This term for threadbare illusionism was coined by the Reformation to represent the ‘ordinary’ (i.e. non-Latinate) person’s hearing and interpretation of the priest’s words of consecration at the altar: Hoc est corpus meum, ‘This is my body’ – Christ’s words at the Last Supper, instituting the Eucharist. The Roman Catholic belief that at these words the substanceof the wafer was changed from bread into the real body of Christ – ‘transubstantiation’, a word never used by the Church itself – was seen by Reformers as a degeneration from a mystic truth into a form of magic.
Rather than concentrate, as the Reformers did, upon what happens to what during the Consecration, I want to think for a moment about the Why. Why did Yeshua Meschiach create not merely a solemn moment (it was, after all, a Goodbye event) but at that moment a ceremony of symbolic sacrifice, to be repeated (‘Do this, whenever ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me’)?
It is a fearful thing to attempt to enter into the workings of the Divine Mind. But between waking and sleep, I like to meditate drowsily on the life, thoughts and actions of Yeshua bar-Yosef before he became the Meshiach in deed as well is in potential. And at such moments I imagine him, with his brother Ya’akov, shaping a scroll-case for a wealthy client, Mr Salamon, in the city of Tsippori (Sepphoris in Greek) about five miles up the hill from Nazareth, and discussing the then-popular topic of the Meshiach and his coming. Unlike Ya’akov, who liked to think of that magical Liberator as a new King David arriving with an army out of the desert, Yeshua imagined an itinerant rabbi, a healer, preaching the Law and the Prophets, but in a different way, a way that stressed inwardness rather than outward observance.
To the question (asked, either by Ya’akov or by the interested Mr Salomon), ‘But how can an itinerant rabbi walking around Galilee liberate Israel?’ Yeshua, after considerable thought, replies ‘I’m not sure his purpose is to liberate Israel from the Romans. I suspect it is to liberate Jews and Romans both – and Greeks, and others – from sin, and from evil.’ And to the obvious next question, ‘How?’, he replies by citing his study of the prophet Yeshayahu (Isaiah), who shows somebody very like the Meshiach going ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’: being, in other words, the sacrifice that atones for the sins of others.
Joe Rat, the sainted Joseph Ratzinger, reminds us, in his Jesus of Nazareth, that our culture has largely forgotten the concept of atonement and the need for it. It responds to a very deep element of our human and social nature: an evil committed cannot simply be forgotten as if it never happened. Before we (individuals, or society as a whole) can ‘move on’, it must be atoned for. This not the same as punishment, but something needs to be done to ‘appease the gods’ in the old term, to right the wrong, to restore the balance. Hence the idea of a sacrifice, the surrendering of something precious.
Following Yeshayahu, Yeshua explains that the Meshiach can liberate humanity from sin by himself being that sacrifice, that offering. After all, it was always already likely that those who consider themselves the guardians of the Law and the Prophets would not take kindly to one who preached following them differently: they would almost certainly act against him, and given the importance attached to even minor points of observance, they might well go so far as to condemn him to death.
I imagine him explaining this to Ya’akov and Mr Salomon as, the lovely scroll-case duly installed, they sit down and drink a glass of wine to celebrate. There is a long silence, as the others assimilate this stupendous concept. And then Mr Salomon says, ‘I think I understand, young man. But tell me: such a liberation by sacrifice may wipe out the sin of the whole present generation; but what about the unborn? You can’t efface it pre-emptively for coming generations. Imagine our great-grandchildren. How would the Meshiach’s liberation apply to them?’
At that moment, Yeshua (we are still a year or two away from Yohanan’s baptism of him) does not yet know the answer to that question. But at some point before that fateful Supper (whether or not it was a Pesach meal) he understood that the best, perhaps the only, way for future men and women to be the beneficiaries of the Meshiach’s sacrifice was to institute a ritual, a ceremony of the utmost solemnity, in which the sacrifice was mystically repeated, in their own time and era. In that way, there would be a genuine Atonement for sin and evil in each generation. And each man and woman taking part in it would be able to feel, in the deeply-moving words of a Victorian hymn, ‘Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’. In other words, reborn.
Image: Laure Albin-Guillot, 'Consecration' from Missa Est by Daniel-Rops
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