The Scandal of Real Food

Feb. 5th, 2021 | By Bradley Yam SY ‘21

Pictured: pitcher, goblet, and plate of bread.

We do not presume to come to this your table, O Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord, whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the Flesh of your dear son Jesus Christ, and to drink his Blood, that we may continually dwell in him, and he in us.  Amen.

  – Prayer of Humble Access

Acccording to a Chinese idiom 割股疗亲, there is an ancient Chinese myth that a filial son can cure his parent’s diseases by cutting off meat from his leg and feeding it to them. Over time, the idiom has come to represent filial piety. This practice might seem superstitious, medieval, even barbaric to us, but it says something about the hierarchy of value in ancient Chinese society. It expresses the primacy of progenitors because the existence of their offspring depends on them. Like most other hierarchies in the world, Chinese filial piety is mediated by food.

The food chain that we imagine is more than an ecological description. It’s a hierarchy of consumption that says who gets to live at the expense of another. We seldom think about eating as an act of survival, but everything that we eat was once alive. Then, to insist that we should die a natural death is to place ourselves at the top of that hierarchy. That’s not too far off from implying that to eat another human being is a special kind of evil. 

Montaigne famously used the cannibalistic practices of the Tupinamba people in Brazil as an example of cultural relativism. But we shouldn’t be too distracted by the exceptional cases of cannibalism that do emerge in history: the Tupinamba (supposedly) ate the flesh of their dead enemies in a ceremonial honor ritual, not for subsistence.

In contrast, the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist ought to be understood precisely as consumption from necessity, as an act of survival. [1] This is the essence of real food: that which sustains and nourishes us. 

It would be reasonable to a bystander then to experience confusion, perhaps revulsion, that a religion would believe that they are subsisting on the flesh of their leader. But it goes beyond sacrilege if we are to take their claim seriously that their leader is also their God. This represents a complete contradiction, even a reversal, in the hierarchy of value that these religious folk espouse. It ought to make us sit up and notice.

The Christian scriptures are full of evidence that the Eucharistic practice is not anomalistic but central to understanding the Christian faith itself. 

In the creation narrative in Genesis 3, it could be argued that death is introduced not as a direct curse of God but as a result of being separated from the fruit of life. Mankind is banished from Eden and is forced to produce his own food “by the sweat of [his] brow,” but this food was not meant to sustain him indefinitely, hence it will only feed him “until [he] returns to the ground.” In other words, real food leads to real life. 

Man’s need for real food continues to echo through the biblical narrative. 

God demands a child sacrifice from Abraham, and it has to be his only beloved son, Isaac, in a parallel to the sacrificial practices of some sects in the ancient near east. But this sacrificial hierarchy is subverted when God interrupts the sacrifice and provides a sheep in place of Isaac. God implies that the sheep is a mere stand-in when He promises that He Himself will provide the real sacrifice.

The Israelites wander through the desert and are going to starve. In an act of miraculous intervention, God sends down manna, a bread-like substance, to sustain them throughout their journey. God’s only stipulation is that they do not gather it on the Sabbath. 

There are a multiplicity of laws relating to food and food production in the Levitical law, including sacrifices and diet restrictions. It created the categories of “clean” and “unclean” food. 

The full meaning of this is not apparent until Jesus, who bears the title of the Son of God, later also comes to be understood as the true sacrificial lamb of God, who takes away sin once and for all. His flesh and blood is (1) the true sacrifice (2) the bread of life (3) the food by which we are made clean. To partake in the Eucharist then is to intentionally embrace feeding on God.

In John 6:52, the onlookers argued fiercely amongst themselves: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Instead of watering down their supposition, Jesus confirms it: “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Jesus describes the Eucharist as a necessary act of survival. 

“Does this offend you?” Jesus continues to ask, “then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!” Any offense at the consumption of His human flesh can only be exponentially multiplied by the revelation of his divine nature. The act of the Eucharist can only be understood as nothing less than a scandal.

The Eucharist subverts the hierarchy of consumption. But it doesn’t end with a single twist: mankind does not end up on top. The followers of Christ were not called to take advantage of his sacrifice but follow him in it. “The disciple is not greater than his master.” In Romans 12, the Christian apostle Paul espoused the following dogma: “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.” The Eucharist doesn’t just subvert the hierarchy of values––it continuously transforms it.

The Eucharist reveals that the Christian religion is deeply transformative. It asks for nothing less than a revolution of our entire understanding of the nature of reality, and the reality of nature. It asserts that the hierarchies of value and consumption that we think make sense in this world are actually built around false notions and absurd power dynamics. The Eucharist invites us into a new world, a world of living sacrifices, and it does so by asking us to eat our God. 

Notes

[1] Without getting into an endless controversy, it suffices to say that many Christians do believe that the “real presence” of Christ is present in the elements of bread and wine, which are subsequently consumed.

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