Jesus is Bread

I Corinthians 11:17-34, Matthew 14:13-21

August 3, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

“For all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment unto themselves.”

(I Corinthians 11:29)

Have you ever tried explaining what we do here to a small child or to a new Christian, someone totally unfamiliar with the Lord’s Supper? “Take and eat,” we invite, “this is the body of Christ, broken for you.” If you think about it, your response might be “Eww, gross!” Indeed the early Christians were often accused of cannibalism, of breaking most societies’ basic moral code against eating other people. There are Christian traditions which proclaim that in Holy Communion, this bread does actually, mysteriously, become the literal flesh of Jesus. We do not understand it that way in our tradition, but sometimes people misinterpret Protestant beliefs about the meal and say we are just eating a remembrance, sort of like a family reunion where we eat the potato salad from dear departed Aunt Loretta’s old recipe and remember her fondly.

No, what we believe happens here is much more than fondly remembering our beloved teacher, Jesus. That would, indeed, be eating “without discerning the body” as Paul says. The word most Reformed Protestant theologians use is the word “real.” We say that Jesus is “really” present in this meal. We don’t know how; it’s a mystery, but we believe that in some way Jesus intended us to understand that each time we do this most basic of things, eating bread and drinking wine or juice, we become connected to him all over again. Jesus doesn’t just give us bread, as he did on the hillside in the story we heard today, Jesus is the bread we eat. In John’s gospel, we hear Jesus himself say, “I am the bread of life.”

So if this is not cannibalism, what did Jesus intend by identifying himself more than once with broken bread and urging his disciples, and then us all, to eat of the bread that is Jesus? If you read all of the passages of the gospels and this one tantalizing glimpse Paul gives us into the Communion practices of one early church, and if you look at the word we use to describe this meal, “Communion,” one answer becomes very clear. We eat this bread to become one with Jesus and with all who eat and drink in his name. We eat this bread to create community with God and with each other. To eat and drink and “discern” the body of Christ means to understand that in the meal a connection is created and renewed between the body of Jesus and our bodies, and between us and the bodies around us. It’s not just an intellectual or emotional thing, but something that involves our physical beings.

One of the earliest written services of Holy Communion we have, from the 2^nd century after Christ, includes these words in the prayer, “As this bread was scattered over the hills as wheat and then was brought together and made one, so let your Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into your Kingdom.” (Didache) From the very beginning, from miraculous meals in the gospels, from the Last Supper, from the early churches love feasts, to today, eating together and discerning Jesus present in the food we eat brings us physically closer to Jesus and to each other, and to those far from this room who also eat and drink in Jesus’ name.

But, some of you may say to me, nothing happens to me when I eat this little piece of bread and drink the little cup or taste the juice on the bread I have dipped in the cup. Am I doing something wrong? What am I supposed to feel? Is something supposed to change?

Well, yes to the last question, but it may not be anything you feel, in either a physical or spiritual sense. It’s more about a reality that one recognizes and lives into understanding. This is not fast food, something that quickly meets hunger, but with little lasting value to the body or the spirit. This is food that it takes time for our hearts to digest, sometimes a lifetime.

Do you remember the story of Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan? If you’ve seen the film The Miracle Worker or read her biography, you’ll remember that Helen became blind and deaf following an illness in infancy. Annie Sullivan set out to try to teach Helen language, an understanding that the signs she made with her hands connected to something in the physical and emotional world. The signs for “water” or “bread” had a meaning, a reality connected to something in the physical world. We forget how we all learned that connection in language development, but it is a profound moment of understanding that the symbol for something and the thing itself are tightly tied together. Once Helen’s mind clicked that the hand symbols for water meant the physical thing, water, her whole world opened up and she was able to communicate and function in the world in a new way. She was able to “see” things of which she had only been dimly aware. Annie Sullivan helped connect Helen to a new vision of the world in which she lived.

Eating the bread Jesus proclaimed to be his body brings us a new vision of the world as well, a new understanding of ourselves and all creation, Jesus’ understanding. Knowing that Jesus is a very part of our bodies can give us strength in our journeys, the certainty we do not travel alone through life. And when we see the world as God sees it, we discover a new obligation as well. We are to be as Jesus for the world, in the ways he was. To allow ourselves to break open to risk loving and caring for a world which may not return the favor, even as happened to Jesus, to allow ourselves to be bread to those who hunger and thirst for food, for justice, for hope, for healing, on the streets of New Haven or in our homes or schools or workplaces or wherever we are. To be Annie Sullivan, who herself was sight impaired yet taught others to see worlds through her hands and words. To use the words of Augustine which I often quote in the Communion liturgy, “to be what we eat.”

The other part of the equation, the reason that we believe that, whenever possible, this meal should be eaten with other people and never celebrated alone, is that we eat discerning Jesus’ body in the bodies of others around us. We create community with all those who eat and drink and become bread themselves. What a gift this is! Jesus does not simply take one of us and say, “You eat and go out and be bread for the world,” but rather a collective “eat this all of you.” One of my favorite Communion hymns, by Brian Wren, sings this truth using these words. “As Christ breaks bread and bids us share, each proud division ends. The love that made us makes us one, and strangers now are friends. Together met, together bound, in friendship we will stay, and go with joy to love the world and live the way we pray.”

I have eaten the bread and drunk from the cup in many different places in this country and around the world, with people I know well and with people who not only were strangers, but whose language I did not speak and whom I would probably never meet again on this earth. We may not have known each other, but we knew Jesus, and in eating the bread of Jesus’ body, we overcame what divided us and found a moment of oneness, just as we do here today. The deep hope is that this moment of oneness may stretch and grow, the way yeast grows and raises a small amount of dough into a loaf large enough to feed the whole room. The more we eat and drink together and with others who seek Jesus in their lives, the more there is a chance that we and Jesus together can feed the deepest hungers of the world. The more we break ourselves open to becoming one with each other, the more we are empowered and given courage to break ourselves open to become one with those who do not share this meal with us, the more of Jesus we see and hear in the world around us.

At my most hopeful moments, I believe that eating this little bread and tasting this fruit of the vine changes a great many things, in me, in you, in the world. I confess that I do not always live as the bread of life to the world, I fail at this task Jesus has given each of us on a daily basis. That’s why I keep coming back to eat and drink, to renew my vision and find nourishment, and to find help in each of you who eat and drink. Come to this table, then, and keep coming back, until that great day when symbol and reality become truly one and we eat at the great banquet table of a new heaven and earth. Amen.