Spirituality of the Readings

A Question

You say you are eating someone’s body and drinking their blood?

Here is an indelicate question: why?

You walk up the aisle and receive what appears to be bread and wine, but which is, according to your beliefs, Christ’s Body and Blood. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) therefore described Christians as cannibals. Many of Jesus’ followers simply went away when he said, “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” (Jn 6:56 ff) It is a hard saying.

An answer can be found in the word “sacrifice.” I do not mean the word in today’s signification, which today is, you give up something you like for Lent. Or, as parents might say: “I sacrificed my own interests in order to raise you kids.”

There is a longer history of the word sacrifice, and significantly, it involves body and blood.

Once upon a time, the tribes of the world tried to please whatever gods their tradition held, in order to get the heavenly avoidance of storms, or drought, or starvation, and so on. By giving up their best, they hoped to win over the gods.

And they often killed what was being offered! Why would they do this?

Because slaughtering the best lamb from the herd made it a best gift for the gods. The lamb or dove (or young girl!) represented the superlative things that belonged to earth, but which death freed from earth by sending the gift(s) to heaven. Think of it this way:

send the best of earth to heaven so that the best of heaven could come down to earth.

It was a uniting of heaven and earth. Often, the people ate the flesh and drank the blood of their offering in order to include themselves as an integral part of this “sacrifice.”

This desire to be at one with the gods, at one with their gifts and good things, is lodged deep in human culture and human nature. Therefore, in the fullness of time, the One God gave his people a connection with God’s own self—the real God, not the ones pagans had fancied. You guessed it, he did this through sacrifice. But he reversed the order of things by sending his own self to be sacrificed.

Notice the difference.

Instead of peoples sending the best of earth to heaven so that the best of heaven could come down to earth, Abba gave the reverse:

send the best of heaven to earth order that the best of earth can go up to heaven (Christ on the cross).

Christ came from the kingdom of heaven and yet was of the world. Therefore he achieved for us the perfect unity of heaven and earth. Animals could not choose to be sacrificed, but Christ did freely choose it, out of love, on our behalf.

So, on the night before he suffered Jesus gave his disciples sacramental signs of what would be fulfilled the next day: he handed them his body and blood under the appearance of bread and wine. He told them to consume it. Thus it became a re-presentation for all time of the bloody sacrifice of the cross, now in an unbloody form.

So the answer to the question with which we began, “why do you and I eat his body and drink his blood”? From the above we know that it is in order to take part in Christ’s sacrificial presentation of all humanity to the Father. It is a presentation of us, even our sinfulness, our errors, our forgetfulness, all of which he takes unto himself and pays the price of love and forgiveness.

John Foley, SJ


**From Saint Louis University

Kristin Clauson