Eat my flesh

By T.L Frazier

I see that the first Christians "devoted themselves to the teaching of the Apostles and to the communal life,, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers'- (Acts 2:42)."Obviously, "the breaking of the bread and to the prayers" (Greek: taiklasei ton artou kai tais proseuchais) was something other than the traditional Baptist after-church potluck hosted by the Ladies Auxiliary. This verse, along with Acts 20:7, says that the Lord's Supper, or Eucharist in Greek (literally "to give thanks," as in John 6:23), was a central part of Christian Sunday worship described in the New Testament. "Why wasn't it a part of ours?" I wondered. This thought really plagued me.

One afternoon I was reading the Gospel of John when something Jesus said caught my attention for the first time. It contained graphic eucharistic language: "I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever,- and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world....

"Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats [Greek: trogon] my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats [trogon] my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds [trogon] on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats [trogon] this bread will live forever" (Jn. 6:48-_£8).

The normal Greek verb meaning "to eat" used throughout this passage, phagon, is suddenly replaced by literally to crunch or gnaw. The real, corporal function of eating is obviously being stressed. Also, the tense of the verb trogon implies a continuous consumption of the body and blood of Christ.

So as death was introduced by eating the forbidden-fruit, now life is restored by eating the "bread of life," that is Christ's flesh. I knew the Catholic Church taught that the bread and the wine used in celebrating the Last Supper became the real body and blood of Christ. Professional anti-Catholic Jack Chick had disclosed as much to me in his coming books in which he lampoons the Eucharist as the "Cookie Christ." While it's easy to ridicule the Eucharist, I saw that this passage in John was best understood in light of the ancient Catholic belief.

1 Corinthians 5:7-8 came to mind where Paul says, "For indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast." As the Lord's Supper is the only "feast" Christians celebrated, this implied a regular celebration of the Eucharist as the New Testament Passover, the Passover being a ceremonial meal the Israelites had to eat in order to be saved from "the destroyer" which killed the first-born among the Egyptians (Ex. 12:1-42).

Recalling that in Acts 2:42; 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 11:20-21, the Christians used to celebrate the "breaking of the bread and the prayers" whenever they met, I became even more uneasy. Could Catholics possibly be right? Could the Eucharist be the normative Christian worship where, as Jesus said, "whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life," saving us from the "destroyer?"

I found the import of1 Corinthians 11:27-32, that those who fail to discern "the body and blood of the Lord" in the Eucharist would eat and drink condemnation upon themselves, refuted the Baptist dogma that the actual body and blood of the Lord were not to be discerned in the Eucharist. In fact, if the Eucharist were merely a "symbol" lacking efficacy, Paul's stern warning to the Corinthians concerning its improper observance seemed incomprehensible: "That is why many among you are ill \ and infirm, and a considerable number are dying." What other Christian "symbol" ever carried the death sentence for its ill treatment?

Moreover 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 says that our communion, or fellowship (Greek: koinonia}, in the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist is the basis for the Church's own koinonia—each member of the Body of Christ being at one with each other (cf. Rom. 12:4-5 and 1 Cor. 12:12-26). Certainly our fellowship with the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist couldn't be less real than our fellowship with one another, especially, as St. Paul says in this passage, if the Eucharist is the very basis for the Church's fellowship.

If the Church as the Body of Christ isn't merely a symbolic koinonia, then the Eucharist as the Body of Christ couldn't be merely a symbolic koinonia either.

To uphold the Fundamentalist position, one must maintain that the Church itself is only symbolic like the Eucharist. But could a merely symbolic Church be the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matt. 5:13-16)? The thought was absurd.