Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics: Scripture, Sacrament, and the Jewish Body of Christ

Cross Currents, Winter, 2000 by Scott Bader-Saye

Eucharist and Hermeneutics

The post-Christendom posture of radicalization thus requires communal practices that train us to map our social vision not in relation to states and empires, but in relation to the calling of Israel to be a light to the nations. I will focus here on one particular practice, the celebration of the Eucharist, for this sacrament is uniquely able to shape the community both politically and hermeneutically. The Eucharist enacts the pattern of Christ's presence in our midst and thus shapes how we understand the biblical words which witness to him. In this practice the written Word becomes the sacramental Word; the Word read becomes Word consumed. By re-Judaizing this sacrament and reclaiming its Jewish elements, Christians will come to see what it means to be Jews with the Jews or, in Paul's terms, to be grafted into Israel. In this way our experience of the Word in the bread and wine may transform our reading of the Word in the text.

Attention to Eucharist as determinative for right interpretation is something that may not appear obvious, at least to most Protestants. But as the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky writes,

Christ appeared and still appears before us not only in the Scriptures; He unchangeably and unceasingly reveals Himself in the Church, in His own Body. In the times of the early Christians the Gospels were not yet written and could not be the sole source of knowledge. The Church acted according to the spirit of the Gospel, and, what is more, the Gospel came to life in the Church, in the Holy Eucharist. In the Christ of the Eucharist Christians learned to know the Christ of the Gospels, and so His image became vivid to them. [22]

I take this not only as prescriptive but also descriptive; that is, Florovsky accurately describes the interplay between Eucharist and scripture even in traditions that do not formally acknowledge or exploit this interplay. Indeed within the scripture itself the deep connection between word and sacrament is made clear. On the road to Emmaus the disciples do not recognize Jesus until biblical (Old Testament) interpretation and broken bread have come together (Luke 24). When Ezekiel encounters the glory of the Lord he is commanded to eat the scroll, to ingest the word (Ezek. 3:1-2). And John in his Revelation describes the angel commanding him to take and eat the Word of God that is both bitter and sweet (Rev. 10:9-10). Eating and reading, digesting the text, feeding on the flesh that is the Word -- these interplays of food and language point to the deep correlation of word and sacrament through which the one Christ is revealed and reiterated in the liturgy.

In Telling God's Story, Gerard Loughlin has brilliantly brought to the foreground the connections between Eucharist and interpretation, between the body of Christ in the meal and the story of Christ embodied in the church. [23] Loughlin describes the Eucharist as

The Eucharist is a summation of narrative theology, since it is precisely the practice whereby the community is engrafted into the story. God's story becomes our own story; we become participants in the ongoing drama of God's reign. [25] Loughlin suggests that in Revelation 10:9--10 the scroll which John eats is "both Christ's risen body in the bread of the Eucharist and the divine logos in the word of Scripture." Eating and reading become one, for the single Word of God is made present in both. The reading/eating of Christ means "becoming part of the story as the story becomes part of oneself." [26]