The Hard Saying

There are only two things the internet will tell a curious teenager about Communion, and they contradict each other.

The first is that it’s cannibalism — that Christians claim to eat a man’s body, and that this is either barbaric or embarrassing depending on who’s saying it. The second is that it’s a symbol, a memorial, a piece of bread that means something the way a wedding ring means something. Most people who hold the second view hold it partly to escape the first.

What almost nobody tells that teenager is that the Church spent fifteen hundred years holding neither position, and that the objection he’s raising is not a modern one. It was raised in the sixth chapter of John, out loud, by people standing in front of Christ. It cost Him most of His followers.

This is a story about a boy who worked all of that out on his own, correctly, and then got stuck.

The old man’s kitchen table had a scar across it where something hot had been set down once, decades ago, and never sanded out. The boy had been tracing it with his thumbnail for about ten minutes before he said what he’d come to say.

“I think it’s cannibalism.”

Elias set down his cup. “Good.”

“That’s not — " The boy stopped. He’d rehearsed three different arguments on the walk over, and none of them had a branch for good. “You’re not going to say I’m wrong?”

“I’m going to say you’re the first person to sit at this table in about four years who actually followed the sentence to the end. Everybody else stops in the middle and says something warm.” Elias turned his cup a quarter turn on the wood. “Say the whole thing. I want to hear the reasoning, not the conclusion.”

So the boy said it, in order, the way he’d built it. If the bread is really Christ’s body, then eating it is eating a person, and eating a person is cannibalism — the word means what it means, you don’t get to keep the practice and drop the label just because you don’t like how it sounds. But if it isn’t really His body, then everyone who bows to it and calls it God is doing something worse than eating a person. They’re worshipping bread. So it’s one or the other. It has to be. There’s no third door.

“No,” Elias agreed. “There isn’t a third door. Not the way you’ve built the hallway.” He got up, took a Bible off the shelf behind him, and put it on the table facing the boy. “Read the sixth chapter of John. Out loud, if you can stand it. Start at verse fifty-two and don’t stop until the crowd leaves.”

The boy read. He had a flat, careful reading voice, the kind that doesn’t perform.

He read the Jews arguing among themselves, How can this Man give us His flesh to eat? He read Christ’s answer, which did not soften anything. He read to the end of the discourse, and then a few verses past it, to the place where it says that from that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.

He stopped. Looked up.

“He didn’t fix it.”

“No.”

“They misunderstood Him and He didn’t fix it.” The boy went back a page, checking, because that was the sort of thing he checked. “He does that other places. The woman at the well thinks He’s talking about actual water and He explains. Nicodemus thinks he has to be born physically again and He explains. Every single time somebody takes Him too literally, He says so.” He put his finger on the page. “Here they take Him literally and He says it again harder.”

“Say more about harder.”

“He keeps repeating it. Flesh, blood, eat, drink, over and over, like he’s — " the boy searched for it " — like he’s making sure nobody can walk away thinking they heard him wrong.”

Elias nodded slowly. “There’s a detail underneath that you can’t see in English. In the earlier part of the discourse the word for eat is the ordinary one. Then, right at the point where they object, He switches to a different verb. Trōgō. It’s a coarser word — it’s the one you’d use for an animal chewing, gnawing, working at something with its teeth. Given the chance to make it gentler, He made it worse.” He tipped his head toward the page. “And then He let the room empty out. That’s the part I’d want you to sit with. Whole crowds of His own disciples left permanently over one teaching, and He watched them go and turned to the Twelve and asked if they wanted to leave too. He did not run after them with a clarification.”

“So He meant it literally.”

“He meant it really. Hold the difference, because it’s the whole thing.”

“Okay.” The boy pushed the Bible back an inch. “Then it’s cannibalism. You just proved my first branch instead of my second one.”

“Define cannibalism for me.”

“Eating human flesh.”

“Be more precise. You’re capable of it.” Elias held up one finger at a time. “A man is killed. His body is dead. It’s cut apart, and the pieces are distributed, and each person gets a different piece, and when the pieces are gone there is no more man. He is diminished by exactly what you consumed, and you are nourished — turned into more of yourself — by his death. That’s the thing the word names. Every part of that matters.”

The boy was quiet for a second, running it.

“Now the chalice,” Elias said. “Christ is not dead; He is risen, and He doesn’t die again. He is not cut apart — every communicant receives Him whole, not a portion, and the ten-thousandth person to commune receives exactly as much of Him as the first. He is not diminished. And the direction is backwards: you don’t turn Him into you. He turns you into Him. Cannibalism is a living man consuming a dead one and staying what he was. This is a living God being consumed by dead men and making them alive.” He shrugged. “Same three words in the definition. Not one of the actual conditions holds. It’s not a softer version of cannibalism. It’s the opposite operation.”

“That’s — " the boy stopped, restarted. “That’s not a dodge?”

“Test it and see. That’s what a definition is for.” Elias smiled slightly. “And for what it’s worth, you’re in good company having the thought. The Romans accused the early Christians of exactly this. Word got out that they met before dawn and ate somebody’s body, and the rumor wrote itself. The Church never handled it by saying no, no, it’s only a symbol. That answer was available and nobody took it. For about fifteen centuries, nobody took it.”

The boy’s jaw set in a way Elias recognized, because it was the good version of stubborn — the kind that has one more real objection and isn’t going to pretend it’s satisfied.

“Where does the Bible say all that? The whole He turns you into Him thing. Show me the verse.”

“Paul. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? And a chapter later he says a man can eat it unworthily and bring judgment on himself, which is a strange thing to say about a cracker.” Elias let that sit. “But you asked the smaller question. Ask the bigger one.”

“What’s the bigger one?”

“You just asked me to show you a verse. Fine. Now show me the verse that says a verse is the only thing I’m allowed to show you.”

The boy opened his mouth and then didn’t say anything.

“Take your time. It’s not a trick. It’s just that the rule you’re using — if it isn’t in the Bible it isn’t binding — isn’t itself in the Bible, and it’s about five hundred years old. Paul writes to the Thessalonians and tells them to hold to the traditions they were taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter from us. He puts both in the same sentence and doesn’t rank them. And when he wants to name the pillar and ground of the truth, he doesn’t name a book. He names the Church.”

“But the Church could be wrong. A book can’t change.”

“A book can’t be wrong, and a book also can’t tell you what it means. Somebody always reads it.” Elias tapped the table twice, gently. “Here’s the part I’d actually think about tonight. That Bible in front of you has a table of contents. Twenty-seven books in the back half. There were other letters and other gospels circulating in those centuries, and something had to sort them. No angel handed anyone the list. It was Christians — bishops, councils, the same Church that was already gathering every Sunday to do the thing in John 6 — who recognized which books were the real ones. If that Church was so corrupt that it got the Eucharist wrong for a millennium and a half, then you have to explain why you trust its table of contents. You can’t take the list and throw away the people who made it. That’s not skepticism. That’s just picking.”

“So you’re saying I have to trust them about everything.”

“I’m saying you already trust them about the biggest thing you own, and you didn’t know it, and now you do.” Elias picked his cup back up. “What you do with that is yours.”

The boy stayed another hour and lost the argument about four more times, which he took better than most grown men do. When he left he took the Bible with him, because Elias made him, and he read the sixth chapter of John twice more that week — once fast, to check that he’d remembered it right, and once slowly, stopping at the part where the crowds leave.

He didn’t decide anything. He just stopped being able to say it’s obviously a metaphor in the flat voice he used to say it in.

That’s usually how it starts.

The two options a teenager gets handed online are both younger than they sound. The symbolic reading of the Lord’s Supper has a birthday: it arrives in the 1520s, with Zwingli, who argued that when Christ said this is My body He meant this signifies My body — though Greek had a perfectly ordinary word for signifies and the text doesn’t use it. It uses is. Before that argument, East and West disagreed about a great many things and did not disagree about this.

What the Church said before there was a Reformation to react to is not hard to find, and it is not ambiguous. St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 107 and taught by the Apostle John himself, calls the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality and the antidote to death,” and describes heretics as those who “abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which flesh suffered for our sins.” If it were only a symbol, ask what it is a symbol of that would make refusing it a heresy — and in what sense a symbol is medicine. St. Justin Martyr, writing to a pagan emperor around 155 and therefore with every worldly reason to make Christianity sound less strange, instead says plainly that the food is “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.” St. Irenaeus, arguing against people who despised the body, asks “how can they say that the flesh which has been nourished by the Body of the Lord and by His Blood is cast into corruption?” And St. Cyril of Jerusalem, catechizing new Christians in the fourth century, tells them exactly what to do with the objection the boy brought to the kitchen table: “Do not regard the Bread and the Cup as simply that; for they are, according to the Master’s declaration, the Body and Blood of Christ. Even though sense suggests the contrary, let faith be your foundation.”

The Orthodox Church has never explained the mechanism. It says the gifts are changed and declines to say how — no scholastic machinery, no theory of substance and accident, just the Church’s oldest confession that what is on the altar after the priest calls down the Holy Spirit is not what was on it before. St. Basil the Great, in the fourth century, uses that very moment to make the point about Tradition, and it is worth hearing him make it: “Which of the saints has left us in writing the words of the invocation at the displaying of the bread of the Eucharist and the cup of blessing?” Nobody did. The Church prayed those words for three hundred years before anyone wrote them down, and prayed them because they had been handed over, mouth to mouth, from men who had been in the room.

The boy’s instinct was right, and better than the instincts of most people twice his age: it’s either real or it’s an insult, and you don’t get to be vague about which. That is precisely the choice John 6 puts in front of a person, which is why the crowds left rather than stay and be vague. The Church’s answer has never been to make the saying easier. It has only ever been to say: yes. It’s real. It is not what you feared and it is not what they told you to settle for.

Come and see, and then decide.