No Real Absence
A Sermon Delivered on the 178th Anniversary of the First Celebratory Mass at Nashotah House
By The Rev. Dr. Michael B. Cover
Gen. 14:18-20 | 1 Cor. 11:23-26 | John 6:51–58
It is an honor to be invited to deliver a homily on this festive occasion—a mass in commemoration of the first Christian Eucharist celebrated at Nashotah House on 16 October 1842. One can hardly help but stand, or better kneel, in awe of the fact that over the weeks and years following that first mass on these hallowed grounds, the body and blood of our Lord has continuously been offered by countless priest-professors who have numbered their days on this domain. Countless seminarians too have benefited from the daily offering of the Sacrament during their years of formation, and have received an enduring model of the sacramental ministry. The cumulative effect of the works and days of these Nashotah priests, professors, and seminarians is surely one of Christ’s glories in Wisconsin. One hears it in the bell and feels it in the bones, in summer or in winter; in the boisterous cacophony of an August swim; or equally in the contemplative, snow-clad silence of a walk in January. Our girls talk about that “Nashotah feeling”, when the van turns off of Oakwood Drive onto Mission Road, heading toward a nexus of friendship and fellowship, seasoned by faith in Jesus Christ witnessed in the Scriptures once delivered and realized in the sharing of a common, holy meal. “Real presence” indeed, perceived palpably by the spiritual senses of the young.
Even during happier times, Nashotah’s unswerving witness to Christ’s real presence has been as salt and light to the wider Church. That witness has grown all the more important during the seemingly endless months of COVID. Ever since March, when many of the churches in this diocese began to shut their doors and their altars, the Eucharist has become a rare thing. Valid concerns about contagion have sparked unceasing debate about the “safety” of the Eucharist—a phrase which however intelligible must always ring as strange—and many bishops and priests, erring on the side of extreme caution, have only recently begun to find alternative ways to distribute the Sacrament to individuals. Absent any communal context of worship (it is hard to overestimate what a privilege you have here!), throughout the spring and summer, many Christians have had no recourse to the Sacrament; and are only now beginning to receive it again occasionally in parking lots, and still not in fellowship with the body gathered. One may fairly speak, at least at the affective level, of a “real absence” wrought by this virus. It’s full effects on the church have yet to be perceived.
Indeed, even in the early days of the pandemic, Pope Francis warned that the church, if she permitted such an absence, was sure in later years to feel its suffocating effects. “Pizzas will be delivered,” said the Pope; “but not the Body and Blood of Jesus.” In an unexpected way, the pandemic has revealed the latent social-clubbish ecclesiology of many, which makes the Eucharist a luncheon option, and considers Summerfest and Pentecost equal kinds of “risky gathering”. Bowing as if by fiat to the high priesthood of public health, many churches have failed to see the invisible and spiritual damage they would suffer if they did not find alternative ways to administer the Sacrament. Compare this with the witness of one Filipino priest, who at height of the pandemic donned a literal hazmat suit and entered into the homes of his parishioners to share with them the Body and the Blood.
The Fool’s words from King Lear sadly characterize our own days:
When priests are more in word than matter,
When brewers mar their malt with water,
When nobles are their tailors' tutors,
No heretics burned but wenches' suitors,
..
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion.
Some, of course, have denied the seriousness of the whole situation as the frivolous concern of Anglo-Catholic piety. Their counsel has been: “just wait; be patient.” While of course many in the Church have gone for various seasons and for various reasons without being able to receive the Sacrament, many would have nearly died to receive it had there been any chance.
We may think, as an example, of the great Jesuit Missionary, Walter Cizek (1904-1984), apostle to the Soviets—sentenced to five years of solitary confinement in the notorious Lubianka prison in Moscow. How often he prayed for a visitor to bring the Eucharist. While daily he made frequent use of spiritual communion, yet he so hungered and thirsted for the Eucharist that he wondered in his memoirs whether he might not have endured his hardships easier had the mass been available. Later, during his twenty years in a Siberian work camp, Cizek and fellow prisoners would daily risk their lives to hold secret eucharists, using a pilfered bit of bread, stored in a pillowcase; and a little wine bottled in a canteen.
In light of this and countless other witnesses, it seems cowardice at this moment merely to counsel patience and equanimity; we do better to pray with fervent conviction for the restoral of our common life and order. COVID is nothing less than a fiendish dragon that has alighted upon our churchtops and wrought in its wake a spiritual desolation. The whole period might be aptly called the Babylonia Captivity of the Christian Eucharist. And to the naysayer who retorts, with a prim sagacity, that we just need to be patient until all of this is over, I myself will not fail to respond with the lamentation of the prophet Jeremiah:
אֵ יכָה יָשְׁ בָ ה בָדָ ד הָעִ יר רַ בָ תִ י עָ ם
הָיְׁתָ ה כְׁ אַ לְׁמָ נָה רַ בָתִ י בַגֹּויִ ם
How lonely sits the city, which was once so full of people!
How like a widow she has become, who was great among the nations!
I realize, of course, that here at Nashotah house, I am literally preaching to the choir (or would be if we were in there). As a visitor, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your sacrificial witness over these past months to the centrality of the Blessed Sacrament. You have been as Melchizedek to many. In a season of captivity, you have brought forth your gifts of bread and wine with unencumbered courage.
Still. I suspect many of us come to the altar tonight feeling a hunger; a hunger not unlike that felt by the crowd in John 6, who follow Jesus across the lake, seeking something more. “Our ancestors ate manna in the wilderness” they implored him. And so might we lament: “Our churches have had daily communal Eucharists to nourish their faith. What now Jesus, will you give to us, as a sign in this season of captivity?”
Jesus beholds the questions and the spiritual hunger of the crowd, both then and now, with empathy. In response, after what must have seemed like an eternal reflective silence by the living Word, Jesus draws a breath and offers what is perhaps the most elaborate homily on a single scriptural verse in the whole of the New Testament. Taking as his starting point the passage that is given to him, “he gave them bread from heaven to eat,” Jesus offers a sequential exegesis of every word, every crumb, ever grain in the verse, revealing that both then as today, the scriptures are food indeed.
The propers for the feast of Corpus Christi, which we are using today, do not give us the entire homily to consider. Rather, they focus on the final culminating lines, which are Jesus’ interpretation of the verb “to eat.” In what follows, I would like first to look back to Jesus’ exegesis at the beginning of the homily (6:32), and then focus on two verses from the Gospel this evening (6:51 and 54), which comprise the climax of the homily. I pray that by thus chewing on the Word together we may find spiritual nourishment for the lean year in which we live.
Before saying anything on the subject of “eating,” Jesus first focuses his audience’s attention on the words, “he gave.” “He gave them bread from heaven to eat”; but, one might ask, “who is ‘He’?”
Jesus rightly intuits that the crowd considers the subject of this giving to be Moses, God’s chosen Levitical emissary and human intermediary. So too, in our own context, it can be tempting to feel that the Christian priest who bears the primary responsibility for feeding the crowds with bread from heaven. To the contrary, Jesus’ words serve as a timely reminder that it is not Moses or the priest, but God who gives the “true bread” in his Son, the Word. It is often said at ordinations that the Sacrament(s) belongs, not to the priest but to Christ. Jesus’ opening words in the Bread of Life discourse pass the buck even higher: it is ultimately the Father, from whom the sacramental ministry flows. Let us then like Jesus not relent in storming heaven and asking our Father to “give us this day our daily bread,” the spiritual and sacramental nourishment that we need.
But what is this “true bread” that Jesus promises? The term is notoriously slippery in Jesus’ homily. Rather than referring only to the Eucharist, Jesus uses the phrase “true bread” in a three-fold manner, to indicate a three-fold gift. He speaks first of God’s revelation of the Word, given in the Incarnation; second, Jesus gives his own flesh on the cross at Golgotha; third, Jesus gives the Holy Eucharist, the enduring food of the Church.
Against the backdrop of this threefold gift: Incarnation, Cross, and Eucharist—each framed by the glory of the Resurrection—we may hear afresh the words of John 6:51:
I am the living bread, who has come down from heaven;
If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever;
And the bread which I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world. In these words, Jesus finally turns to the action of “eating.” But what does this eating refer to? Is it all sacramental, as Raymond Brown suggested (esp. John 6:51b)? (1) Or, does this first eating in John 6:51 refer to faith? Similarly, what is the flesh that Jesus speaks of: is it here the sacramental body of Christ; or at this stage in the homily, does it merely refer to the flesh of Jesus given once for all on the cross?
Advocating for the second option, German Roman Catholic theologian Heinz Schürmann saw in Jesus’ homily a gradual development of all three levels of eating. In the first instance, in John 6:51, Jesus speaks about eating as belief in the flesh of the Crucified One. Subsequently, in John 6:54, where both flesh and blood are mentioned together, the Eucharist proper comes into view. Critically, the Greek words for eating change between these two verses. Whereas in John 6:51, Jesus uses the scriptural word φαγεῖν, in John 6:54 Jesus supplies as a homiletic alternative the verb τρώγων. τρώγων would seem to be a more colloquial alternative to φαγεῖν, meaning “to munch, nibble, or gnaw.” (2) There are important differences as well of verbal aspect: whereas the aorist φαγεῖν might point to the “once and for all eating of faith,” a definitive, punctiliar belief in the Crucified One (or is this perhaps the “ingressive” aorist of the beginning of faith?); the continuous present aspect of τρώγων points instead to the repeated action of Eucharistic reception, week in and week out.
Where then, one might ask, is the third level of eating present: eating as belief in the words and teaching of the incarnate Jesus, prior to his crucifixion? Here, Jesus’ verb τρώγων in John 6:54 is again instructive. As John Behr notes in his recent study of this “Paschal Gospel,” the verb τρώγειν was interpreted by many of the Fathers to indicate not only the eating of the Sacrament, but also the continuous chewing of the Word in Scripture. In these few verses, Jesus invites his hungry hearers to eat through the reading of Scripture, through faith in the Crucified One, and through the reception of the Sacrament. The three kinds of eating are woven together in a kind of three-fold cord that cannot be easily broken.
What do these morsels, taken together in our reflection on the Gospel, tell the Christian priest about ministry during this COVID captivity of the Christian Eucharist. I would like to distill three concrete suggestions.
First, in all wisdom and prudence, continue as Melchizedek to bring forth bread and wine. Thinking of the wider context of Genesis 14 and the battle of “the four against the five”: remember that Lot—the symbol of every Christian in your charge—has not long before been taken captive by sin and the enemy; minister to him, as the faithful Abraham, with the words of Scripture; and as the priest Melchizedek, with the Sacrament of the bread and wine.
Second, do not forget that the Sacrament does not stand alone: it is bound up in a three-fold cord with Scripture and the Trinitarian faith. There may be moments when you as a priest may not be able to serve, as Shakespeare says, “in matter”; do not, in those moments, fail to gather “in Word.” Returning again to Genesis 14: it was with the two edged sword of the Word of God that Abraham went to war to rescue the captive Lot, and to deliver him from the kings of Elam, Goiim, Shinar, and Ellasar. Do not flee, like the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, hired hands rather than shepherds. When the Word cannot be given in Sacrament, He is mightily present in Scripture.
This brings us to a third and perhaps most important consideration: remember that God is not, has never been, nor can ever be “really” absent. It is worth lingering for a moment to consider why this is so.
On the one hand, I began this homily by noting that there is a real detriment to the Christian and the corpus mysticum when the Sacrament cannot be received. I do not wish to retract this one iota. I also suggested that in terms of “affective salience,” this may feel like “real absence,” or better, the absence of the sacramental “real presence.” This should not lead to the additional Manichean conclusion that God is “really absent.” As we have seen in our common reading, even before the institution of the Sacrament, Christ’s flesh could be feasted on by faith. Indeed, even before the Incarnation—which may not be an episode in the biography of the Word, but certain is a moment in the history of salvation—the Word “came to his own” in prophecy and theophany, in Lady Wisdom and Job’s whirlwind. There has never been a time when He was not; there has never been a place where He was not. Absence is not as “real” as Presence is “real”, just as “nothing” is never another kind of “something.” Privation is not the substantial opposite of gift and relationship, but only its thin and feeble shadow.
From this perspective we may look back on the Nashotah woods of 1842 with different eyes. The altar lay unhewn, the sacrifice of the mass, unoffered. And yet within these quiet autumn woods, there was as yet a Presence, proclaiming in every falling leaf the glory of the Crucified One. There is no “real” absence. But now, thanks be to our Lord Jesus Christ, there is Real Presence.
Amen.
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Rudolf Bultmann (The Gospel of John) similarly suggested that John 6:51c begins the “Eucharistic coda” of the homily.
2 Τρώγειν is also used as the koine present tense, in place of ἐσθίειν. The question of a qualitative distinction in the kinds of eating here remains an open question.
The Rev. Michael B. Cover (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is Associate Professor of Theology (Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity) at Marquette University. Born in Boston and reared in Texas, he returned to Massachusetts to study the Classics at Harvard, and then read Greek literature at St. Cross College, Oxford. A graduate of Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School, he was ordained priest in 2010 in the Diocese of Dallas. His research interests include Paul, early Judaism, and Hellenistic literature and philosophy. His scholarly articles appear in The Harvard Theological Review, New Testament Studies, The Journal of Biblical Literature, The Studia Philonica Annual, and a variety of edited volumes. His first book, Lifting the Veil (Walter de Gruyter, 2015), explored the interpretation of the Old Testament in the New, particularly in the Pauline letters. He is a member of the current round of Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue in America (ARC-USA) on reconciliation in the Holy Scriptures. He and his wife, Susanna, live in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, with their three daughters. He is a priest associate at Trinity Episcopal Church in Wauwatosa and a member of the Nashotah House Board of Visitors.
Image (homepage) of Nashotah House President, The Rev. Dr. George G. Carter and The Rev. Dr. Theodore M. Riley, professor of Ecclesiastical History and Polity, courtesy Frances Donaldson Library, Nashotah House, circa 1868. Known as The Preaching Cross, the cross stands at the place of the celebration of the first Holy Eucharist at Nashotah House.