Written in Flesh

 

Propers: Maundy Thursday, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What is a soul? Can you measure it, weigh it? Many have tried. Can you see it? Many have claimed. A perennially popular quote, variously attributed, has been making the rounds for well over a century. It goes something like this: “Never tell a child you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.”

First, I think we must be clear on exactly what a soul is. It is not a ghost in a machine. “Soul” literally means life, and life of a specific sort: fleshly life, worldly life as opposed to spirit, which is a sort of life immune to the ravages of time. Yet this leads naturally to the next available question: What is life? What is its essence, its purpose, its meaning? That’s what the soul is. The soul is the meaning of your life, the story of your life, the essence of your life. And it is written in the flesh.

Indeed, for as materialist as our culture claims to be, we still believe in eternal things, transcendent things, beyond mere matter. First and foremost: numbers. Numbers are the prime example of eternal ideas expressed in form. You cannot show me the number four, only instantiations of it: four pennies, four bricks, four years. Yet numbers—even imaginary numbers—unerringly predict the music of the spheres, from the spinning of the farthest galaxy to the vibrations of the tiniest quark.

We also believe in truth. We can’t avoid it. The claim that there is no truth is absurd, self-contradictory. If someone says, “There is no truth,” we must reply, “Is that true?” Morality’s another. We don’t invent morality; we discover it. Murder is wrong in every culture. Lies are wrong in every culture. Life is good in every culture. We may disagree on the foundations of morality, or how we apply our morals to specific situations, but the meat of it is always the same and only madmen disagree.

There are eternal ideas, eternal understandings, which express themselves in matter, here in space and in time. It’s a language; the whole world is a language. Like all languages, it expresses truth imperfectly, for truth itself is silent; truth simply is. Yet the human mind exists, the human life exists, to discern the meaning of nature, the meaning of reality, its goodness and beauty and truth.

Because everything is a story. Everything is a story! We encounter reality and we find in it meaning and we express it in language, in the language of our lives. And that’s your soul: that’s the story of your life, the meaning of your life. This is not some crazy new interpretation on my part. In the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis 1, God speaks everything into Creation. He does so by taking an idea in His infinite mind and expressing it through His breath, His life.

The idea is the Word. The life is the Spirit. And both of these are God.

See, every one of us has a telos, which is to say, an end: not an end in the sense of termination, but an end in the sense of a purpose; what we are becoming; what it’s all been building toward. Another word for this is perfection. “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” right? Become what God imagines you. Become what you were meant to be. That’s your telos, your perfection, the meaning, point, and idea of your life. To fall short of your telos is hamartia, “sin.”

That’s why so many religious and spiritual traditions speak of the true self and the false self, the ego and the spirit. There’s who we are now, and who we are becoming. We are called out from nothing into the fulness of all Being, which is God. We aren’t there yet. We miss the mark. We fall short of who we’re meant to be, our story and our soul. After all, isn’t the ending the most important part of any tale?

Enter Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God, the Word made flesh, the Logos. He is the big idea, the whole story, the perfect expression of spirit in flesh. When we ask ourselves, “What does it mean to be human? What ought my soul to become?” we look to Jesus. He is whom we are all meant to be. He is what we are becoming, the perfect expression of the meaning of life. For Him, there is no separation between matter and spirit, natural and supernatural, God and man.

Jesus sees the world as it is, and as it is meant to be. And He loves it, loves every single soul, every single story, every single facet of Creation; loves it entirely, because He knows whence we come and whither we are going. He does not judge. He simply states the truth, because He sees reality in its perfection, sees God shining through every molecule of matter. For Christ there is no hamartia, no missing of the mark. He perfectly lives out His telos, the telos of us all. And because of that—because He sees God in everything—we all see God in Him.

We ask things like, “How can Christ be God and Man?” He asks things like, “How can we be not?” He isn’t half-and-half, you see. By being fully human, by perfectly expressing the soul of humankind, He is fully God, God in flesh, God in Creation. If only we could see like Him! He sometimes seems surprised that we cannot. He’s baffled when people lack faith in their own healing. He sighs when Peter only manages to walk but a few steps on water, certainly more than I could manage.

Christ retains that perfect, primal, eternal unity which we have lost. For Him, Spirit is breath and breath is Spirit. God is man and man is God. Bread is body and body is bread. The symbols are as real as the facts, the symbols contain the facts, because in Christ and Christ alone is meaning perfectly fulfilled, is telos unerringly followed: Truth expressed in Creation, Word made flesh.

On this night, this Last Supper, Jesus shares with His Apostles a final Passover meal. And if you know anything about the Passover, you know that it’s a story. The whole thing is a story. It expresses what it means to be a Jew, to be the people of God. And you have to lose yourself in it. Time and space break down. The Greek word is “anamnesis,” remembering, but remembering in such a way that you are there, mystically and spiritually there. In telling the story of freedom, you yourself are set free. In eating the bread of blessing, you are eating the grace of God.

Jesus takes us deeper. He changes the Passover script. He holds up the bread and says, “This is My Body.” He holds up the cup and says, “This is My Blood.” He becomes our Passover Lamb, whose Blood now sets us free. And Christians have argued for centuries over whether to take this all literally—presto-change-o magic words transforming the bread into God—or whether it’s all a symbol, a metaphor, a story, that only represents our Lord.

But this is a distinction that would not exist in Jesus’ mind. Yes, it is bread, and it’s His Body. Yes, it’s a symbol, and it’s the truth. The barriers break down: past and present, earth and heaven, meaning and language, word and flesh. It’s a glimpse at how He sees the world. It’s a moment to be as Jesus is. Every part of the liturgy, every word of Holy Communion, exists to hammer home to all of us that this here is heaven on earth, eternity breaking into time, returning us, re-membering us, all as one in Him.

Yeah, it’s just bread. But when you eat it, you eat God. Yeah, it’s just wine. But when you drink it, His Blood becomes yours. For the Word has been added unto it—the Logos, the purpose, the meaning, the end—and we are made divine. I don’t expect you to understand. Language always falls short of truth. That’s why we partake! That’s why we enter in, into the mystery, into the meaning, into the life of God. Thus are we given a glimpse of who we already are in heaven, in eternity beyond time. There’s your soul perfected. There’s the life of Christ in you.

Come and see how Jesus sees. Come and live how Jesus lives. Be fully human by entering fully into God. Then is the world suffused in meaning, goodness, beauty, truth, love, even in the midst of suffering, even from the wood of the Cross. You are a story imagined by God and written down here in the flesh. Come and taste your destiny. Come see how the story shall end.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

 

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