- Valson Thampu
It is easier to fight over something when we don’t understand what we are fighting for. It is impossible to know and to fight. We fight, not to know, but to hurt and defeat. So, it happens perforce that the more we fight over a cause, and the more ferociously we fight, the more our focus shifts from the cause to the fight. Then we become zealously un-sacramental in fighting over things sacramental, and assume that we are the most righteous in doing so.
Consider the Mass at the heart of which is the symbolic ‘breaking of the body’ and the ‘shedding of the blood’. What do these symbols mean? How are we to understand them in spirit and truth?
We tend to ignore the quintessential Jesus. He represents wholeness; the wholeness of Life. Life involves the integration of the past, present and future. Life is a flow; not a frozen moment. Jesus’s teachings become intelligible to us only if we regard them as underlaid by the wholeness of the human condition on Earth. This is implied also in the omniscience that we associate with God.
Now consider the ‘breaking of the bread’ as symbolic of the breaking of the body/self, which is the essence of the Crucifixion. The book of Genesis gives us a clue, which has remained ignored hitherto, to understanding the creational and redemptive significance of this symbol of breaking. Adam had to be ‘broken’, so to speak, that Eve may come into existence. God’s causing a sleep to come upon Adam, taking a rib out of him and turning that into Eve, is symbolic of Adam’s brokenness which is the precondition for Eve’s coming into being. The principle at work here is: if something new is to come into being, something appropriate that pre-exists has to be broken. Eve cannot be created out of a pig or parrot.
“When Jesus said, ‘You are the light of the world’, what he meant was that his followers are to live out this spiritual principle. The principle of the world is contrary to this. It is that of breaking all else to ensure that the self does not have to break. We call it the power principle. The spiritual evidence for the fallenness of human nature is its atavistic affinity to power; and the consequent rejection of love. We thirst for love, but vote for power. We devalue agents of compassion and hero-worship icons of cruelty. Sadly, even Church leaders remain confused in this regard. This confusion arises out of the reluctance to deny oneself. Jesus said ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up the Cross and follow me.’ The Cross of Jesus symbolizes self-denial and rejection of the animal instinct of self-preservation. We remain confused, not because we are mentally challenged, but because we are spiritually divided. We preach love, but repose faith in power.”
This principle existed even prior to the creation of Eve. How did God create humankind: according to chapter 1 of Genesis? He broke himself. The idea that God created out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) means that he created out of himself. That is to say, creation involves God’s brokenness. It’s the same as saying, creation is sacramental. The force that facilitated this creational-sacramental divine self-breaking was Love. That is why we say that God is love. Creation is God’s Essence as Existence. God’s Essence is Love. Love must express itself. And Love expresses itself in plenitude and diversity.
This is the law of nature. In nature, nothing comes into being without a breaking of the self. We take this for granted, and don’t realize that when a grain of wheat falls into the ground it is enacting the sacramental pattern Jesus highlighted. It breaks itself, resulting in the sprouting of a seedling. Not so, in the case of chaff. Grain is potentially sacramental, chaff is not.
Chaff perishes, but can’t break itself. The reason? Well, it is empty within. It is similar to the ‘lamp without oil’ in the parable of Jesus. A light-giving lamp is a multi-level manifestation of the principle of breaking the self. The wick breaks/burns itself. The oil, likewise. So does the oxygen in the air. If there is no oxygen in the air, neither the wick nor the oil can burn, or break themselves. And, there will be no light.
When Jesus said, ‘You are the light of the world’, what he meant was that his followers are to live out this spiritual principle. The principle of the world is contrary to this. It is that of breaking all else to ensure that the self does not have to break. We call it the power principle.
The spiritual evidence for the fallenness of human nature is its atavistic affinity to power; and the consequent rejection of love. We thirst for love, but vote for power. We devalue agents of compassion and hero-worship icons of cruelty. Sadly, even Church leaders remain confused in this regard. This confusion arises out of the reluctance to deny oneself. Jesus said ‘If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up the Cross and follow me.’ The Cross of Jesus symbolizes self-denial and rejection of the animal instinct of self-preservation. We remain confused, not because we are mentally challenged, but because we are spiritually divided. We preach love, but repose faith in power.
‘Body’, in the Hebraic context, symbolized personality. We tend to equate body with flesh, or the physical-material aspect. Disputes and skirmishes about direction or the minutiae of liturgical rubrics become sticky only from the perspective of the flesh. For the Spirit, what direction? Is the East more spiritual for the Spirit than the West, or vice versa? So, Jesus was unmindful of directional fetishes in celebrating the last meal.
Jesus’s breaking his body became sacramental because it was transformative. It took me half a century of reflection to realize that the disciples’ partaking of the broken body of Jesus was a resurrection-experience. We rarely go beyond the breaking of the host and the spooning out of the consecrated wine. But, that’s less than half the story. The full story is that it enfolds the prospect of resurrection. That is why the spotlight is on Peter, both in the Fellowship Meal and in the trial of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is prefigured in the breaking of his body in the Meal. The human relevance of that resurrection is affirmed through the crash and resurrection of Peter. Jesus breaks himself. Peter is broken. The broken pieces are put together by God. Peter remains the foremost disciple. This principle of breaking and putting together the broken pieces on a new foundation is the apostolic essence of Peter. It is also the sacramental essence. And that essence is the ‘rock’ on which the church is to stand.
If the above argument carries any biblical verity, it can point the way to the resolution of the un-sacramental stand-off regarding the ‘how’ of celebrating the Mass. What matters is not ‘in which direction’ but ‘what’ is broken, and the ‘who’ of those to whom the sacramentally broken is administered and, above all, whether or not the outcome is sacramental.
If it is a grain of wheat that is broken it will occasion a harvest. Not so, if is the chaff. Chaff is not sacramental; for it is empty within. It is all appearance, and no substance. Such a condition is, from Jesus’s perspective, abhorrent; as is evident from the most corrosive denunciation ever uttered in the history of humanity: ‘You whited sepulchers’!
