Suppose you flipped past the Discovery Channel some evening and you saw a documentary about a primitive tribe, just rediscovered by some anthropologists, who made their promises in a ritual where they slaughtered animals, smeared the blood on themselves, and on everything, and on the altar they set up to their god? If you didn’t change the channel immediately, it would be hard not to have a reaction that says: Thank God we’ve moved beyond that stage of evolution.
Then, of course, you’d come here, and today, on this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are presented with the same problem. Readings with covenants of blood everywhere, the blood of animals smeared all over our ancestors in this faith in the first reading, the blood of Christ shed for us and drunk by us in the letter from Paul and the gospel. We have to ask ourselves again, What can this possibly have to do with us? Haven’t we outgrown shedding blood, smearing blood, drinking it? The answer is, no, we haven’t grown out of it. In fact, the issue may be, we haven’t yet grown into it.
When we hear that today is the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, our first reaction is to remember that we are a people of the eucharist, and we know that the eucharist is a meal. That we understand. In a meal, we’re fed, we’re strengthened, we feel better. We share a meal with others, and we feel able to go on. That often is why people come to the eucharist hoping to feel that it has a power that can heal them. It’s why our church has us seated all surrounding this table here in a circle, to remind us just a little of a table at which we are all eating together.
But today, with these readings, all this talk of blood, we’re reminded of a whole other view of what eucharist is. It is not just a meal, but a promise. Not just a one-way movement from God to us, but a two-sided pledge, sealed in blood.
Why blood? Blood is life, and when we see it, even now, whether it is the blood drive or a blood transfusion or the blood we see shed every day if we look at our world, we know that it still means that. Spilling it is serious business. When the people of Israel sealed their covenant with blood, they were making two promises, and so was God: The first promise that each party made was to lay down their lives, if needed, for the other one; the second promise was to surrender their own lives if they were unfaithful to the promise. Those are frightening things, not done lightly. They were promising, God and the people, to turn their lives over to the power of another. Moses gives his people a chance to back out, but they go ahead, and shout it out, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do!” But it’s not enough to say it. They have to promise in a way that they’ll never forget. They did. They ultimately failed, many of them, but they promised. And every week, so do we.
Sometimes people still ask why our church is so determined to restore sharing in the cup of Christ’s blood to all of us here at communion, It’s still unfamiliar, and people can easily think it’s not for them. But today we remember that it is for all of us: We don’t get the blood of our covenant thrown onto us, or onto our altar: Jesus tells us that we can do something that is even more powerful: We take it into ourselves, the power of Jesus’s life and the promises he has made to us, and we have made to him.
That power can feed us but it can also overwhelm us. If anything were to make us afraid to approach the eucharist it should be a sense not that we’re unworthy of it but of what it might bring upon us and do to us. Because it turns us into people who know that that we have greater power to love than we usually imagine. This not a solitary supper, something that helps us and us only. It is a dinner with everyone, all of us making the same promises. It asks us to become what we have received. That means that we become like gods, but because we are like our God, it means we become people who are willing to do anything, to be broken, to be given to someone else. Sometimes the eucharist does this to us dramatically when an Archbishop Oscar Romero is marked with his own blood, and Jesus’ blood, during the consecration. But that same blood is alive and active in us every time we take any action for anyone, offer love to anyone, because we remember that we have made a life or death promise, sealed right here, with blood.
All of us come to this church each week looking for direction, for something that will make us new people. If we eat this meal, we will have it, and all that the Lord has spoken, we will do.