Temple Mysticism and the Eucharist

(I originally wrote this in November 2015, after reading a book on understanding Jesus's teachings in the light of first century Jewish Temple mysticism. I had been struggling with the cannibalistic implications in the Eucharist of "eating Jesus's body and drinking his blood." It was such a relief to discover this interpretation which connects neatly with the way his disciples would likely have understood the language Jesus was using.)

 

Eucharist

A little bit of research on the internet produced a description of Jewish ritual sacrifice in the time of Jesus. A person, say a woman named Sarah, offers a goat. She buys it and takes it to the priest at the Temple. He examines it to see if it is “perfect,” i.e. healthy and unblemished. He then takes it and slits its throat with the ritual words, “This is Sarah’s blood.” The meaning should obviously be, that this is the blood belonging to Sarah and offered on her behalf. The blood would then be poured out at the base of the altar. The priest then lays the carcass on the altar with the words, “This is Sarah’s body.” Again, meaning belonging to, and offered on behalf of, Sarah. The blood was washed away immediately, and the body was divided between the priest and Sarah. It was customary for bread and wine to also be offered along with the animal sacrifice: the wine was poured out as a libation, and the bread was burnt. It was likely that Sarah then had a feast to which she invited people, a dinner party where her share of the sacrifice was eaten with merriment and in good company.

This really helped me understand the Eucharist on a much deeper level, and also eased my distaste over the ritual cannibalism implied, especially in our modern understanding. It isn’t that we are actually eating Jesus, it’s that Jesus intended to identify himself as both the Offering and The One Who Offers, as well as deliberately take on the role of priest. This meant that he was being subversive in implying that a non-priest could fulfil the role of the priest as intermediary in the act of sacrificial offering. Jesus offers the bread and wine, body and blood, to God on behalf of “the whole world.”

Implications:

The priestly office is to present an offering on behalf of someone else. Therefore, Jesus was saying that he WAS the bread and wine; that they were literally his “body and blood.” That is to say, he was offering up himself as a gift. Theologically, that would parse out as “God gives God to God.” But if that is so, then how are we (human beings) included in this giving? By offering the bread and wine to his disciples, and saying that the offering was “for the whole world,” Jesus was essentially putting his disciples (and the world) in God’s place as the Receiver of the offering.

Jesus called it “the blood of the covenant.” The only covenant that applies to the whole world, and not just the Israelites, is the Noahic Covenant, in which God promises to never again destroy the world by flood. “Never again destroy,” how profound is that? So the blood of the Covenant would be the fulfillment of the promise, and instead of destroying the world, God destroys himself on behalf of human beings, by becoming a human being and offering himself as a free gift for the sake of love.

(Another theological chain of reasoning leading me into questionable places is this: If Jesus was God, and was uncreated from before time, then the Incarnation also transcends all time, and God has always been Human, is Human now, and will always be Human.)

So. God identifies with Creation, becomes Creation by being “of one substance with these creatures of bread and wine.” God is Human in Jesus, always and forever, from before time. God acts through promises, pledges, gifts, offerings. God acts through eating and drinking, making God the very substance that sustains life. The mystery is this: God and Heaven are all around us; in us; through us; by us; because of us. Humans. The world. Creation.

This line of reasoning could lead to the pathetic error of thinking that there is no God but Us. Nope! That leaves out too much. That leaves no room for awe, mystery, immanence, or the certain sense that God is somehow a Person, and not just a vague, amorphous quality that permeates the world and explains the ‘spiritual’ dimension of human understanding. No.

God is, and must be, a Force, a Might, an Impetus, a Power, that Lives and Moves and has Being.

God is the great Creator, the First Principle, the Progenitor, the Singularity, the Wellspring, the Beginning, the End, the Source, the Wind from Nowhere, the Great Dao, the Tathagata, the Teacher, the Friend, The Listener, the Speaker, the Question, and the Answer. (I got a little excited there.)

Anyway, back to my understanding of the Eucharist. First and foremost is my perception that somehow, through it and in it, God pours out into Creation and fills it with God-ness.

What we eat and drink, the fruits of Creation, the ‘creatures’ of bread and wine, are literally the Body and Blood of the Living God. Not a dead and bloody sacrifice, but Alive.

God flows as the Living Blood through all Creation, and We are God’s Body; God’s Hands; God’s Feet; God’s Eyes; God’s Mouth. That’s all there is to it, and it is a greater Mystery than anyone could ever express in words.

Through and in God, we follow our Teacher by giving ourselves as a perfect Offering to the whole world, for the forgiveness of each other’s sins along with our own.

If you think about it, this Way of being really works. It provides its own empirical proof. If we align ourselves to one another in compassion and kindness, without thought of return, then evil loses all its power to dominate us, suffering becomes bearable, and the fear of death loses its potency.

Yeah. I think I’m onto something here.