Digesting Jesus

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I have thought a good deal about the Christian sacrament of communion this year. For those who are not familiar with this practice, it began shortly before Jesus was crucified when he was having a meal, often referred to as the Last Supper, with his disciples. At that last meal Jesus was to share with his friends, he took the bread and broke it into pieces, giving each a piece to eat. He told them, “take this and eat it, it is my body, broken for you” (Luke, ch. 22). Wait, what? Eat something that represents your loved one’s flesh and bones? He also shared a cup of wine with his friends, telling them “this is my blood shed for you.” Again, what!? For those who have very vivid imaginations, like I do, this is revolting. And this is what we refer to as communion – deliberately reflecting, while ingesting bread and wine, on the sacrifice that Jesus made when he was crucified - physically taking him in. Gives a whole new meaning to, “You are what you eat,” doesn’t it?

The story of The Last Supper is so multilayered that it would take a great deal of time, contemplation, and illumination to dig into all of it. For the sake of brevity, I am not even going to attempt to unpack all of it here. What I will do is start with where all this pondering began for me.

I have to eat gluten-free, so I usually use a gluten-free cracker instead of bread for communion. I blame, or bless, the cracker for what ensued one evening when I was participating in communion. Chewing is violent. It tears, crushes, and grinds our food as the first step in digestion. As I began to chew the cracker, and felt (and heard) it crunch and crush between my teeth, I was thinking of the torture that Jesus went through before and during his crucifixion. A small sob escaped when it hit me. And a larger, involuntary sob when I thought about how I needed his crucifixion. Fast forward to this Good Friday this year. This is the day that people in the Christian faith observe as the day Jesus was killed. (Side note: I vote we rename the day. Unending good did come of it, and all is well that ends well, but still.). I thought about the connection of the day of Jesus’ death with The Festival of Unleavened Bread, on the first day of Passover, a Jewish celebration of deliverance and freedom. The Hebrew people put blood on their doorposts on Passover as a sign that it was believing household, so that the Angel of Death would ‘pass over’ their home. So why didn’t Jesus instruct his disciples to dab some of his ‘blood’ on their doorposts, or rub it on their foreheads? Why didn’t he tell them to take his ‘body’ and use it for a burnt offering or throw it over their left shoulder, like salt, for heaven’s sake?! Why must we eat his body and drink his blood? I suspect that it is because of what struck me next. The Gospel, the good news about Jesus’ sacrificial love for us, is not tidy, easy, or tasteful. It’s beautiful, but also brutal. To say that it was physically, spiritually, and emotionally messy is a gross understatement. We need to digest him, which is a biologically complex, elegant, and messy process. We need to digest the sacrifice he made for us, as well as who he is and how he lived. We need the blood that made total forgiveness possible to become part of us. We can now become sacrificial love and forgiveness. Digesting Jesus is crushing, brutal, sweet, complex, nourishing, and transformative. Sante