the miraculous haul, the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” traditionally identified as the author of the Gospel, shouted, “It is the Lord!” (John 21:7). St. John, the one who rested on the breast of the Lord at the Last Supper and who had the greatest intuitive feel for Jesus’ intentions, represents here the mystical dimension of the Church. Up and down the centuries, there have been poets, preachers, teachers, liturgists, mystics, and saints who have an instinct for who Jesus is and what he desires.

Through certain hints in the Old Testament, some first-century Jews had begun to cultivate the conviction that at the end of time God would bring the righteous dead back to life and restore them to a transfigured earth. In the risen Jesus, the first Christians saw this hope being realized. In Paul’s language, Christ was “the first fruits” of those who had fallen asleep—that is to say, the initial instance of the general resurrection of the dead.

If, as Feuerbach said, we are what we eat, then those who eat the Flesh of Jesus and drink his Blood must constitute a new society, grounded in love, service, non-violence, and nondomination. Reminding them of their crucial importance as the first members of the Church, Jesus said, “I confer on you, just as my Father as conferred on me, a kingdom...And you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Luke 22:29-30)."

To say “body” and “blood,” in the nondualist context of first-century Judaism, is to say “self,” and thus Jesus was inviting his disciples to feed on him and thereby to draw his life into theirs, conforming themselves to him in the most intimate and complete way possible. We must never keep the account of the fall far from our minds when we consider these events. If our trouble began with a bad meal (seizing at godliness on our own terms), then our salvation commences with a rightly structured meal (God offering us his life as a free gift).

At the outset of the story, the disciples refused to serve the crowd, preferring to send them away to the neighboring towns to fend for themselves. At the climax of the narrative, the disciples become themselves the instruments of nourishment, setting the loaves and fish before the people. Within the loop of grace, they discovered their mission and were themselves enhanced, transfigured. The little detail at the end of the story—that the leftovers filled twelve wicker baskets—has an eschatological overtone.

This is just the kind of phony, self-destructive community that Jesus has come to interrupt. And so he responds to this criticism: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick… For I have come to call not the righteous but the sinners.” Here we find a theme that will be developed throughout the tradition—namely, the sacred meal as medicine for the sin-sick soul. In light of Jesus’ observation, we can see that the inclusion of sinners is the very heart and raison d’être of the meal that he hosts. The miracle of the feeding of the thousands with a few loaves and fish must have haunted the imaginations of the early Christian communities, for accounts of it can be found in all four Gospels.

He was destined to be, not only the host at the sacred banquet, but the meal itself. And to Christ’s manger came the shepherds (evocative of the poor and marginalized, the lost sheep of the house of Israel) and kings (evocative of the nations of the world), drawn there as though by a magnet. Thus commenced the realization of Isaiah’s vision. A story that can be found in all three of the synoptic Gospels is that the conversion of Levi (or Matthew) the tax collector. We hear that as Jesus was passing by, he spotted Matthew at his tax collector’s post.