Work of Human Hands

 

These are the words of consecration at the mass:

“the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.

“the wine we offer you: fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink.”

I suddenly realize it is significant that the bread and wine have two sources: nature plus human effort. This is their essential nature, and this is why they are the things we consecrate.

They are works of art, in the proper sense: they are co-productions of God and man.

This is the divine plan of salvation: God made the natural world to be perfected by man in art. God offers each of us grace and salvation, and it is up to us to respond and to work with it, as in the creation of art.

This is the contrast between the wine of the Eucharist, and the apple of Eden.

We are saved by art—not just the fine arts, but by every craft and skill. We are made, in Genesis, to be gardeners. We are made out of red clay by Yahweh, as a pot is made, and made in his image—to be potters. We are to imitate Christ--and Christ was a carpenter.

Through each work of art, we are building the New Jerusalem.

The Original Locked Room Mystery

A Protestant friend recently argued with me against the doctrine of transubstantiation on these grounds: that Jesus, after the resurrection, proved he was not a spirit by having Thomas put his hands in the marks of the nails. It is in this Sunday’s gospel reading:

Jesus came, although the doors were locked,
and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”
Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands,
and bring your hand and put it into my side,
and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”

A brief summary of the doctrine of transubstantiation is perhaps needed here: the Catholic Church holds that, at consecration, the bread and wine for communion actually transforms into the body and blood of Christ. They retain all the physical qualities of bread and wine, the “accidents.” But the substance has changed.

My Protestant friend is arguing that Jesus was here using the accidents to prove that he was in fact there in body, not just a hallucination. If God himself considers such visual and tactile evidence proof, it follows that anything that looks, smells and tastes like bread and wine, is actually bread and wine. No transubstantiation.

A clever argument; but it has things cleverly reversed.

In the gospel, Jesus is not showing the wounds in his hands and side to prove he has a physical body. To prove he were not a hallucination, touching him anywhere would have sufficed. But so would the simple fact that many disciples were seeing him at the same time. Touching his wounds proved something else. These wounds, after all, were fatal. He is proving he really did die. Yet he is here. He is proving that he has been able to overcome the characteristics, the accidents, of a physical body.

This body has also just passed through a wall into a locked room. The essence of the physical is that it occupies a discrete point in space; this body does not.

Later, when disciples encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus, they do not recognize him. His body apparently lacks all the accidents that would identify it as him.

If Jesus’s resurrected body is capable of such things, it is surely as capable of appearing as bread or wine.

Good Friday and Denial

My friend Xerxes, for Maundy Thursday, quotes Jesus at the Last Supper: first he took a piece of pita bread, and divided it, saying:

“This bread is (like) my body (which will be) broken for your sakes.”

Then he raised the cup and said:

“This is like blood. You need it to keep your strength up. Drink it, and remember me in tough times.”

It seems to me this is worth citing as an example of denial, and of the perennial human tendency to deny evidence they do not want to accept.

The actual words, from 1 Corinthians, the earliest of the five texts we have confirming what he actually said, are of course quite different:

“This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

“This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

(NRSV)

Why the tendency to change the words? Because they are shocking. They suggest not only death, and a solemn pact hinting at requiring death, but cannibalism. This is above and beyond the thought that bread can become flesh and wine can become blood. That too may sound surprising, but then, not really, given the essential premise that the speaker is God himself.

Yet this is exactly why we can be assured they have been recorded correctly just as they stand in the gospels. Because they would be a very hard sell to anyone reading, as they stand. If this were not obvious enough, from Xerxes’s reaction, just such a reaction is presented in detail in John 6.

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.” He said these things while he was teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.

When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”

… Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. (NRSV)

There is no ambiguity here; the apostolic record ensures there is no ambiguity.

Yet Xerxes is far from the only one who wants to resist and deny the plain meaning of Jesus’s words. Not because he, being God, could not have turned wine into blood, as he turned water into wine. Because it makes too graphic and real the significance of the sacrifice he made today, on Good Friday, over two thousand years ago. And what a solemn, serious commitment it really is to be a Christian.

Missing Mass

My portlisting pal Xerxes is mocking the Catholic Church for cancelling masses.

“My Catholic friends were told they had to attend mass every week. Even during epidemics. Because the wafer and wine, as the symbolic body and blood of the sinless Christ, could not transmit germs.”

This is a grave misunderstanding of Catholic teaching, and so perhaps must be addressed.

The wafer and wine are not, as he says, the “symbolic” body and blood of Christ. They are the actual body and blood of Christ.

Nor did Catholic doctrine ever hold that this means they cannot transmit germs. That would be like saying they cannot get dirty if dropped on the floor. Great pains are traditionally taken to prevent just this.

If a virus can adhere to ordinary bread, it can adhere to the consecrated host. All the “accidents” of bread and wine remain. That means that they still weigh what they did, look as they did, and act as they did. If you drink enough communion wine, you will indeed get drunk.

Does Xerxes want to argue that God would never allow anyone to die as a result of taking communion? That makes no sense; God allows us all to die, good people as well as bad, and no matter how many times you have taken communion.

As to Xerxes’s point, that masses were not cancelled during previous plagues: this is because medical science did not know about germs until about the middle of the 19th century. Before then, the dominant assumption was that infectious diseases were spread by bad smells: the miasma theory.

On this understanding, a church full of incense should be about the safest place to be. Now we know better.

I have no sympathy with those who complain that the Church has abandoned them by shutting the doors. You could as justly complain that the church abandoned us all years ago by closing its doors when masses were not scheduled, preventing us from going in to pray at will. It was, and is, a practical necessity. This falls under the principle that “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.” Going to church and assuming it is God’s duty to protect you from the usual laws of nature is necromancy. It is claiming authority over God.

And, of course, God is everywhere. He is with the hermit in his cell. He is with the imprisoned martyr. He was with the persecuted church in Korea that had no priests for thirty years. We have our choice of online masses on the Internet every day.