Atonement Notes: 1

Mark 14:22 / “This Is My Body”

I.

A friend of mine occasionally sends me a newsletter me from a group of scholars concerned with semantics and semiotics. One of their agendas is to advocate the use of a way of communicating called “E-Prime.” E-Prime means speaking or writing in English without using any form of the verb of being, such as: is, am, was, were, be, are, been, and so forth. They suggest this on the basis of a philosophical conviction that the verb of being has basically no real meaning. It doesn’t add any value to a sentence. Indeed, it clouds the meaning of a sentence and people use it to say something when they don’t really know what they mean to say.

It is — or I should say, I find this discipline very useful in that it demands that I use more descriptive and immediate language. Without getting excessively dogmatic about it, the use of E-prime will spice up your language.

However, how would we translate Jesus’ words of institution without using a verb of being? Indeed, especially in the Fourth Gospel, a lot of what Jesus says about himself would become unintelligible. He is always saying “ego eimi,” which is Greek for “I Am,” in a deliberate echo of that other famous I Am passage, in which God reveals God’s name as “I Am,” when God appears to Moses in Exodus.

Certainly, former President Clinton’s famous problem with the verb of being, when he answered under oath a direct question and said, “It depends on what ‘is’ means,” does not make him unique. The Church has wondered, and argued about, what “is” means from its earliest days, especially in relation to this passage. “During the supper he took bread, and having said the blessing he broke it and gave it to them with the words: ‘Take this. This is my body.’”

When we try and translate this into E-prime English we have to find a more specific verb to replace the “is.” Indeed, theologians make whole careers out of this sort of thing. “Is” has so little meaning that we have to figure out what Jesus really means. I mean, he can’t mean that the bread literally “is” his physical body in any direct way. In John 6 some people asked the question, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” indicating that they just don’t get it, like Nicodemus asking whether to be “born again” means literally going back into his mother’s womb. So, since the sense of physical identification doesn’t work, we have to start speculating about what the “is” could really mean. Here are some ideas:

This bread represents my body.

This bread resembles my body.

This bread stands for my body.

This bread functions as my body.

This bread symbolizes my body.

This bread signifies my body.

This bread approximates my body.

This bread refers to my body.

This bread reminds you of my body.

This bread substitutes for my body.

This bread makes real my body.

This bread connects you to my body.

This bread feeds your spirit as would my body....

II.

The Church has always maintained the strongest view of that “is” as possible. The Church maintains that we find Christ really and actually present in this Sacrament, that means in this bread, in this cup, and in us. In finding Christ we find God. In finding God we find the great I Am, the One-Who-Is, the Source, Ground, and Goal of all that exists. In him, and in this Sacrament, we find the very is-ness of everything. “He was with God at the beginning and through him all things came to be; without him no created thing came into being,” as it says in the Gospel of John.

Many of you have read to a child the story of The Velveteen Rabbit, which is about a stuffed, toy rabbit who wished to “be real.” This story works as a parable about our own life. For as the stuffed toy rabbit yearned to “be real,” and achieved this reality through love and sacrifice, so do we. If the rabbit attained the reality of living, jumping, breeding physical, mortal rabbits through the magic of the nursery, we attain to the reality of eternal life through the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Only our own love and sacrifice do not make us real. By themselves our love and sacrifice lead only to the fire, which the rabbit faced on his last night as a toy, as he lay sleepless in the trashpile. Our reality depends not on us but on the love and sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us.

He serves as the model and pattern for our journey to reality. “Through him all things came to be.” Through him, and only through him, we too come to be. He shows us what it means, what it costs, what it involves, what it gives us, to be real. To exist.

He works as the touchstone of reality. You touch him and you catch some of his reality. You taste him and you receive some of his being. You chew him and swallow him and digest him and his being becomes part of your being even as the nutrients in this bread become literally part of every cell in your body. “In very truth I tell you,” says Jesus, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you can have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise them up on the last day.”

For in the end we have to ask not the question of what this bread is, but of who we are. Indeed, we have to ask the even more stressful question of whether we are. Most of us are not even conscious enough to ask the questions that the Velveteen Rabbit asks so persistently: Am I real?

We tend to take our own existence for granted. We think, we feel, we act, we love... we must therefore be. Right? After all, if anyone exists, I do. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I certainly exist, right? But what if we couldn’t do any of those things? What if we couldn’t feel, act, think, or love? Would we still be?

III.

Beyond E-prime, there remains one thing to which the verb of being does refer and that is... being. It refers to the fact of existence itself. What does it mean to exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? At the bottom of everything, what really is?

In the Eastern philosophy of Zen the practitioner tries consciously to get down to this fundamental level as well. The Zen student sits, breathes, and asks, Who sits? Who breathes? Who thinks? Who feels? Who is this “I?” “What was your original face before you were born?” Who are you, once you have stripped away all the attributes and predicates and characteristics and accidents?

You follow this reasoning all the way down until you realize in a sense that “you” are nothing. By yourself you just aren’t. Nobody’s home. We could hear that as bad news.

The good news is that you do not exist by yourself. You don’t have to hold yourself in existence by your own willpower or your own accomplishments or your own work. You are not by yourself; Someone Else is for you. God exists for you.

We find this in God’s first self-revelation to Moses. “Tell them, I Am sent you,” God says. The One “who is, who was, and who is to come,” the Alpha and the Omega, the Living One. That which exists only exists to the extent that it exists in God. You exist only to the extent that you exist in God.

So, when Jesus lifts the bread and says, “This is my body,” “I Am the bread of life,” he means, “Get real! I Am lives in this bread, just as I Am lives in everything.

When we consecrate the elements for Holy Communion, we ask God to: “Send your Spirit upon us, and upon this bread and this cup, that this bread may become the Body of Christ, and this cup may become the Blood of Christ, changing us by your Spirit.”

What gets changed in this Sacrament? What “this” does Jesus mean when he says, “This is my body”? Does he mean just this particular piece of bread?

I think he means more than this. Maybe he means this, in the sense of all this; all this gathering of believers. All you see. All this good creation. All that exists, all that God spoke into being at the beginning and holds in being every second. This is. And whatever is, in some sense is his Body. And whatever is not his Body, doesn’t fully exist.

This bread, this wine... they represent the whole creation. They represent our God-given human creativity and ingenuity. It is this creation that God embodies in Christ. The immaterial becomes material, the eternal becomes temporal, the deathless becomes mortal, the Word becomes flesh. This happens to show us the true nature of existence.

It has been said that the early Church started to decline spiritually when they went from being Christ’s Body, to merely receiving it from a priest. What is the point of the Lord’s Supper? What is the point of Christian faith? The point is to “get real.” The point is that the reality of God become our reality as well. The point is that we catch some of God’s realness and have it spread through every part of us.

Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” “In very truth I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you can have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day.” To get real is to participate in God’s reality. To get real is to live forever.

+++++++

Verb Endings.

“The point of church isn’t to get people to come to church….

[It is] to feed them,

so they can go out and, you know, be Jesus.”

Sara Miles

The classic statement of the “Great Ends of the Church” in the Presbyterian Book of Order needs new verbs. The current wording expresses a static, even inertial, inward gazing, complacent, protective institution. It is incompatible with a missional understanding of the church as sent out into the world to do something. The current language reflects a bias against change and an assumption that what we now have is perfect and will last forever if only we don’t mess with it. People only need to hear what we say and watch what we do in order to be saved.

Here they are:

“The proclamation of the gospel for the salvation of humankind.”

Is the gospel a purely verbal phenomenon? Is it only proclaimed and announced, or is it also enacted, embodied, and accomplished? Does talking to people save them? Did Jesus merely talk, or did he also heal, exorcize, fast, pray, suffer, die, and rise from the dead? Is the church’s responsibility done when it has delivered verbal statements and pronouncements?

“The shelter, nurture, and spiritual fellowship of the children of God.”

Is the purpose of the church limited to gathering, feeding, and protecting believers? Is it just a safe harbor in a nasty world, or is it also a launching pad for mission? The church is certainly a gathering, but it is a gathering with the purpose of being sent out.

“The maintenance of divine worship.”

We maintain our houses by plugging the roof and cleaning the furnace. We maintain our cars by keeping them in good repair. This wording gives the impression that worship is a static and unchanging set of rubrics and ceremonial actions that we “maintain.” That is, we keep doing the same things, and make sure the same things keep happening. This statement might be used to justify maintaining worship language and forms of previous generations as if they were the measure of faithfulness. There is no sense of adaptation, cooperation, or continual dialogue with either the world or the demands of the gospel. Worship is not maintained like an old clock; it is celebrated, danced, and explored in wonder.

“The preservation of the truth.”

Again, is the truth of the gospel something that is a static deposit that we own and that needs our protection so it doesn’t ever change? Do we possess the truth so profoundly that we can preserve it? Is the truth written in stone or captured forever in amber? Does not this statement reflect the arrogance of Uzzah, who thought to preserve and stabilize the Ark of the Covenant (1 Chronicles 13:9-10)? Is it not more accurate to say that the truth of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ possesses us, and that it preserves us for service? Is not the truth a mystery far larger than the church and beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp?

“The promotion of social righteousness.”

Is it the church’s calling to promote righteousness, or to actually be righteous? Is it to advocate goodness, as if that is our recommendation for someone else, or is it to do good actions? Too much of this smacks of the pompous pronunciamentos the church has been in the habit of generating, telling other people (usually the government) how to be righteous. These might have mattered a little in the days when the church had some social clout. But now they are ridiculous. And since the church itself does not often live up to its own vision of social righteousness, they are hypocritical.

“The exhibition of the Kingdom of Heaven to the world.”

At least this one has an “ex-” word, indicating some kind of outward focus. But even here, an exhibit is still a fairly controlled and artificial presentation, like a diorama a child might make in 7^th grade history. The assumption is that we have something that others need to passively observe and perhaps buy. Do we call on the world to watch us as spectators? We invite people to watch us as if we were an ant farm… do we really want people watching us that closely anyway?

I am sorry to say it but these “great ends” are just that: the end, as in termination and extinction, of the church. They depict a church that is in the process of imploding within its hermetically sealed protective container. Nothing escapes but a few words, words that are increasingly unintelligible to the rest of the world.

How about:

o The active living of the gospel for the liberation of humankind.

o The healing, empowering, and spiritual formation of the children of God.

o The exploration and celebration of God in worship.

o Standing in humility and awe before the great mystery of the truth of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ.

o Seeking to follow Jesus Christ in our life together.

o Reflecting, expressing, embodying, anticipating, and activating the commonwealth of God in the world.

Nazis.

The philosopher, Ken Wilber, suggests that something like 70% of the people on the planet are “Nazis.” By that I think he means that a large majority of us are liable, under stress, to fall into the kind of ignorance, paranoia, hysteria, bigotry, rage, and violence that took over Germany in the 1930’s and threw the world into a ghastly orgy of mass murder. Hitler and other demagogues cultivate, exploit, exacerbate, and otherwise fan sparks of fear, rage, and hatred that just seem to be always at least dormant in the human heart. A Rwanda, Cambodia, or Yugoslavia, that is, a time of mindless and uncontrolled violence between different human groups is something that can readily happen. If we are not very careful, vigilant, restrained, and diligent, we become a lynch-mob. It doesn’t take much.

It is these the way someone aggravates and exploits these negative, fearful, and violent qualities, not superficial things like giving stirring speeches or favoring national health care, that make a leader comparable to Hitler. Different people may have different views about, say, the role of government. But ignorance, paranoia, bigotry, hysteria, rage, and violence, are what make us similar to the Nazis. If we wish to identify the most dangerous people and movements today, look for these characteristics. Look for conspiracy theories and scapegoating. Look for bands of armed, angry, and wildly misinformed young men. Look for fearful people mad about losing their privileged status in the world, people who will think, say, and do anything, no matter how violent, to reverse this trend.

Ignorance means a blatant disregard for verifiable facts, like when we invent or wildly misinterpret history. Paranoia has to do with imagining threats and playing on fears. It is connected to bigotry because we are told to be afraid of other people, people not like us. For Hitler, of course, it was Jews, Communists, socialists, liberals, gays, Slavic and Roma peoples, the disabled, and some Christians. Fears stoked with misinformation can easily be fanned into hysteria, an irrational and hyper-emotional attitude which cannot even hear contrary views or data. The more people are force-fed misinformation about their own supposed victimization and injustices they have had to endure, the angrier they get, and the more likely they are to turn to violence.

The Nazis began begin as hysterical, paranoid, bigoted, ignorant, and violent grass-roots organizations. Nationalism, racism, militarism, and the idolatry of economic growth where their main ideologies. Like all totalitarianisms, they were regurgitated up from the dark regions of the soul of the people. They imagined themselves to be idealistic. They thought they were defending and restoring a glorious past. Other totalitarianisms think they are the vanguard of a glorious future, like Communism. But they are revealed by their hatred and willingness to place blame on others and to kill them in what they think is righteousness.

This is nothing to mess with. This is not a matter of entertainment or being ever more outrageous in order to gain market-share. Too many people have suffered and died because of this way of thinking. We need to find a way to shun it and expose it for what it is: a system of lies which pokes at the worst in us, and leads inexorably to mass-murder.