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Christians have long focused upon the blood of Christ. Some of us may remember singing the 1771 gospel hymn by William Cowper, “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins and sinners plunge beneath that flood, lose all their guilty stains.” For sermon illustration purposes I maintain a rather large file of news articles. Among one of the more unusual in my collection is a National Geographic article done after the 1980 Iran/Iraq War. In the town of Mashhad, Iran, a high proportion of the town's young men had died in the Iran-Iraq war. The people missed the presence of their youth and wanted to honor the dead in some way. So the town’s Shiite Muslim leaders put red dye in the town's central fountain to depict the sacrifices of the town's young men in the war, thus creating a fountain filled with blood.
There is a strange parallelism between the old Christian hymn and the Shiite fountain in Mashhad. Both versions of faith are stuck in the 18th century; both are a wooden, literalistic interpretations of each’s respected holy book, the Bible and the Qu’ran. It is important to note that many Moslems were as repulsed by the fake blood-filled fountain as we are. As troublesome as it sounds, Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.” So what are we supposed to do with this disturbing saying? When I was a pastor in Minneapolis I inherited the pulpit from a distinguished gentleman, Morris G. Robinson. Robi, as he was called, forbade any use of hymns or anthems that mentioned blood. He gave specific orders to the choir director to that effect. So if we are offended by this bloody Christian language, we are not the first ones. There have always been Christians who have wanted no blood in their religion. Among the more famous in the past was a fellow named Marcion, a church leader in Rome about 135 AD. Marcion blamed the Jews for the blood themes in Christianity saying they were a hold over from the sacrificial system of the Old Testament in which animals were sacrificed so that their blood might appease an angry deity. So Marcion decided to purge Christianity of everything Jewish including all of the Old Testament and most of the four gospels. Interestingly enough, he was the first to propose which books should be declared in or out of the emerging New Testament. He limited his list mainly to the writings of St. Paul. The Bible, of course, is a Semitic book. Its cradle is the Middle East. It is a strange book in this sense because it is culturally very distinct from the culture of the USA. Our society is Greco-Roman and English in its dominant forms and so we tend to be repulsed by things like fountains filled with blood and perhaps even the crucifixion of Christ. Baffled, repulsed or not, the center of our faith is a bloody execution. Should we ignore it and move on to more pleasant things like the teachings and deeds of Jesus? Since the Lord’s Supper is a form of remembering the shed blood and broken body of Jesus, perhaps we should eliminate that sacrament and just keep the pleasant one, baptism. Why use these strange words, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them”? These words from the Gospel of John are dramatically different from the other gospel writers. Indeed we find them only in John’s gospel. They are different because the audience (or we could say the “congregation” to which John’s gospel is addressed) is different. John was originally writing to people who had no problem with Jesus’ divinity, they had a problem with his humanity. This is exactly the opposite of our problem. Modern people tend to doubt Jesus’ divinity and affirm his humanity. The gospel of John was written to people who affirmed that Jesus only “seemed” to be human. Many thought that he didn't cry, or eat or get angry. Since Jesus only seemed to be human, his body wasn’t all that important. To John’s “congregation” the practice of Christianity meant living above the prison of the body and the bad world through superior knowledge, because ultimately at death, the soul would be freed from the bad body and return home. Helmut Koester, Professor of New Testament Studies at Harvard University, is quite clear when he says; in the “whole” Gospel of John the gospel writer is trying to counteract these tendencies. Therefore, John’s metaphors of Jesus are earthly, specific, and concrete. Jesus is the door, the bread, the life, the light, the good shepherd. (See footnote #1) But John also is dealing with another problem in his “congregation”: amnesia. His audience had begun to forget Jesus. The people in his congregation were the grandchildren, even the great grand children of the people who actually walked and talked with Jesus. They, like the gospel writer himself, had never met Jesus and the traditions passed down to them sounded a bit unreal, distant. They lacked the real physical presence of Jesus. So through his presentation of the visceral, real-world Jesus stories, John was teaching his congregation that they would experience the real presence of Christ. It is important to say that neither Jesus, nor the gospel writer John, ever intended for anyone to take this saying literally any more than one would take Jesus literally when he said, “If your right eye offends you, cut it out.” (Mark 9:47) It is a metaphor from origin to application. John uses this Jesus saying to remind his congregation about the importance of participating in the Lord’s Supper so as to not forget the real presence of the Spirit of Jesus among them. There is nothing older in Christendom. Before any kind of church government was devised, before any creeds or theological statements were formalized, even before the first words of the New Testament were written, the Lord’s Supper was firmly fixed in practice. The ritual of the Lord’s Supper was observed every Sunday by the first Christians. Nothing is older than the Lord’s Supper and nothing has torn the church apart more. I am glad to report that in 1997 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, The Reformed Church of America, the United Church of Christ and we Presbyterians created a “formula of agreement” whereby ministers in one denomination may be a minister in full standing, including the ability to administer the Lord’s Supper, in each other’s denomination. This July the Episcopalians agreed to include the same denominational clergy as equals at the Lord’s Table. This is good news, but it is fascinating that it has taken 500 years of Protestantism to come to such a formula of agreement, to say nothing of the lack of agreement about the Lord’s Supper between Protestants and Catholics. Historically there have been major Protestant-Catholic differences about the Lord’s Supper. For example, during the Middle Ages, priests taught that if the bread or wafer, called “the host”, were scratched, it would bleed. Presbyterian and other Protestant reformers reacted to such magical opinions by restricting the Lord's Supper to only four times per year. This low frequency of observance has passed into modern times in most Protestant churches. Protestants have rationalized that the Lord’s Supper is very sacred and frequent participation makes it too common. So these visceral words of Jesus in the Gospel of John are a direct challenge to the assumption of those would observe the Lord’s Supper a few times per year. John suggests that our problem is not making the Lord’s Supper too common, but forgetting it. The danger of forgetting the Lord’s Supper is forgetting that God is present in our world. We need this regular assurance that God is present in our world. Rarely do we read of God’s loving presence in our world in the newspaper. We read a lot of other things however. Evidence seems to say that God is rather absent. Our cynicism about the harshness of the real world, our despair about our personal and common problems hides a much deeper longing for the real presence of God in our world. We know life is not right, we want something better. We hunger for a divine presence in our world. We really want to know that we are not alone. So the Lord's Supper is a guarantee, a seal of God’s actual presence in our world. A seal? People who purchase new computer software know what seals are all about. It is that sticky piece of paper which seals the software disk inside the envelope. Breaking that seal is agreeing to abide by the terms of the contract of the sale of copyrighted material. It also is the company’s guarantee that their merchandise is officially theirs. So the Lord’s Supper is the seal which ratifies, authenticates a covenant between God and humanity. The Lord’s Supper is the visible seal, the reminder that God is present in our world. Why do we need the Lord’s Supper to remind us of God's presence in our world? Isn’t the spirit of Christ already present in many things in our world; in justice done, in compassion shown, in forgiveness given, in reconciliation experienced, in quiet prayer, in reading scripture? Well, yes, most certainly. But those are scattered aspects of divine presence. We discern them far too infrequently. The Lord’s Supper is the concentrated presence of God, the summary of God's presence. Who showed justice? Jesus. Who showed compassion? Jesus. Who forgave his enemies, reconciled those who hated, read and interpreted scripture, prayed in an upper room and died on a cross? Jesus the Christ. In the crucifixion, all the teachings and actions of Jesus, his person and his work, are summarized, concentrated. Therefore remembering, yes celebrating, the action on the cross by eating and drinking reminders of that concentrated action is to affirm divine presence in our world. So, a Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper affirms that when we eat the bread and drink the cup, we are NOT literally eating and drinking Christ, but eating and drinking with Christ. It is a human ritual by which we remember God's amazing commitment that God will never leave us nor forsake us. We need this reminder quite regularly because our problems lead us into amnesia. We hunger for God’s presence in our troubled world, so we are invited to come to the Lord’s Table. By eating and drinking at this table, our starving and anxious spirits are nourished by the assurance of God’s presence. At this table we are nourished for our life’s journey. “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in
me and I in them.” Footnote # 1. Helmut Koester, History and Literature of Early Christianity, c. 1982, 1987 Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin. p. 189 “This anti-gnostic position is determinative for the whole Gospel of John.” P. 190 “This Johannine theology of the cross is directed not only against Gnosticism , it also contradicts the theology of the divine miracle worker… the more the author had to enter into ever sharper conflict with the traditional [Gnostic] theology of the [his tradition] church.” p. 192 “Discipleship of Jesus includes the experience of sorrow, suffering and the hostility of the world and cannot be understood as following Jesus on his way to the heavenly realms.”
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