Today’s readings: Deuteronomy 8, 2-3.14-16; 1 Corinthians 10, 16-17; John 6, 51-58.
The assertions of Jesus that he is the bread of heaven and the life-giving bread are basic to the understanding of Christian living and yet they can so easily reduce themselves to mere clichés at a time when millions still die of hunger and many more are undernourished. We need from time to time to revisit with honesty the meaning of this sacramental presence of the risen Lord in the world. Otherwise we risk living two parallel realities which in itself weakens the credibility of our faith.
The Eucharist is the centre and the source of Christian living because it is the real power of resurrection or, as St Ignatius of Antioch says, the “leaven of immortality”. Christian living is about experiencing personally but also collectively the power that comes from above and that serves as antidote to all that can corrupt and weaken our will to believe and our possibilities to see change in the way things are.
Walter Brueggemann, in his book Theology of the Old Testament, writes about two traditions that exist alongside each other within the Old Testament. These are what he calls the justice tradition and the holiness tradition. The first is marked by caring for one’s neighbour, the second by ritual purity.
Throughout the Old Testament the prophets are consistent and adamant on the priority of the justice tradition and condemn as abusive and alienating any ritualism as an end in itself and which separates senselessly the temple from everyday living. Even in Jesus’s time this irresolvable tension between these two traditions is still on the surface and Jesus situates himself squarely within the prophetic tradition. He champions the justice tradition while his opponents are advocates of the holiness tradition. He seriously questions all ritualism that perpetuates rites of exclusion.
The Church cannot exist in function of a holiness tradition while closing its eyes on those marginalised, persecuted, and cut off from any fellowship whatsoever both in society and in the Church itself. When the Church acts in this manner, it is completely contradicting its vocation, which in the first place is to bring freedom to captives, to heal class divisions, and to foster the dignity of all, particularly of those at the lower levels of society.
Jesus’s lifestyle was prophetic because it contrasted with the mainstream temple life of the ruling classes who gave priority to order in the temple and ignored the voiced urgings of justice outside. The notion of justice triumphing over holiness in no way contradicts God’s ways as depicted in the Scriptures.
Deuteronomy today narrates Moses reminding the people how God was for them first and foremost a saviour who brought them out of the house of slavery. It is difficult to believe in God without having experienced Him as saviour in some way or other. It is this memory of having been captives and saved that keeps us from sliding back in our Christian living to the purity codes which we find, for example, in Leviticus. Unfortunately, we still encounter obstinacies in this sense in our churches and in the way we conceive and celebrate our liturgies.
As much as the Church embodies the power of transformation in reliving the sacramental presence of the risen Lord every time it celebrates the Eucharist, it also exists as a community of sinners. This puts us all in need of intimacy on a spiritual level as well as on a purely human level. Within our communities we cannot afford to have some who define themselves by their holiness while judging others by their fallenness.
Gregory of Nyssa, summarising his teaching on this, speaks of the Eucharist as a remedy. He writes: “In the economy of grace, he (the Lord) gives Himself as seed to all the faithful. His flesh, composed of bread and wine, is blended with their bodies to enable human beings, thanks to their union with His immortal body, to share in the condition of incorruptibility.”