The Sacred Meal in the Life & Ministry of Jesus, pt. 6

09-29-2024Weekly ReflectionReflection from mycatholic.life

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)."

The order of love that obtains within God became flesh in Jesus and, through Jesus, was given to the community that he founded. That community in turn, the new Israel, would be, in accord with Isaiah’s prediction, the means by which the whole world would be gathered to God. Here, the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fish comes to mind. Initially, as we saw, the disciples refused their mission to be the new Israel and feed the crowd, but then, in light of the miracle of grace, they became the distributors of grace. A very similar dynamic is on display in the account of the Last Supper. It is never enough simply to eat and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus; one must become a bearer of the power that one has received. The meal always conduces to the mission. The Last Supper preceded and symbolically anticipated the terrible events of the following day, when Jesus’ body would indeed be given away and his blood poured out. In the next section of the book, I will speak much more of this sacrificial dimension of the supper, but for now I would like to focus on what followed the dying of Jesus. If Jesus had died and simply remained in his grave, he would be remembered (if he was remembered at all) as a noble idealist, tragically crushed by the forces of history. Perhaps a few of his disciples would have carried on his program for a time, but eventually the Jesus movement, like so many others like it, would have run out of steam. N.T. Wright, echoing the opinion of the Church Fathers, argued that the single most extraordinary fact of early Christianity is the perdurance of the Christian Church as a messianic movement. There could have been, in the first century, no surer sign that someone was not the Messiah than his death at the hands of the enemies of Israel, for one of the central marks of messiahship was precisely victory over those enemies. That Peter, James, John, Paul, Thomas, and the rest could announce throughout the Mediterranean world that Jesus was in fact that long-awaited Israelite Messiah and that they could go to their deaths defending this claim are the surest indications that something monumentally significant happened to Jesus after his death. That something was the Resurrection. Though too many modern theologians have tried to explain the Resurrection away as a wish-fulfilling fantasy, a vague symbol, or a literary invention, the New Testament writers could not have been clearer: the crucified Jesus, who had died and been buried, appeared alive again to his disciples. The risen Christ was—as all of the accounts attest—strange. On the one hand, he was the same Jesus with whom they had eaten and drunk and to whom they had listened, but on the other hand, he was different, in fact so changed that frequently they didn’t immediately recognize him or acknowledge him. It was as though he stood on the borderline between two worlds, still existing in this dimension of space and time, but also transcending it, participating in a higher, better world.