“If the Eucharist is just a symbol,” said Flannery O’Connor, “then to hell with it.”
Flannery O’Connor, a devout Roman Catholic, was the premiere writer of short stories in the mid-twentieth century; Southern Gothic best describes her work. She believed in the depravity of the human condition, because she saw it in the mirror and in the people around her, and so her fiction was filled with questionable characters of dubious morals. They all needed redemption, but not all found it in the few pages she took to tell their tales.
As a fiction writer, O’Connor knew something about symbols – how one image or idea can signify or stand in for something else. This makes her sharp, uncompromising insistence on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine all the truer.
“If the Eucharist is just a symbol, then to hell with it.”
It’s likely that Flannery O’Connor would have enjoyed professionally, and despaired of privately, a questionable character of dubious morals, twenty-one years her junior and a Southern Baptist, who once said about a topic altogether different, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
A genius of Anglicanism, or at least a welcome way to hedge our big-tent, theological bets, is to claim that Jesus is Really Present in the Eucharist, while not trying too hard to explain just how this happens, and allowing for some latitude of interpretation on the part of the individual communicant.
One person’s understanding of the Real Presence might not be the same as another’s, and in the Episcopal Church, that’s okay. You won’t be turned away when you come forward to receive the sacrament. I won’t ask you the what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.
We celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi today. The feast correctly falls on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, but it has long been our practice here, I’m told, to transfer it to the following Sunday to catch more of you.
Most Episcopal Churches don’t observe Corpus Christi. It’s not on the official church calendar. However, many Anglo-Catholic congregations such as ours – for whom the word ‘is’ is more Flannerian than Clintonian – we find we derive a great good by keeping the feast.
Corpus Christi is, of course, the Latin for the Body of Christ. Yes, Corpus Christi is also a city in Texas, and was very nearly the name of a United States Navy submarine, were it not for some churchmen with a conscience who protested the contradiction and blasphemy in naming a warship after Jesus; the sub was commissioned instead the USS City of Corpus Christi.
It is neither the city nor the submarine that we celebrate today. Rather, we call to mind what we do every time we celebrate Mass: that Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body, broken for you; given for you.”
We remember that earlier in his earthly ministry, Jesus said “I am the bread of life […] this is the bread that came down from heaven […] the bread that […] is my flesh.”
Theologians for centuries have tried to sort out just what all this means.
Flannerians, if I may, take Jesus’s words for what they plainly are. The meaning of ‘is’ is ‘is’. For them, the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Jesus, truly present in the elements of bread and wine.
Clintonians, on the other hand, see the bread and wine as symbol of what Jesus handed over to us at the Last Supper. The meaning of ‘is’, more lawyerly in latitude, is closer to ‘is like’.
Flannerians in the Catholic traditions – Anglican, Orthodox, and Roman; and Clintonians in the Protestant traditions – also Anglican, as well as Lutheran, Calvinist and Anabaptist, are equally earnest and every-bit as devout, one against another.
It doesn’t do much good to question and quibble the Eucharistic piety of fellow believers from different traditions.
I suspect, and I hope that, in the end, what we make of Jesus’s words and believe when we come to Communion is of less importance to Jesus than what we do with the gift of himself that he gave us.
Which leads to what Saint Paul wrote to the fractured and fractious Corinthian Church that we heard this morning.
Paul relays the words of institution that we also receive in the synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and that we hear in every Eucharistic prayer – “This is my body, this is my blood.”
But then Paul shifts to an accusatory tone: Do the Corinthians – do we – receive worthily or unworthily? Do the Corinthians – do we – discern the Lord’s body when we eat and drink?
There are two ways to look at what Paul wrote. The first has to do with our Eucharistic piety: Do we come to Communion in humility, eager for the Lord’s gift however we understand it? Do we believe, or hope to believe, or try to believe, that Jesus is present, somehow, in some way, in the bread and wine? I suspect that desire is enough to meet Paul’s criteria for worthy reception. Flannerians and Clintonians are equally welcome here. Jesus loves you and will meet you where you are.
The second way of looking at what Paul wrote is in the context of the Corinthian Church itself. It seems there were deep, class-based divisions in that community. Paul criticized the wealthy members who had the time and leisure to gather early for the community meal and eat up all the food before the working-class members got there. Elsewhere in his letter, Paul scolds these wealthy, writing, “Do you not have homes to eat in?”
Paul thought it important that the entire community be present before both the family meal and the nascent celebration of what we now call the Eucharist began.
The Body of Christ, which for Paul was also the believers gathered in Christ’s name, was incomplete. By starting early, the wealthy members failed to discern the body and thus received unworthily, eating and drinking judgment against themselves.
If Jesus worries less what we believe about his presence in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, I think he worries much more what we believe about his presence in other people, especially people who are on society’s margins, and people among us who are suffering and struggling silently.
“I was hungry and you fed me,” Jesus said; “I was thirsty, sick, unhoused, unclothed, imprisoned, and you helped me. When you cared for the least of these, you cared for me … and when you didn’t, ya’ didn’t.”
“If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the Church door,” wrote Saint John Chrysostom, “you will not find him in the Chalice.”
“You cannot worship Christ in the tabernacle,” wrote the Anglo-Catholic Bishop Frank Weston, “if you don’t recognize him sweating in the streets.”
For Anglo-Catholics, being Flannerians when it comes to finding the real presence of Jesus shut in a sick room, or slouching on a bar stool, or standing in the breadline of a street mission, or sleeping in a doorway in the Haight, or slumping overdosed outside a tent in the Tenderloin is every bit as important as worshipping Jesus in the Real Presence of the Blessed Sacrament in Frank Weston’s tabernacle and John Chrysostom’s chalice.
And finding Jesus in these suffering among us is far more important a witness to the rest of the world – for whom God is a fiction and the Church irrelevant – than what we believe when we ourselves stand in the breadline inside these walls this morning.
Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP
Corpus Christi Sunday – June 2, 2024
All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco
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