Recently, Candyce Leonard brought to my attention a passage from John Cheever’s novel, Falconer, in which the narrator says of Farragut, the main character:
“Food was a recently revealed truth in his life. He had reasoned that the Holy Eucharist was nutritious if you got enough of it. In some churches, at some times, they had baked the bread — hot, fragrant and crusty — in the chancel. Eat this in memory of me. Food had something to do with his beginnings as a Christian and a man. To cut short a breast-feeding, he had read somewhere, was traumatic and from what he remembered of his mother she might have yanked her breast out of his mouth in order not to be late for her bridge game; but this was coming close to self-pity and he had tried to leach self-pity out of his emotional spectrum.”
From the Delivery Room to the Upper Room, a remembrance of food and faith, life and death, guilt and redemption, can haunt us, passed on in mother’s milk or the body of Christ, an unending quest that transports tangible grace beyond mere sustenance. For if baptism marks our Christian beginnings, Holy Communion-Eucharist-Lord’s Supper marks our journey. Ideally, baptism is a once-and-for-all life event. Communion, however, is a repeatable moment, a tradition “handed on.” St. Paul says, “from the Lord himself” who “on the night of his arrest, took bread and, after giving thanks to God, broke it and said: ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this as a memorial of me …’” (I Cor. 11:23-25NEB). Simple words; complex interpretations. Lent offers an occasion for re-examining our Eucharistic options.
In Catholic theology, the faithful consume the very body and blood of Jesus Christ, a dogma articulated by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica: “And this is done in this sacrament by the power of God, for the whole substance of bread is converted into the whole substance of Christ’s body. … Hence this conversion is properly called transubstantiation.” When properly consecrated, the “accidents” — bread and wine — remain the same, while the “substance” — what it really is — becomes Christ’s body and blood.
Martin Luther rejected transubstantiation while affirming the Real Presence of Christ — flesh and Spirit. In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he wrote: “I had been hesitating between the devil and the deep sea, but now at last I brought my conscience to rest in my former opinion; which was, that the bread and wine are really bread and wine and the true flesh and blood of Christ is in them in the same fashion and the same degree as they hold them to be beneath their accidents. … What prevents the glorious body of Christ from being in every part of the substance of the bread?” Faith alone makes possible this encounter with Christ’s physical and spiritual presence.
Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli viewed the Supper is a simple memorial to Christ’s death. Bread and wine are outward “signs” reminding us of Christ’s sacrifice. His presence is known in the hearts of believers who gather in his name. Christ promised to be wherever “two or three are gathered” by faith, Zwingli said, noting, “How much more is he present where the whole congregation is assembled to his honor! But that his body is literally eaten is far from the truth and the nature of faith.”
John Calvin also denied Real Presence, calling the Supper “a testimony of God’s grace to us confirmed by an external sign [bread and wine] … and that God does not by putting before us a vain or empty sign, but offering there the efficacy of his spirit, by which he fulfils his promise.” For Calvin, the Supper is “a spiritual feast, at which Christ testifies that he himself is living bread, on which our souls feed, for a true and blessed immortality.” Christ is spiritually present with the bread and cup because he promised to be.
In Holy the Firm, writer Annie Dillard links spiritual earthiness with Eucharistic logistics, asking: “How can I buy communion wine? Who am I to buy communion wine?” Answering: “Here is a bottle of wine with a label, Christ with a cork. I bear holiness splintered into a vessel, very God of very God, the sempiternal silence personal and brooding, bright on the back of my ribs. … Walking faster and faster, weightless, I feel the wine. It sheds light in slats through my rib cage, and fills the buttressed vaults of my ribs and light pooled and buoyant. I am moth; I am light. I am prayer and I can hardly see.”
Perhaps novelists like Cheever and Dillard help us move beyond Eucharistic theories to aesthetic audacity. Should Jesus return to our Winston-Salem congregation some first Sunday when we take Communion would he recognize himself in the tasteless bits of unleavened bread and plastic shot glasses of temperance grape juice by which we claim his resurrected presence? By God, he’d better.