Eat the God

Propers: The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, AD 2024 B

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.

Marcus Terentius Varro—who witnessed the fall of the Roman Republic, and subsequent rise of the Empire into which Christ would soon be born—wrote that people participate in three sorts of religious practice: the civil, the natural, and the mythic.

Civil religion has to do with the state. In Varro’s day there were state gods, state ceremonies, and even the deified dictator Julius Caesar, who thus posthumously inaugurated the imperial cult. Civil religion remains very powerful today. If you don’t believe me, just watch a political rally, or the SuperBowl, or visit the secular temples of Washington, DC. Lady Liberty, Uncle Sam, and the Founding Fathers form our postmodern pantheon.

The second sort of religion consisted of natural theology, what we would call philosophy. This had to do with the contemplation of higher realities: the nature of God, humanity, and the cosmos. Early Christians often considered themselves philosophers, for the Way of Christ was a way of life, in pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

The final division of divinity in Varro’s eyes was the mythic, that aspect of religion dealing with ritual, with liturgy, with mysticism, telling timeless stories in a spiritual way. This is mostly what we imagine when we speak of organized religion today. Yet everyone participated in all three. Religion was communal, thoughtful, and mystical all at the same time; unifying body, mind, and spirit, three in one.

For the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day, the mythical aspect of religion manifested primarily in mystery cults. These were ancient rituals, supposedly so at least, passed down in secret to the initiated, dealing with the afterlife and with our union to the divine. The most famous mystery cults were the Eluesinian, the Mithraic, and the Dionysian. And this is important because John’s Gospel treats Christianity as a mystery cult—not one among many, mind you, but as the true divine mystery to which the others can but point.

Our word “sacrament” means mystery. And in theological terms, a mystery is not something that cannot be understood, but something we begin to grasp after we go through it. An aspiring Christian would undergo a period of penance, prayer, and preparation—the instruction and the fasting we now focus on in Lent—culminating in Holy Baptism. Baptism, remember, is ritual resurrection. We drown in the waters and rise with the Spirit and the life of Christ within us. We often receive new names. We are reborn in Jesus, as Jesus, as part of His Body the Church.

Once baptized, a Christian would be welcomed to the Eucharist. The Early Church limited the Lord’s Supper to the baptized; everybody else had to leave after the first half of the service, at the passing of the peace. It was a mystery reserved for the initiates. That’s why John’s Gospel never speaks directly of the Eucharist. There is no Holy Communion in the Johannine Last Supper.

The language of the Sacrament saturates John’s Gospel—as should be obvious amidst five weeks of Christ as the Bread of Life—but it’s only clear to us because we know. We’ve been to the Table of the Lord. We’ve experienced the mystery of His Body and His Blood. John’s audience has not. And at this point in his narrative, no-one has, because Jesus hasn’t instituted the Eucharist as yet. He hasn’t given to us the Christian Passover feast.

This explains much of the outrage of the crowd. “I am the living bread coming down from heaven,” Jesus says. “And the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.” That’s a harsh word, “flesh,” both in English and in Greek. It grates upon the ear. Remember, observant Jewish communities are forbidden to eat meat with the blood in it. And the way that Christ is talking, it almost sounds like cannibalism. But it gets worse.

“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life … They abide in me, and I in them … The one who eats this bread [My Body] will live forever.” In other words, God the Father lives in Christ, so that when we eat Christ, the life of God then dwells in us. Scandalous stuff, made worse by the fact that the latter word which Jesus uses for eating—at least in the Greek that John gives us—means something rather visceral, like masticate or crunch. We don’t just eat Jesus Christ; we chew Him up.

Such talk gets pious folk even more upset, understandably so. Because now Jesus doesn’t just sound crazy. Now Jesus sounds like Dionysus. Allow me to explain.

See, John is Jewish. All the authors of the Bible, with the possible exception of Luke, are Jewish. John’s audience is Jewish. The Early Church is Jewish. They know their Hebrew Bible inside and out, both the literate ones, and those who grew up hearing family stories. But they are also Hellenized. They’ve been part of the Greek-speaking world for over 300 years, since Alexander the Great. Jesus appears to be fluent in Greek, if John’s to be believed. And they’re all Romans too: not Roman citizens, mind you, but certainly Roman subjects.

They know the pagan philosophies and myths. They know the Greco-Roman gods. And they know the mystery cult of Dionysus, I guarantee. So let me tell you what they know, yet are not explicitly stating. Dionysus—Bacchus in Latin—is the god of wine. He began as the son of Zeus and Persephone, but when Zeus’s wife Hera learned of this illegitimate child, she had him torn apart and eaten by the Titans. Yet Zeus took the immortal infant’s heart and gave it to the mortal woman Semele to drink.

Semele thus grew pregnant, and through her womb Dionysus was reborn. This isn’t the only version of his myth, but it will do for now. He went on to invent wine, which the old seer Tiresias called mankind’s only remedy against the suffering of life. Dionysus was the most sympathetically human of the Greco-Roman gods, the one who went about in mortal guise, the one who had experienced death and thus could see us through.

When a supplicant joined the Dionysian Mysteries, they would reënact the death and rebirth of Dionysus, eating of his flesh, and drinking of his blood. We know that the blood in question was wine; as the god was understood to be the embodiment of the vine. How literal the flesh was, we simply do not know. Keep in mind that the state accused Christians of cannibalism, once outsiders learned that we eat of Jesus’ Body and drink of Jesus’ Blood. The technical term for this is theophagy, the eating of the god.

That this should sound familiar is no scandal. Christians did not steal our ritual from the Greeks; we inherited it from the Jews. Communion is deeply Jewish; it is rooted in the Exodus, in the blood of the Passover lamb. Yet John saw parallels between the two communities, between the Christian Sacrament and the mysteries of Greek religion. He wasn’t alone; some mistook the Church to be a Dionysian cult. But this makes sense. All peoples yearn for union with the divine. No culture has ever taught that death is truly our end. And sooner or later we’ve all discovered the One God is God of us all.

John plays with this throughout his telling, plays up the parallels between Jesus and Dionysus, from the wine at the Wedding of Cana through the murder of the immortal mortal. And why not? Ancient church buildings painted the Hebrew prophets on one wall whilst depicting the sybils on the other—both Jew and Gentile likewise pointing to Christ. Jesus is the fruition of every human hope and dream: the God who walks among us, who nourishes us, who brings to us healing and joy, who precedes us into Hades and raises us up to the heights of Heaven. Jesus is the True Vine, to whom Dionysus may point.

The life of God the Father abides in God the Son, wholly, fully, infinitely; so that when we are joined in Jesus, one in His Flesh and His Blood, we thus have the life of God within us, the Spirit of God within us, who makes of us the Body of the Christ within the world. We are called as a people out of time, partakers in the Bread of Life together, gifted with eternity within the here and now. And we are to give ourselves away for the world, as Christ has given Himself for us. That is the mystery, the Sacrament, of Holy Communion: that God’s Incarnation be continued now in us.

Dionysus was a myth, yet Christ is myth made fact. Eat His Flesh, drink His Blood, and live in Him forever.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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