Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue

In the so-called “synoptic” gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we find accounts of the Last Supper in which (with slight variations of detail) Jesus takes bread, and passes it to his disciples, and says that the bread is his body, given for them. Likewise he takes a cup and pronounces it the new covenant in his blood. Because of this which Jesus did on the night before he died, Christians have ever since—even to this hour here at Saint Thomas—celebrated the sacrament, in which we take bread and wine and believe it the body and blood of Christ.

John is unique among the gospels in that, in his account of the Last Supper, these famous actions and words are not there. John does not tell us that Jesus took bread and then wine and gave it to his disciples; John does not tell us that Jesus said, “This is my body . . . this is my blood.”

But John has something that the other gospels have not. John has Jesus’ explanation of what the Eucharist means. Thanks to a perhaps complicated textual history (I rely here on the magisterial commentary of the late Father Raymond Brown¹), the explanation of the actions of the Last Supper have been moved in John’s gospel to the story of the feeding of the 5000. We can see in these verses, read today, indications of the words Jesus used at the Last Supper itself, the explanation Jesus gave of this sacrament.

We turn to the text. The first thing to be said about these words is that it would have been flat impossible for anyone to have heard them in this scene upon the mountain in the middle of Jesus’ ministry—and understood them. Jesus declares the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood if one is to have life. His flesh, he underscores, is the life of the world, and it must be eaten. The religious authorities asked with reason, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

How indeed? These words in Jewish ears were violent and abhorrent. Hear the Old Testament reverberations. Psalm 27 [verse 2]: “When evildoers came upon me to eat up my flesh . . .” Zechariah 11 [verse 9]: “Let those that are left devour the flesh of one another.” But God commanded his people otherwise. Genesis 9 [verse 4]: “You shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” And Leviticus 3 [verse 17] and Deuteronomy 12 [verse 23], to the same effect. Perhaps most haunting in this context is Ezekiel’s vision of the end times in which vulturous bird and beast come to eat flesh and drink blood; this is carnage, this is not communion; hear Ezekiel 39 [verse 17]:

Speak to the birds of every sort and to all beasts of the field, “Assemble and come, gather from all sides to the sacrificial feast which I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast upon the mountains of Israel, and you shall eat flesh and drink blood.”

So Jesus, summoning people to eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have life, speaks words without meaning, unless they point to the Eucharist. If you take what Jesus says on the mountainside and hear it in the context of the community of the church in which Holy Communion is experienced reality—then his words become lucid and clear. So this is what the Eucharist is about. Jesus is telling us about the great sacrificial feast which is not the gathering of vultures to devour the remains of humanity, but the gathering of humankind given life in Jesus Christ.

There is no denying the realism of the Eucharist. It is Jesus’ teaching: we eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood; not only the realism that Jesus himself was true flesh and blood, a real man and not apparition or phantom nor hybrid half-human, half-god. Not only that, but that in Eucharist we experience the life of God by being intimately held by Jesus.

The realism of the Eucharist yields us true experience of the life of God. So he says, verse 51: if you eat this bread, you will live for ever. Verse 53: you only have life in you if you eat the flesh of the Son of man. Verse 54: if you so eat you have eternal life. Verse 57: Jesus was sent by the living Father, and Jesus lives because of the Father, so if you eat Jesus you will live because of Jesus. We cannot escape the tight association here of any sort of life whatsoever with eternal life: the only real life is that which Jesus gives, and it is eternal life, and Jesus has it only because the living Father sent him and has given it to him. The life of the world which Jesus gives himself for the sake of, is simply and without dissembling the life of God, the life of the Father and the Son (which is given, we know from Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, by the Spirit).

There is no life which in the end is not Trinitarian life. And how can you and I experience the life of God? By being intimately held by Jesus. This is the second part of his teaching about the Eucharist. Verse 56: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. The geometry of these words is unimaginable. How can Figure A abide inside Figure B while at the same time B is inside A? Yet it is the truth of all being, the way God has made us. We human beings are not atoms of reality, containers with a surface that separates us from the rest of the world. It is not true about me that I only exist inside my skin, and that none of you, nor anything else in the universe, nor God himself, exists inside my skin, but only me. The truth is that we only live when we have mutual indwelling; for we are not boxes or containers separated from each other; we are alive and we live only when Jesus is in our stomachs.

The teaching of Jesus is miles away from any doctrine that would deny the importance of the body, miles from that sort of New Age spirituality which thinks of the body as a tool to be transcended. On the contrary. The body is where I meet you and where I meet God. But what we must understand is that our skin does not delimit the difference between us and the rest of the world. I exist, I live, only insofar as inside my skin, namely in my mouth and throat and stomach and then throughout my body, Jesus has come in. And this is a sacrament of the truth: that, on the one hand, every living thing exists only by mutual indwelling with other living beings; and that, at the same time, true life is found by dwelling in Jesus and having Jesus dwell in you.

Because: Jesus dwells in the Father and the Father dwells in Jesus. And to make it fully Trinitarian: Jesus dwells in the Father and the Father dwells in Jesus because the Holy Spirit makes it possible for them to do so. God has an eternal life, and we can enter into it, into God’s life, when we dwell in Jesus and Jesus dwells in us. This is what Jesus teaches us that the Eucharist means.

Last week some tapes of phone conversations from 9/11 were released. One of them was a conversation had by a woman on the 83rd floor with an unidentified emergency operator. The emergency operator exemplified the best of New Yorkers, said the editorialist, for she offered reassurance, encouragement, hope, and practical advice, while at the same time dealing professionally with the rescue data that was continually changing. She said things like stay close to the floor, stay calm, say your prayers, we’re going to get you out. She offered hope. I’m going to die, aren’t I? said the woman in the tower. No no no no no, she answered.

It wasn’t a lie. You will not die. The realism of the Eucharist means that you will not die. You may suffer fire, or bomb, or nails, or spitting, but you will not die. That’s the realism. And the location of undying life in the Spirit-enabled life of the Son and the Father means that you will never be alone. The image of two women, voices in each other’s ear, separated by 80 horrible storeys and yet united in painful hope, is I think an unexpected sign of the Eucharist. Or perhaps the other way round. We are so mysteriously bound up one with another.

“Real Life”