After a healthy round of hunting Easter eggs, I heard my nephew ask his dad something like, “Is it really the body of Jesus that people eat at church on Easter.”
In a society surrounded by Christianity we are somewhat used to hearing about the eating of the body of Christ as little wafers and drinking his blood as wine, but it is a pretty weird concept. No wonder a kid would ask such a logical question. In a secular society that becomes more and more literal, a ritual that was born in a symbolically based civilization would be hard to understand.
I kept thinking about it all weekend. How would I explain that to an adult much less a child? Why is it a thing, much less a central theme to a whole group of people that for the last two thousand years eat bread and drink wine as if it was the body of a man they worship?
This is my attempt to articulate it.
To be fair, none of what follows are my ideas. It’s simply what comes to mind as I was thinking about how to explain this religious ritual. My mind pulls from the authors I’ve been reading on the subjects of our origins for the past several years and this is what bubbled up.
Play Acting
Imagine I told you that I was a really good basketball player. After many dedicated hours of reading about basketball, its rules, its history, its framework and its best players, I now knew about it in an incredibly deep way. On top of that, I spent hours watching games during the regular season, the playoffs, and championships for both professional and college athletes. But, I rarely if at all played the game. I wasn’t spending any time on the court taking shots, practicing defense or testing those skills up against any opponents. What would you think?
Is it possible to be a great player of any sport without actually playing the game? Can we read and discuss our way to athletic greatness? What about the physical component? If I was in great shape and exercised like David Goggins that would help, but isn’t there a component of greatness that requires me to do the actual thing I’m looking to be great at?
Nobody would disagree with that. We may not be able to articulate exactly why that is true, but we all know it to be so. No great doer of anything does it without practicing the thing they are doing. There is a physical activity that must accompany the act, and with most sports and even behaviors, the physical act is practiced long before we can articulate the reasons behind it.
Acting out a concept precedes our ability to understand or articulate it.
If you watch any group of kids playing a game, they follow the rules, for the most part, but couldn’t specifically tell you what those rules are. We aim children towards good behavior by modeling it, rewarding it, and punishing bad behavior. We don’t lecture them on the philosophy of good behavior using Aristotle’s essays on virtue. It’s all physical and acted out long before we articulate the “Why?”. Even most adults couldn’t articulate a good “Why.”
Ok, so we have one reason why there are rituals at churches: We need to physically act out ideas as a means to embody them long before we are able to understand or articulate them. This goes for any games we play and is applied to moral concepts which are the ultimate games. This is especially effective in teaching children these concepts, who can act them out long before they understand them.
But now we have to understand the act itself. Why are we eating the flesh of another human being? To explain why I think this is relevant, I need to first explain what I think it means to be human, and then what it means to be the best human.
Being Human
Most of us have seen compelling videos of our primate relatives using tools. It’s usually a chimpanzee using a long twig to extract ants out of a tiny hill full of protein rich creatures. It’s significant because the use of tools is a marker of intelligence. A creature can see the world around them and use items not for their intended purpose, but for the advantage of the creature at that time. We think of the use of tools as a huge step forward in the development of intelligence. It’s a sort of a marker of the progress we associate with being human. But there is a huge next step that may define the most important difference between humanity and the rest of their primate cousins.
Our long term view of time is fundamental to our humanity.
I think it was in the first chapter of Mircea Eliade’s A History of Religious Ideaswhere he discusses this fundamental difference with regard to our use of tools. Whereas a chimpanzee will seem brilliant in relation to the rest of the animal world, and share an important conceptualization of the world with us by using tools, there is one specific thing we do with tools that demarcates a massive chasm between us and them.
Once the chimpanzee is done using that tool, it drops it and moves on. We don’t do that. We understand the significance of that tool not only for right now, but for the future. We will not drop it once we’re satiated, if it was a tool for eating. We will take it with us knowing that it will be useful in the future. In fact, we’ll collect a whole treasure trove of tools that will become the marker of what we call culture and then use those tools to build civilizations which are cultural tools.
All of this first requires that we conceptualize the future and plan for it. No chimpanzees do this. They don’t have a stash of skinny twigs that they can go to and share them with their troops. They don’t build cases out of the items in their environments to store the skinny twigs. But we do.
What it means to be human is that we have a long term perception of time.
Using that ability to plan today for the future and build tools and cultures and civilizations to manage the future for ourselves is the key difference between our knuckle dragging cousins and us. As clever as they are, they are stuck in a cycle of immediate gratification.
So that’s what a human is, but what is the absolute best version of human?
Being the Best Human
Because we are aware of the future and plan for it, we have come to understand that the best way to plan for the future is to sacrifice immediate gratification for the sake of a better future. That’s what work is: sacrificing immediate gratification for the sake of a better tomorrow.
This is why in the Bible, Adam and Eve are destined to toil and produce food from the ground for the rest of their days once they have eaten of the tree of knowledge. They are now aware of good and evil, and are aware of their own mortality. They know the future exists and are compelled with anxiety to plan for that future. They work the earth and plan for the future by sacrificing what they want to do right now with what they should do for the future. They know they’ll be hungry again.
Even secular standards of success are measured in these terms. The marshmallow test, where kids can eat one marshmallow now or avoid that temptation then be rewarded with more later, is a test of their ability to delay gratification. Delayed gratification is a form of sacrifice and is predictive of future success as an adult. Can you control your desire to satisfy your immediate desires in order to gain more in the future?
Sacrifice is the basis for what it means to properly plan for our own future. That’s what it means to be a productive human. But what is the very best form of sacrifice? What is the pinnacle of sacrifice? What should we give up today that would make for the best possible future? Our own lives.
Sacrifice
Anyone who has sacrificed their own life for something they believe in is revered as heroic. As long as that sacrifice was for an agreeable concept, like the defense of our nation or other human beings. The Medal of Honor isn’t necessarily given to people who killed a lot of enemies, but traditionally it is given to someone who risked their own life to save the lives of their comrades. They sacrificed, or at least came very close to sacrificing their lives, for others.
The willingness to sacrifice ourselves in the service of humanity is the pinnacle of what it means to be a good human.
We think of good parents as those who give up the daily pleasures to assure their kids get what they need and want. Our best friends would give up a night of Netflix binging to be with us when we need them. All of the markers of the best humans involve sacrificing something now in order to serve other humans.
That is the story of the crucifixion of Christ. He sacrificed himself for the benefit of all humans. Even though he was betrayed by humans and killed by them while knowing he was not only innocent but the very best of us, he still believed there was enough good in humanity to allow himself to be tortured and murdered in a humiliating public display in front of his own mother. If that was what it took to save humanity, he was willing to do it.
Christ takes the idea of what it means to be a good human to its most extreme limits. He sacrificed his flesh and his blood for humanity. And that is why people in church to this day ritually consume his flesh and his blood. It’s at the very least an acknowledgment of his sacrifice.
At the Last Supper, Christ knows what is about to happen and symbolically offers his disciples his flesh and blood as bread and wine. It’s a way to act out what it takes to be a good human. One must be willing to sacrifice everything they have in the service of other human beings. Christ gave humanity his flesh and blood, and they consumed it. Not literally in the sense of eating it, but symbolically. And today, that symbolism reminds us of what it takes to be the best human possible.
Every time a Christian gets on his or her knees and consumes a tiny wafer and drinks a sip of wine, they are not literally consuming the flesh and blood of the son of God. They are acting out a physical representation of what it means to take what’s best in humanity to its extreme end. If Christ was willing to sacrifice his flesh and blood, then what are you willing to sacrifice and for what will you sacrifice?
A child or an adult may not understand this or be able to articulate its significance, but acting out the best in us is the first step towards being the best of us. Reading about playing basketball is insufficient for learning how to play basketball, just like reading the Bible is insufficient for learning how to be the best kind of human.
You must act it out as well.