Eat or Be Last

Mixing metaphors, it’s a favorite pastime of mine. I used to collect mixed metaphors. Coworkers used to give them to me for free. One coworker was talking about doing a job in a client’s kitchen while the clients were living in the house. Everything was a big problem plus, as my coworker explained, “They smoked like a sieve.”

It’s probably too late to change hats in midstream, I guess.

As another coworker offered, “I feel like I’m grasping at strings.” Like maybe he should have been pulling straws to get what he wanted?

There are many, many metaphors expressed in scripture. Our problem isn’t so much mixing the metaphors (e.g. I am the vine and you are the sheep) as it is confusing the metaphor with the reality. Jesus uses the device of metaphor constantly. He does so for a reason, and this is really important so pay attention: He uses metaphor because there is nothing that is exactly like Him. As Aladdin’s genie sang, “You ain’t never had a friend like me.”

The world had never, and has never, seen anything like Jesus. We were not equipped to fully understand who and what he was. Even after two thousand years of trying to figure him out, we barely understand. So in an effort to give some frame of reference to himself Jesus resorted to parable and metaphor.

You see? Jesus is like a shepherd and he is like rock you can build on and he is like a man almost beaten to death by the side of the road that the religious leaders wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, and he is like a vine, and he is like a very forgiving father, and he is like an unfair employer. Yet he is not any of those things. He’s bigger than any of those things and all those things combined.

And his work, the things that Jesus came to accomplish, the Gospel, is not like anything we have ever run across before. Even though God designed the covenant of Moses to point to the coming of Jesus, and what Jesus accomplished on our behalf is like the Day of Atonement where the sins of the nation are transferred to the goat, nevertheless his work is not the Atonement. His work is like that but the Atonement picture is an inadequate and incomplete picture, it is not the reality. It is not even an analogy, a this-equals-that equation.

The Religious Thought Police would like to have me arrested right now, if they only knew I was thinking like this. Please don’t tell them about me. The Atonement inadequate? Very much so. Okay, we have the forgiveness of sins. Great! Where is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? Where is being “born from above?” Where is the creation of the “new man?” Where is being seated with Christ at the right hand of God? Where is the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace and the One New Man made up of all the kindred tongues and nations of the world? Where is the return of Christ and the resurrection from the dead? All this and more is the gospel. It’s not just four spiritual laws, you know. Besides, there is a sheep and a goat in the atonement ceremony. What do you do with them? To name just a few inadequacies.

As the writer of Hebrews tells us (chapter 8) the sanctuary of David, for example, and the succeeding Temple are only “shadows of the good things to come.” They’re only a picture, not the reality. The writer further tells us why the picture of the sanctuary is inadequate, “because the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins.” Oops! The Old Covenant was never reality. It never worked. It only pointed to Jesus who, as John the Baptist declared, “…takes away the sin of the world.” Now you’re talking.

I’ve heard the Gospel described through many a metaphor. It is like a courtroom scene where God the Father is the judge and the devil is the prosecuting attorney and Jesus is our defense attorney. It is like the Jewish Passover where Israel’s firstborn are spared and God leads them out of slavery. It is like the lamb in the bushes when Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac. It is like a kingdom. It is like a city of God. It is like a building. It is like a living temple, it is like a body, a corpus, it is like a new man, it is like all these things and yet the Gospel is still none of the above!

“This piece of unleavened bread I give you is like my body broken for you. This cup of the Seder dinner is like my blood which I am about to shed for you.” Now I know that Jesus did not use the word “like” in the accounts of the Last Supper. But look what happens when you don’t separate metaphor from reality:

During the early Reformation, say 1550 or so the followers of Luther and the followers of Zwingli, a Swiss reformer, had a falling out. Luther, a former Catholic and good son of the church, never questioned the doctrine of “transubstantiation,” which states that when a priest prays over the elements of the mass they “change substance” as the believer partakes of them, turning into the literal body and blood of Christ inside the believer. Zwingli advanced the theory of “consubstantiation” which states that Christ was with the substance but did not become the substance. Get it? Sort of?

Well the followers of the two reformers killed each other over who was right and who was wrong about this. In fact one faction would capture instigators of the other faction, tie their hands to their feet and then throw them into the North Sea, alive (briefly). Hallelujah.

In John chapter 6 Jesus says that unless we drink his blood and eat his flesh we have no life in us. That’s just plain creepy! And he follows that up by saying that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink. Real? And that’s how the church, being run by a bunch of non-imaginative legalistic literalists came up with the doctrine of transubstantiation. They couldn’t distinguish between metaphor and reality. The bread and wine turn into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus as you eat it? That’s even creepier!

What does Jesus mean when he says “real?” He means that the fish and the bread that they all just ate, five thousand of them, is temporal, transient, not forever, impermanent, you get hungry again. And in that sense what we would call “real” bread is declared unreal by Jesus and what we would call “symbolic” or “metaphorical” bread is real because “eating” is the metaphor for “believing” and if we believe in him he will, as he says plainly, raise us up (from the grave) on the last day. The bread is the symbol for faith, Rising from the dead is not a symbol it is reality.

Bread – metaphor. Resurrection – real. Can you tell the difference?

It is unbelievable. It is incredible. It is stark madness that the church has grown and thrived while its most fundamental practice, the practice of “communion” or the taking of the elements of the mass, which has defined everything from church membership to absolution from sin, has been essentially misunderstood and essentially misrepresented.

How did we become so neurotic that we severed the elements of communion from their context? Their context is the Passover meal. It’s Jewish. It is entirely Jewish from beginning (wine) to end (singing). When Jesus said “this is my body” he meant “this unleavened bread that we all traditionally eat every year at our Passover celebration is not about the Exodus, it is about me. Don’t confuse the picture with the reality.” And so we didn’t confuse the unleavened bread with the Exodus. We confused it with something else – the creepy notion that Jesus wants us to eat him.

Inconceivable! Have you ever read in Luke 14 where Jesus is adjuring the leading Pharisee not to invite his rich friends and relatives next time he gives a banquet? Jesus tells him to invite losers and the physically impaired instead. I am amazed. I am astounded that in all the years that have followed since Jesus uttered those words; someone has not started a new church movement condemning the practice of inviting one’s friends over for lunch. “The Church of the Dining Exclusion” it could have called itself. I mean given the influence of legalistic unimaginative literalists in the church’s history, how did we avoid this?

Given that we can’t tell the difference between the picture and the reality how did this not happen?

Wow. This whole discussion has really made me cranky.

I need a shot of love. Happy Easter.

The Gospel Crank

P.S What you just read is the second post this week. Keep reading to see part one. I know I am really sporadic in my publishing schedule, but that’s just the way the Crank rolls.