Remembering the Forgotten Messianic Feast

Nurturers of the Real #4

This is the fourth part of an essay series which takes as its inspiration something Wendell Berry said in The Unsettling of America: “Over and over again, spring after spring, the questing mind, idealist and visionary, must pass through the planting to become nurturer of the real.” Resounding in the background, too, as if across an empty canyon where our hearts used to be, is Vine Deloria's rhetorical question to the sunset of the West: “Can the white man's religion make one final effort to be real?” The first essay in the series was All Over the World the Faces of Living Ones Are Alike, which is free for anyone to read.

Fresco, catacombs of Priscilla (2nd-3rd cent.)

The fact that Jesus had a deep relationship with physical attitudes, the language of the body, and the world of signs is of great significance, because precisely in this it becomes clear that he lived in an unbroken relationship to human physicality. Jesus is not alien, helpless, or disturbed in relation to the body; for him, body and bodiliness are indispensable aspects of humanity. Jesus takes the body and its needs seriously. No one could have said of him what antiquity said of the pagan philosopher Plotinus and what Athanasius reported of the Christian hermit Antony: Plotinus “lived like someone who was ashamed to have been born into a human body,” and Antony “blushed” when he ate in the presence of others.

—Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth

I want to begin this retelling of the Messianic Feast in a strangely lonely place, and end it in a beautiful and a joyful one. First, though, the lonely place—in a Sumerian temple five thousand years ago, with this statue of the god Enlil, or “Lord Wind”:

In ancient Sumeria, a stone statue like this—silent, motionless, windless, breathless, and frozen in time—was imagined as a body of a god. Of course, not the only body—the god himself was transcendent, and could embody himself in other forms, such as wind and sky, in the case of Enlil, or other forces of nature, for other gods—but his real presence was in the statue, too: Priests would blow the breath of life into its nostrils, confirming this.

And priests would bathe and dress the statue, as a way of bathing and dressing the god thus carved, and they would take food and drink offered by the faceless masses and place it before the statue, who would symbolically eat it in the form of the priests eating it themselves later.

Normal people weren’t allowed inside the sanctuary, only priests. But normal people—or at least the wealthy—could have limestone or alabaster avatars made of themselves, eyes wide open and hands clasped in catatonic piety, staring forever at the god in bright-eyed devotion, breathless except for the first breath of priests, who would arrange those lifeless statues in rings around the lifeless statue of the god, in the stone temple kept holy—meaning, set apart as exempt from the flux of nature—in what must have been the early dawn of what we’d now call virtual reality:

Votive figurines, Early Dynastic Sumeria. The Apple Vision Pro and Oculus Rift were born here, after Adam ate the apple and tore a rift between himself and God.

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Here comes the paywall, placing my hat on the sidewalk of the world as a writer. Past the wall, you'll find the rest of the essay, an easily printable PDF version of it, a recording of me reading the essay in soundscape that fits the mood—a seashore maybe, or bustling city, or a sunlit forest—and the comment section, where you're safe to say what you really think.

-graham

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The prophetic critique of idolatry was a critique of just this kind of reciprocal virtualization:

They have mouths, but cannot speak;

Eyes, but cannot see.

They have ears, but cannot hear;

Noses, but cannot smell.

They have hands, but cannot feel;

Feet, but they cannot walk,

Nor utter a sound with their throat.

And those making them will become like them—

(Ps. 115:5-8)

—sleepwalkers, religious zombies worshiping the zombie constructs of their own imaginations.

It is in light of this self-virtualizing religiosity of their neighbors in the Near East that the vision of the ancient Hebrews—astonishing and radiant—comes as such strange and beautiful medicine, for they saw true temple life as something quite different:

Worshipers at Lalibela, Ethiopia (photograph by Darren Ornitz; click for source)

—they saw it as a flickering green garden, the Breath of Life himself moving through it like a refreshing breeze:

Elohim created humanity in his image. In the image of Elohim he created him, male and female he created them...Yahweh Elohim formed the man out of the dust of the ground and he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life—so the man became a refreshing breath. Then Yahweh Elohim planted a garden in the east, and there he placed the man whom he had formed, and Yahweh Elohim caused to sprout from the ground every tree of aching beauty and good as food... (Gen. 1:27; 2:7-9)

This is Sumerian religion flipped on its head, blown apart by the Hebrew revelation: In the place of worshipers making stone avatars of themselves and giving them to priests to ritually breathe the breath of life into them, arranging them in stone temples to stare lifelessly at the lifeless avatars of the gods, in Genesis the One whom the Hebrews called the Living God fashions living images of himself from the living Earth—warm bodies of human clay, male and female alike—and plants them in a garden, a living temple, which itself—as these living images sprout up like flowers, coming alive in the breath of God—is coming alive, also, as a reciprocal blossoming of both the human body and the plants.

And I think it’s in the light of just this ancient Hebrew “antireligious” spirit of real life over pious simulation that Yeshua’s parable of the Son of Man, the truly human king who arrives at the end of history, is meant to shine:

The king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you invited me in; I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the harmonious (tzadik—righteous, or right-related) will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? And when did we see you a stranger and invite you in? Or naked and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?’ And answering, the king will say to them, ‘Amen, I tell you, whatever you did to one of the least of these my brothers, you did to me.’ (Mt. 25:34-40)

The way to attend to the Living God embodied in his living image, the messianic king, is not primarily “religious” or “liturgical” as conventionally understood; it is not to ritually bathe and dress, to place food and drink before an artificial image-body of the god, giving this sacred but lifeless object the lion’s share of our priestly attention. It is instead to share food and drink and homes and clothing, unselfconsciously, without a sense of it being a “religious” act at all, with real people in the real world who actually need them: “the least of these, my brothers.”

And it is also to give our human presence, our deep listening and empathy to these living images of God—our human attention and human compassion, face to face, heart to heart, as only a human person can, like a refreshing breath: “I was sick and you visited me; I was in prison and you came to me.”

“Love your enemies,” said Yeshua, “so that you may be children of your Father in the sky. For he causes his sun to rise on both the wayward and the wholesome, and sends his rain on both the harmonious and discordant alike” (Mt. 5:44-45).

The sun in the sky is our Father’s sun; the rain is his rain, also, falling as the rays of sunlight do, to bring forth food from the Earth, to care for us, his beloved children:

You send forth springs gushing from the wadis,

Which run between the hills, and let every living thing in the fields drink their fill:

The wild asses quench their thirst,

The creatures of the sky are coming to dwell along the waters:

Look, they're singing from among the branches!

He's letting the hillsides drink from his lofty ascent,

Quenching the Earth with the fruitfulness of his works.

He springs up grass for all the lumbering beasts

And the aromatic herbs and grasses of the field, as Adam's servants,

That he might bring forth bread from the Earth

And wine to make our hearts rejoice, oil to make our faces shine,

Bread to refresh and strengthen our hearts…

(Ps. 104:10-15, my version)

Sun and rain are embodiments of the love of God; that’s why they exist. By means of them—by means of the bread and wine they become—the Father cares for us in our physical bodies, and in our hearts, also, both nourishing us and encouraging us to unfold and blossom and grow into greater fullness of life, alluring us out of ourselves by their beauty.

The Father’s body as sunlight and rain, after many transformations, becomes our bodies, also. (photo by Justin Stenning, Creative Commons)

So, to care for others as unselfconsciously as the Father does, friend and enemy alike, is to live as human sunshine and human drops of rain. And to receive divine love like that, simply and unselfconsciously, as children of our One Father in the sky, is to live as little human songbirds, and also little human flowers:

Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your Father in the sky feeds them. Look deeply into the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his radiance clothed himself like one of these.

This giving and receiving of the Father’s love as transformations of the sun and rain are woven together—or at least ought to be woven together—in the sharing of bread and wine of the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper (which, since the phrase sounds weak in English, I amplify it as ‘the Messianic Feast’): a ritual memory and bodily participation in the self-emptying love of God which animates the whole cosmos: The sun “dies,” shedding its light to become the body of the grass; rain falls to ground and “dies,” and is reborn as the sunlight of human fellowship, wine—every ray of light, every drop of rain rippling outward as it were from the one astonishing death and new life blooming at the heart of the universe: Yeshua, the Son of Man hanging from the tree of life and gushing fountains of blood and water: This bread is my body, shattered for you; this wine is my lifeblood, poured out for you and for the life of the world.

The symbiosis of giving and receiving in the Messianic Feast are not abstract, but concrete: Those who have enough to eat, share it with those who don’t; those who have loving, healing, liberating deep attention to offer, give it to those imprisoned inside themselves for lack of it.

These two dimensions of love—feeding one another’s bodies by sharing food and drink, nourishing one another’s hearts by speaking from the heart and truly listening—together constitute table fellowship, the core of the sacred life of the Hebrews, and a primary image of the fullness of the Messianic age to come: “Many will come from the east and the west, and they will recline at table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of the sky” (Mt. 8:11). “Blessed is he who eats bread in the kingdom of God” (Lk 14:15). “The kingdom of the sky may be compared to a king who made a wedding feast for his son” (Mt. 22:2). “A lavish banquet for all peoples—a banquet of aged wine—of rich food, of choice marrow, of aged wine well refined…” (Is. 25:6)

These are metaphors for a future age on Earth whose humane tenderness and overflowing abundance are scarcely conceivable in this present age of ours, overwhelmed by dog-eat-dog brutality—this beast, this dogpile of the human pyramid clamoring over itself, clawing itself in the eyes trying to scramble to the top of nothing—but the Good News of Yeshua is precisely that the future age is already dawning on Earth here and now: “Behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Lk. 17:21). “The Breath of Adonai is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim Good News to the poor” (Lk. 4:18).

This Good News for the poor is not just words for the impoverished mind, but also food for the famished body. In Yeshua, the Word is incarnate; the bread of the kingdom is huge chunks of bread for eating with your mouth:

Yeshua called his students and said, “I have compassion for the crowd, because they’ve stayed with me for three days now and have nothing to eat. I don’t want to send them away hungry, because they might pass out on the way.” His students said to him, “Where in this wasteland is enough bread to satisfy such a large crowd?” Yeshua said to them, “How many loaves do you have?” “Seven,” they said, “and a few small fish.” After directing the crowd to recline on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish; and after giving thanks, he broke them. And he began giving them to his students, and his students to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. (Mt 15:32-36)

Satisfied! And here the miracle is not in pulling bread and fish out of thin air, but in rippling the generosity of his students outward, who also are hungry, and give away the only food they have, without complaint.

Eating and drinking together, face to face, in the miracle of shared abundance while the Empire lurks in the background, confused at the joy of all these scumbags refusing to feel properly oppressed: That’s the look of the Messianic Feast. (Yeshua’s dirtbag follower, Philip, picking up leftovers, as seen in The Chosen)

And the miracle is also that in Yeshua’s table fellowship of the grass, those who have learned to feel alienated from one another in their minds—either by having, or not having, money; or by having, or not having, ritual purity; or by having, or not having, Jewish identity—are brought into renewed communion with one another, becoming a new social body: “The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’” (Mt 11:19)

Eating and drinking, not just talking and preaching: For Yeshua, the symbolic world of the mental stratosphere, and the symbiotic world of sunshine and rain, and of grass and bread, and of eating and drinking them in the mammal flesh of the body, are one and the same world—the only real world there is.

And so this eating and drinking of his is to continue in our own eating and drinking, as our joyfully subversive way of life as his social body: “When you host a banquet,” Yeshua says, “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind and you will be blessed, since they cannot repay you” (Lk 14:13-14).

Such reckless generosity, such brazen and rehumanizing disregard for social and economic decorum, not only anticipates the Messianic Age to come, but also begins to realize that age here and now; only a feast can symbolize a feast. And only a feast which actually satisfies the hunger of actually hungry people in their bodies, and also satisfies their hunger for renewed communion with God by renewing their communion with God in one another, face to face, is in fact the Messianic Feast, and not just some religious ritual, followed by hanging out and partying:

When you meet together in the same place, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper— for each one takes his own supper beforehand, and one goes hungry while another gets drunk...Do you despise God’s community and try to humiliate those who have nothing? (1 Cor. 11:20-21)

By divorcing the ritual from the everyday, earthy satisfaction of the human body’s need for food and fellowship, the rich Christians of Corinth were living high off the hog separately in their own homes, then coming together for spiritual ‘fulfillment’ and getting sloshed off the ritual wine at their own tables with their own cliques—while the poor who showed up to the Lord’s Supper, the Messianic Feast, imagining it would be exactly what it sounded like, had to sit there and watch them, maybe sing a hymn or two, then leave again as hungry as they came, totally ignored: When it’s like that, it’s not the Lord’s Supper, no matter what ritual prayers are said, or not said, says Paul.

But when, in fact, the human dogpile-subverting abundance and generosity of a shared feast brings people who would otherwise be separated into renewed fellowship with one another, while also renewing their earthly bodies together here on Earth—this Earth, the one we can touch with our human bodies—then a new world is dawning: The Messiah’s world, here and now.

And it is precisely this eschatological dimension of the Messianic Feast which is lost, except in our own imaginations, when we fixate—like dogs looking at the hand, not what the hand is pointing to—on the questions of which religious bodies have “valid” sacraments, and which don’t, and how, and in what way, Messiah’s presence is “in” the bread and “in” the wine, invoked or convoked there by priests, both of which—in a strange reversal of the miracle of the loaves and fishes—have been diminished to crumbs and sips, then abstracted from the table fellowship which alone invokes our presence to one another, is the gist of what I think my man, Sherrard, is saying:

The Church and the Eucharist have lost their meaning as an integrating and creative focus of communal life. From being a “common cause” they have become a means of individual salvation. The Christian’s own religiousness has become his chief preoccupation. And in this context the concept of the Christian’s responsibility for the fate of the world has inescapably lost all meaning.

(Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition)

And I think my man, Father Alexander Schmemann, is saying much the same thing:

More and more I am convinced that the root of the evil about which I wrote (i.e., the isolation of the Eucharist from its eschatological, hence cosmic and historical, meaning) is not in the West, but in Byzantium, in undigested Platonism, in the platonic heresy about time. (Journals)

And herein lies the root of the problem my man, Vine Deloria, Jr., saw like an eagle swooping over the selfmade deserts of Christianity, with his caustic vision:

While Christianity can project the reality of the afterlife—time and eternity—it appears to be incapable of providing any reality to the life in which we are here and now presently engaged—space and the planet Earth. (God Is Red)

And I wish all three of these men were still alive today to see the great rewilding of Christianity that’s unfolding now, so many of us doing what it takes to return to the human body and Mother Earth, and especially to return to one another, face to face, after four hundred years of exile in an Egypt of leftminded abstractions, and how we’re on the long road out, finding each other in the wilderness, and how even here and now, in the concrete wastelands of it all, not utopia,

The desert and the dry ground will be glad,

The dry places will be full of joy.

Flowers will grow there.

Like the first crocus in the spring,

The desert will bloom with flowers,

It will be very glad and shout for joy…

Water will pour out in dry places.

Streams will flow in the desert.

The burning sand will become a pool of water.

The thirsty ground will become bubbling springs.

In the places where wild dogs once lay down,

Tall grass and papyrus will grow. (Is. 35:1-2, 6-7, NIRV)

And the sign that this is happening will also be the means by which it does so: You’ll see us in the grass, breaking bread, pouring wine, dancing hymns to our Great Father, and sharing a feast as if it’s the end of the world as we know it, and it will be.

love always in Messiah,

the Father’s horn-o’-plenty he keeps dumping on us wretched children of the Earth,

again and again, forever,

-graham

The new world is coming, and is already here. (Ron Finley in his garden in South Central LA)

Nurturers 4 The Messianic Feast

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