How is bread made? Kernels of wheat that had to be crushed in their individuality to become something communal, flour, which had to endure fire to be baked into the substance that gives off the smell of life. Bread speaks of both joy and pain.
So too wine speaks in a double way. On the one hand it is a festive drink; it speaks of friendship, community, celebration, joy, recreation, victory. But, like bread, it has another side. Of what is wine made? Crushed grapes.
It is helpful for us to keep this ambiguity in mind whenever we participate in the Eucharist. Bread and wine are held up to be blessed by God and to become the flesh and blood of Christ.
On the one hand they represent everything in life and in the world that is healthy, young, beautiful, bursting with energy. They represent the goodness of the earth, the joy of human achievements, celebration, festivity, and God’s beautiful gift of creation. But that’s half of it. The Eucharist also holds up, in sacrifice, all that is being crushed, broken, and baked by violence. At the Eucharist, we hold up both: the world’s health and its achievements along with its depressions and failures and ask God to be with us in both. What we see in the Eucharist ---- the goodness and joy of life --- and the pains and shortcomings of that same life, is the same tension that we need to hold up each day within our ordinary lives.
Every time we invite Jesus into our homes, that is to say, into our life with all its light and dark sides and offer him the place of honor at our table, he takes the bread and cup and hands them to us saying, “Take and eat; this is my body; take and drink, this is my blood. Do this in memory of me.” Jesus is God-for us, God-with-us, God-within-us. Jesus is God giving himself completely, pouring himself out for us without reserve. He gives all that there is to give. In John’s Gospel, water becomes wine and wine becomes blood and blood and water eventually flow out of the pierced side of Jesus. That happens too in the Eucharist, and it happens in our lives. The task is to hold them both in our hands, as happens at Eucharist and then offer them up to God.
God bless! Have a wonderful week!