Christian Imagery in Skyfall

The 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall just came out on Netflix. When I saw it in the theater I was intrigued by the Christian imagery used throughout the film, and on seeing it again I took to the web to see if anyone had unpacked its meaning. I found Father Robert Barron's youtube commentary, hastily composed when the movie was first released, but not much else. So I thought I'd write one myself.

**SPOILER ALERT: Don't read this if you don't want to know how the movie ends.

Baptism, Death and Resurrection 

The most obvious Christian themes in the movie are baptism, death and resurrection. Now, one of the commenters on Father Barron's youtube post asks why we should believe there's baptismal imagery in the movie at all. After all, if every instance of someone getting wet in the movies is baptismal then there's a whole lot of baptism going on! This is a good reminder that many non-Christians, and even quite a few Christians, aren't very familiar with the symbolism of baptism.

The symbolism was clearer in the baptisms of the early Church. The water of baptism represents the waters of the Abyss, the primordial waters that Genesis describes as existing before God created the world. They represent the nothingness of pre-creation. In ancient times, when people were baptized they weren't just sprinkled with the baptismal water, they were fully immersed in it. Through this immersion, the initiate is symbolically sent back into nothingness; they are un-created. They die to their old self, and re-emerge as a new creation. They are "born again," in the words of St. John (John 3). St. Paul likens the death and rebirth of baptism to the death and resurrection of Christ:

"Or are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life."

Romans 6:3-4 

So when in the opening credits James Bond is literally drug through an Abyss and into a watery grave, when he later refers to this as his "death," and when he finally describes his hobby as "resurrection," there can be little doubting that this is baptismal imagery.

Two Rebirths

The themes of baptism, death, and resurrection continue as the movie describes the ultimate crisis of James Bond's childhood. As a boy, James Bond was orphaned. When told of his parents death, the young James hides out for two days in the house's priest hole, and when he finally emerges, "he wasn't a boy anymore." Now a "priest hole" is a hidden compartment built into some Catholics' houses during the Reformation, when the Crown was attempting to eradicate the Catholic church in England. Attending the Mass in those days was illegal, but Catholics are required to attend Mass each Sunday, so some Catholic families would invite a priest to their home on Sundays for a clandestine service. Should a representative of the Crown happen by that day, the priest hole was a place in which to hide him. The young James Bond's two-day refuge in the tomb-like priest hole, and his reemergence as a new man, is a clear image of death and rebirth in the film. That the Mass is a participation in the Passion of Christ makes the use of a priest hole particularly apt.

The theme continues with Silva, the villain of the film, who has also undergone a death and rebirth of his own of sorts, only in his case it has gone horribly awry. He is a former double-O agent who was captured by terrorists, subjected to torture and to terrible suffering. His breaking point comes when he realizes that M, the leader of MI6 and a woman whom he regards as a kind of mother figure, must be the one who betrayed him. Despairing all hope, he breaks the cyanide capsule hidden in his tooth in an attempt to end it all. The cyanide burns through his body, tearing his face apart and searing his insides, but he doesn't die. "Life clung to me like a disease" he says poignantly, one of the film's more memorable quotes. When he emerges from captivity he is also reborn, not as a new man, but as a monster, disfigured from the poison and consumed with a desire for revenge against M and all of its agents.

The Meaning of Skyfall

Skyfall is of course the name of the film, and is the name of the manor in which James Bond grew up, the one containing the priest hole. In his youtube commentary, Father Barron ascribes the meaning of the word "Skyfall" to a passage in Luke, in which the devil is cast down from the sky at the end of times. "I saw Satan fall, like a bolt of lightning from the sky." (Luke 18:10). Now Father Barron's video was hastily put together, and he admits that he hadn't thought it all out entirely, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind my disagreeing with him on this point. Understanding the title is often the key to understanding a film, and with so much Christian imagery in the film it's natural to look for a Christian meaning in the title. But I see no evidence in the movie for the Luke-based explanation.

The movie does provides some clues to the meaning of "Skyfall" however. At the end of the lengthy opening credits sequence, after the usual scenes of scantily-clad, pistol-packing beauties, we see the Skyfall manor being destroyed by blood raining down from the sky. Skyfall literally being annihilated by sky fall. Blood, incidentally, that is pouring from the gunshot wound in James Bond's side, the wound that caused his "death" in the opening scene. This foreshadows the climax of the movie, when the real Skyfall manor is destroyed by fire from the sky, in the form of a military helicopter that first shoots up, and then crashes into and incinerates, the whole house. I would submit, then, that "Skyfall" represents the calamities of life, which rain destruction upon us like fire from the sky (and which seem to rain particularly hard on Mr. Bond). It's end is annihilation and death, the precursor and precondition of rebirth or resurrection. A fitting name for the mayhem-fest that is a Bond flick.

Calamities 

Skyfall is a tale of two men's reaction to terrible "childhood" calamity: the death of the young James Bond's parents, and the betrayal of Silva by his "mother" M. Both Bond and Silva are orphaned, one literally and one figuratively. James Bond's response is resurrection, which becomes his lifelong "hobby," though his rebirth is not at first complete. He emerges from the waters of the opening credits listless and unmotivated. He hides out in nondescript villages, drinking and engaging in reckless and self-destructive behavior. He emerges only when Silva's attack on MI6 headquarters awakens his sense of responsibility. Even then, he is declared unfit for duty: psychologically unstable due to "unresolved childhood trauma". He is physically weak and psychologically troubled throughout most of the film. The key moment for Bond comes near the end of the movie when, as Skyfall manor is about to be incinerated, he looks back at the doomed house and quips, "I always hated this place." It's a laugh line but it's also an important, transformative moment for Bond. Soon afterwards, he will undergo one final baptism, as he is plunged deep into icy waters of a frozen pond on the manor grounds, in a scene reminiscent of the opening credits. Having finally let go of his childhood and the terrible trauma it contained, he is at last able to fully die to it, and to be reborn whole. For the rest of the film he appears healthy and free of the demons that have plagued him.

Of course, Silva's response to his own trauma is far more pathological than Bond's. We learn the extent of it in his closing scene, when he confronts M in a church on the manor grounds. As he enters the building and sees that it is a church he says, "Of course, it had to end here." He puts a gun into M's hand, places his head next to hers and asks her to pull the trigger, ending both their lives with the same bullet. We come to realize that Silva desires not only revenge, but death. His manner is childlike and pleading, he craves release from the insanity that had consumed him, from the twisted half life that he has endured since his failed attempt to take his own life.

Why does Silva find it appropriate that the end would come in a church? The movie provides no certain answer. Perhaps, deep down, he also desires resurrection. Perhaps he only craves annihilation. Whichever it is, death or rebirth, he recognizes the appropriate setting for last things. The end can only come in the Church.

Last Things 

Now, Skyfall is not Ben Hur. I don't imagine the authors have a grand theological design for this movie. No doubt they chose the Christian themes of death, baptism and resurrection to give depth and texture to a series that long ago became stale. And in this they seem to have succeeded. Many reviewers who failed to acknowledge, and probably scarcely recognized, the Christian themes in the film described Skyfall as one of the best Bond movies yet. When real Christianity is portrayed on the screen or in print it never fails to impress.

But there is an interesting reflection to be made here. Death and resurrection is an omnipresent theme of Christianity. We are baptized into it, we hope to share in it on the last day. And like Bond, we are expected to experience it many times throughout our lives, as we cast aside sin in order to follow the way of the Lord. Jesus tells us that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies it bears much fruit. If we don't die to our sins completely, if we put our hand to the plow while looking back to our old lives, we can never be truly reborn.

1st John and the Long Lost Gnostics, Part 2

Papyrus P9, oldest known fragment of the 1st Letter of John

"What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life--

for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us--

what we have seen and heard we proclaim now to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ."

This stark and beautiful opening to the 1st Letter of John immediately calls to mind the beginning of the Gospel of John:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.

What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

And in fact it is generally agreed that 1st John and the Gospel of John were written by the same person, a man styled "John the Evangelist." The tradition of the early Church fathers and the text of the Gospel itself suggests that this man was the "beloved disciple" who rested his head upon Jesus' chest at the last supper, and who was given charge of Mary as he stood at the foot of the cross at the crucifixion. He must have been a very young man at the time, because the Gospel and 1st John are believed to have been written toward the end of the first century, probably in the 90s, some 60 or more years after the crucifixion.

The 1st Letter of John is intended to be a warning, and also a source of strength and encouragement, for a community that was midst of a crisis. John paints the situation in the starkest possible terms: "Children," he says, "it is the last hour; and just as you heard that the antichrist was coming, so now many antichrists have appeared." These "antichrists" were people who had once been members of the community to which he writes, but who abandoned the Church for another. "They went out from us," he says, "but they were not really of our number; if they had been, they would have remained with us. Their desertion shows that none of them was of our number." John warns his readers that they must be vigilant against the missionaries of this false religion, telling them that they must "not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world." To forestall the heretics and save the faith of the community, John eloquently lays out his case against the heresy, and tries to help his readers to recognize the power and value of their own faith.

The Opening Shot

The similarities in the opening verses of the Gospel of John and the 1st Letter of John are so overpowering that we tend to overlook one important way in which they differ: both are powerful and poetic descriptions of the mysterious, divine nature of Jesus, but woven throughout the opening paragraph of 1st John is an additional and not-so-subtle appeal to the authority conferred by John's personal witness to the living Christ:

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life--

for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us--

what we have seen and heard we proclaim now to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; for our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the word "authority" conjures up the wrong image: John isn't dictating anything, he isn't saying "I knew Jesus and you didn't, so fall in line," but neither is he giving any quarter when it comes to the faith he proclaims. His teachings aren't open for discussion. He has complete confidence in his own fidelity to the will of God, a confidence based on his personal experience with Jesus during his Earthly ministry. "Our fellowship is with Jesus," he's saying, "and we know that we are true to him because we saw him with our own eyes, and heard him with our own ears, and touched him with our own hands. And we are happy to extend that fellowship to you if you will believe in the gospel that we proclaim to you now." Anyone is free to accept that fellowship or to reject it, but the nature of the choice is clear: you can side with a community that was founded by Jesus himself, or you can side with the pretenders.

To John, the Church is a community founded by and centered on Jesus, consisting of the Apostles and the disciples who knew him during his ministry, and radiating outward to those who would join in fellowship with them. This continuity of fellowship with the original community of the Apostles is what we call "Apostolicity", and it has been maintained by the Church down to this very day, a fact we affirm every time we say the Nicene Creed and declare the Church to be "one, holy, catholic and Apostolic." It's an idea that was also expressed by Clement of Rome, who was a contemporary of John's, in his letter to the Corinthians: "The Apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ was sent from God. Christ, therefore, is from God, and the Apostles are from Christ. Both of these orderly arrangements, then, are by God's will." And it is echoed in Jesus' commandment to the Apostles after the Resurrection, as related in the Gospel of John: "As the Father has sent me, so I send you."

And this provides an answer to the rhetorical question that was posed by Elaine Pagels, that I quoted in my last post:

[T]hose who called gnosticism heresy were adopting--consciously or not--the viewpoint of that group of Christians who called themselves orthodox Christians. A heretic may be anyone whose outlook someone else dislikes or denounces. According to tradition, a heretic is one who deviates from the true faith. But what defines that "true faith"? Who calls it that, and for what reasons?

Evidently she believes there is no objective criteria by which these things may be judged, that they are determined by the other Golden Rule (whoever has the gold makes the rules); whichever side wins gets to write the history books and claim the title of orthodoxy. But that's not what the early Christians believed. In John's opinion, the authentic Christian community is the one that has maintained a continuous fellowship with the Apostolic community that was founded by Christ. This is the objective standard by which all faith communities may be evaluated. And not only does this answer Pagels' question in the abstract, but I believe it directly answers her specific question, the question of how we can know that Gnosticism in particular is not the authentic a form of Christianity. Because as the astute reader has no doubt surmised from the title of this post, I believe that that the heretics that John was warning his community about in the 1st Letter of John were, in fact, Gnostics.

The Freedom of the Blogosphere

Now this is the message that we have heard from him and proclaim to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

If we say, "We have fellowship with him," while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.

But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.

If we say, "We are without sin," we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.

If we say, "We have not sinned," we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

I often find Scriptural commentaries frustrating to read, because they can tend to be so cautious in their interpretations that they do little more than repeat the literal meaning of the text. This is especially true of 1st John, where so little is known about the context of the letter. There isn't even certainty about which heresy John's community was confronting. The introduction to the New American Bible calls it "a form of docetism or gnosticism," because that is as much as can be certainly proven from the text of the letter. This kind of caution is altogether fitting and proper for a scholarly study, where it is so important to maintain clarity about that which is absolutely known and that which is speculative. But this level of caution comes with a heavy price: it turns 1st John into a one-sided phone conversation, in which we only get to hear John's side of the dialog. We know his answers to the heresy he's confronting, but we don't know the questions. We don't know what the person on the other side of the line is saying, and this robs the text of a great deal of its meaning. When reading these oh-so-cautious commentaries I often find myself thinking that the author must surely have private opinions about the material that go way beyond whatever he or she is stating for the record. Well if there is any venue for stating those types opinions, then a blog post must surely be it, so I'm going to express some of my opinions about the letter here. But I do so knowing full well that in venturing away from that which is certainly known, I'm taking the risk that I could be wrong.

But I don't think that I am, because it appears to me if we do assume that the heresy in question is a form of Gnosticism, then the arguments John makes in this letter, though delivered in his restrained style, snap neatly into place to form an insightful, cutting, and ultimately devastating assault upon that heresy. Because having opened the letter with his strongest appeal, the strongest possible appeal to authority ("Listen to me, I knew Jesus and they did not"), John turns immediately to a set of arguments that would be sure to cut any Christian who is flirting with Gnosticism straight to the quick. John's assault begins with the passage quoted above, but if you aren't familiar with Gnosticism then you probably can't see it there yet. To do so we will have to spend a little more time reviewing some of the beliefs of Gnosticism.

Shedding Light on Gnosticism

God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

Now Jews and Christians have long used the imagery of light their descriptions of God and heaven, but they have never used it to the extent that the Gnostics did. In fact, when reading Gnostic literature it often seems to me that light and darkness are the only images Gnostics ever used. Here are a few examples from The Apocryphon of John, in which it describes the Monad, who is the first, foremost and highest deity:

The Monad is a monarchy with nothing above it. It is he who exists as God and Father of everything, the invisible One who is above everything, who exists as incorruption, which is in the pure light into which no eye can look.....

He is immeasurable light, which is pure, holy (and) immaculate....

And in speaking of the conception of Christ, who in some Gnostic cosmologies is described not as the son of Yahweh, the God of the Jews, but as the child of the Monad and Barbelo:

And [the Monad] looked at Barbelo with the pure light which surrounds the invisible Spirit, and (with) his spark, and she conceived from him. He begot a spark of light with a light resembling blessedness. But it does not equal his greatness. This was an only-begotten child of the Mother-Father which had come forth; it is the only offspring, the only-begotten one of the Father, the pure Light. And the invisible, virginal Spirit rejoiced over the light which came forth...

The light of the Pleroma, the heavenly realm, is contrasted with the darkness of the outer world, the world of matter, as related in the Gnostic text On the Origin of the World:

Now the eternal realm (aeon) of truth has no shadow outside it, for the limitless light is everywhere within it. But its exterior is shadow, which has been called by the name 'darkness'....[M]atter came into being out of shadow.

Light and darkness are indeed apt metaphors for the Gnostic conception of good and evil, which in their worldview are essentially the same as knowledge of or ignorance of the Pleroma. Knowledge and ignorance are all-important concepts in Gnosticism--the word "Gnostic" comes from the Greek word "gnosis," which means "knowledge." It takes a little while for a modern Christian to grasp just how important these concepts are to a Gnostic. One way to understand it is by reading the Gnostic creation stories.

Gnostic Genesis

The specifics of the Gnostic creation stories vary greatly from sect to sect, but they convey similar theologies. These are very different stories than those of the Jews, and the differences are deeply revealing. As I described in my last post, in Gnostic mythology Yahweh, the God of the Jews, is not the first and greatest Creator of all things that he is in the Jewish tradition, nor is he the Father of Christ as the Christians believe. He is instead the bastard child of Sophia, who was one of the least of the aeons. He was "created...in ignorance," and in his ignorance he deceived himself into believing that he was the one and only God. Appalled by this blasphemous self-deception, the true divinities from the realm of light chastise him as "the god of the blind," their voices booming in from out of nowhere. Yahweh flees from them, flees to the world of matter, an evil world that he makes his own, and shapes after the pattern of his own ignorance.

As related in the Gnostic Hypostatis of the Archons, after Yahweh and his minions arrived on Earth, they created Adam, the first man, molding him out of earth. They modeled him on a glimpse they once had of a divine being of the Pleroma, which they saw in a reflection on the primordial waters of the Earth, as it looked down upon the world from above. But Yahweh lacked the power to give Adam a spirit, and so the newly-created man was unable to stand; he could only writhe about pathetically on the ground. But then a divine being descended from the Pleroma and granted Adam a spirit, which gave him life and the freedom of movement.

Yahweh and his minions respond by placing Adam in the Garden and causing a deep sleep of Ignorance to fall upon him, so that he would forget the divine spark of life that had been given him by the divinities of the Pleroma. And while Adam slept Yahweh created Eve from the flesh of his side, and the spirit granted to Adam by the divine beings of the Pleroma came to rest in her. Armed with a real spirit and not yet under the spell of Ignorance (and in this version of the story, escaping from Yahweh's attempt to rape her), she takes the guise of a wise serpent, and talks Adam into eating of the fruit of knowledge, which awakens him from his sleep and opens his eyes: "And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge; and they recognized that they were naked of the spiritual element, and took fig leaves and bound them upon their loins." As punishment, Yahweh and his minions expelled them from the Garden, throwing "mankind into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that their mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, and might not have the opportunity of being devoted to the holy spirit."

The Secret Knowledge

The primary aim of the Gnostic, then, is to awaken from this slumber imposed upon us by Yahweh through the distraction of worldly affairs, and to reconnect ourselves to the divine inner spark that underlies our evil outer natures. This idea that within each of us lies a spark of light from the Pleroma is common to most if not all forms of Gnosticism. As Jesus says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas,

Anyone here with two ears had better listen! There is light within a person of light, and it shines on the whole world. If it does not shine, it is dark.

and again

If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.'

This is why Elaine Pagels, in her book The Gnostic Gospels, argues that the word "gnosis" is, in the way that Gnostics use it, better translated as "insight" rather than "knowledge." Or, I would suggest, "enlightenment." It is a looking-inward to rediscover the inner light of the Pleroma. It involves both a direct, mystical experience of the divine, and it involves secrets that can only be revealed to the initiated. It is not rational or logical; it can't be learned in a book. It is, rather, experiential. Like Mahakashyapa in the story of the Sermon of the Lotus Flower that forms the genesis of Zen Buddhism, the Gnostic initiate must come to realize that gnosis cannot be expressed in words. Only when that understanding is reached can the deeper, secret gnosis be revealed. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas this is illustrated this way:

Jesus said to his disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I am like."

Simon Peter said to him, "You are like a just messenger."

Matthew said to him, "You are like a wise philosopher."

Thomas said to him, "Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."

This is the answer Jesus was looking for; he's quite pleased:

Jesus said, "I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended."

This scene is repeated in the other Gnostic gospels, with the protagonist changing to whichever disciple that particular gospel is named after. Once the wise disciple is identified, Jesus always follows it up by taking him or her off camera in order to reveal his secret knowledge:

And [Jesus] took [Thomas], and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him.

When Thomas came back to his friends they asked him, "What did Jesus say to you?"

Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and devour you."

There are many theories about what this secret knowledge might have been--ways of producing states of ecstasy through meditation or other means, wherein the Pleroma may be directly experienced; magical incantations for bringing about liberation from this evil world, etc. The fact is that we'll never know exactly what it was. The Gnostics' deepest secrets shall remain forever secure, in their graves.

A World Without Sin

Noticeably absent from all of this is any notion of sin and repentance. As the neo-Gnostic author of Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing, Stephan Hoeller, says,

In many ways, the Gnostic concept of salvation is close to the concept of liberation found in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions; Gnostics look to salvation not from sin (original or otherwise), but from the ignorance of which sin is the consequence.

Indeed, in the creation story related above in The Hypostasis of the Archons, there is no possibility of an original sin on the part of Adam and Eve: all of the sinning in the story is done by Yahweh against them. But in truth, even Yahweh's actions aren't "sinful" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word. As Hoeller notes, in Gnosticism "the chief characteristic of [Yahweh] is ignorance, not evil." Ignorance is the (dare I say it?) "original sin" that produced Yahweh's evil nature. The ignorance of his mother, Sophia, who conceived him without the knowledge and consent of her male counterpart because she failed to understand the limits of her power and place in the divine order; and the ignorance of Yahweh himself, who did not know that there were divinities superior to him, and who upon learning about them fled into the twisted ignorance of self-deception, in order to escape the knowledge of them.

John Weighs In

This freedom from even the idea of sin may be one of the chief attractions that Gnosticism has for modern-day neo-Gnostics, for people who have become weary of what Hoeller calls "the threats and anger of the Old Testament Creator God," but it is precisely this idea that John assails first in his case against Gnosticism. He begins with this attention-getter:

God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.

I believe it's no coincidence that John starts with a description of God as "light": the Gnostics' ears have perked up now--he's speaking their language. And now that he's gotten their attention, consider how the following passage would sound to a Gnostic:

If we say, "We have fellowship with him," while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.

But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.

If we say, "We are without sin," we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.

If we say, "We have not sinned," we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

You may like the idea of a world without sin, but look into your own hearts, John is saying, and ask yourself if you really believe in it. You know sin exists, and if you tell yourself otherwise you are lying; you are deceiving yourself! To a Gnostic, these are fighting words: lies and deception are the penultimate evil in the Gnostic worldview.

The Not-So-Secret Knowledge

And consider how the following passage would read to a Christian who is sitting on the fence between Gnosticism and Christianity. The Gnostics claim to have secret knowledge that will lead their adherents to a deep experience of God--what does orthodox Christianity have that can compete with that? John continues:

My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one. He is expiation for our sins, and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world.

The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments. Whoever says, "I know him," but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.

But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him. This is the way we may know that we are in union with him: whoever claims to abide in him ought to live (just) as he lived.

John's answer is simple: knowledge of God is not hidden in secrets reserved only for a chosen few. Rather, the path to God is open for anyone to see: "The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep his commandments." In the original Greek the word "know" actually appears twice in this verse: "καὶ ἐν τούτῳ γινώσκομεν ὅτι ἐγνώκαμεν αὐτόν ἐὰν τὰς ἐντολὰς αὐτοῦτηρῶμεν." "The way we may know that we know him is to keep his commandments." Although the word "Gnostic" ("knower") hadn't been coined yet as a name for these people when 1st John was written, the word "gnosis" ("knowledge") must have already been associated with them, because word play such as this is common. (One of my favorite of these is at the beginning of chapter 3: "The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him." John is lumping the heretics in with the "world" here--elsewhere he implies that they are "lovers of the world." Yeouch! The Gnostics, who believe that matter is evil, are lovers of the world?! Who "know" neither Christ nor the Christians?! John really knows how to twist the knife.)

John never works a single argument at a time: he alternates from one to another, weaving two arguments together, proceeding to another, weaving that one back into the first, and so on. So how is it that following the commandments and example of Jesus enables us to "know" him? John weaves his answer into the idea of Apostolicity:

If we say, 'We have fellowship with him,' while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.

But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.

Doing good and avoiding sin enables us to maintain our fellowship with one another--with the Church, the Apostolic community founded by Christ. This doesn't mean that to be Christians we have to be perfect. Quite the opposite: John reassures us that if we do sin we have an Advocate with the Father in Jesus, and "if we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing."

But there appears to be something else going on here as well. Some Gnostic groups developed antinomian (which is to say, 'anti-moral law') ideas, and many were accused of licentiousness. There are a number of reasons they developed these ideas; their motivations probably varied from one group to another. One reason was that the moral law was created, according to Jewish tradition, by Yahweh, and anything that comes from him could only be a deception whose true, ulterior motive is humanity's enslavement. Another reason was the notion that a Gnostic, having achieved liberation through gnosis, had 'left the world behind' so to speak, and had moved on to bigger and better things. Once gnosis was achieved, nothing that happens on this meaningless, shadowy, material plane of existence could possibly matter, so you may as well do whatever you want.

It appears likely that John was confronting just such a group, because he presses this point about the necessity of avoiding sin and the vanity of evil, not just once but again and again throughout the letter, intimating that the heretics may have fallen into "sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life," that they commit "lawlessness", indicating that they not only disbelieve in sin, but that they are itinerant sinners. John attempts to refocus his readers' minds on the true benevolence of the moral law, and the real gravity of sin, by reminding his readers what Jesus' commandment was, and by emphasizing what it really means to behave as if sin doesn't matter:

Whoever says he is in the light, yet hates his brother, is still in the darkness.

Whoever loves his brother remains in the light, and there is nothing in him to cause a fall.

Whoever hates his brother is in darkness; he walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.

John reminds us that one of Jesus' primary commandments is to love your neighbor. To say that sin doesn't matter is to say that hatred of your neighbor is no big deal. How can someone claim to know God while living in hatred? To John the idea is ridiculous. And to which would you rather aspire: knowledge or love? Which would you rather avoid: ignorance, or hatred? To John the answer is obvious.

Freedom Now

Finally, against the Gnostic promise of eventual liberty, through initiation into the secret gnosis, from the bonds of ignorance that enslave us in the darkness of this current existence, John offers liberty now. And not just liberty for the individual Christian, but liberty for all of creation. Because according to John, we are living in a new era, in which already "the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining." Christ has torn away the veil that has covered the world in darkness since mankind was cast out of the Garden due to the sin of Adam and Eve. The light of Christ is already streaming throughout the universe; there is no longer any darkness from which to escape. All knowledge required to triumph over evil has been granted to us through him. In this rousing send-up, John cheers his readers with the knowledge that the Gnostics have nothing to teach them:

I am writing to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning.

I am writing to you, young men, because you have conquered the evil one.

I write to you, children, because you know the Father.

I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning.

I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God remains in you, and you have conquered the evil one.

....You have the anointing that comes from the holy one, and you all have knowledge.

I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you do!

1st John and the Long Lost Gnostics, Part 1

A fragment of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas

A New Gospel

In the year 2006 a team of scholars at the University of Geneva in Switzerland announced that they had translated the long lost Gnostic Gospel of Judas. This was the product of five long years spent painstakingly tweezering together the crumbling fragments of a manuscript that had been lost for nearly 1700 years. I remember listening to an NPR interview at the time with an expert on this newly-discovered gospel. They talked about the religion that had  produced this gospel--Gnostic Christianity--and about what it had to say about Jesus and Judas. And at the end of the interview, I remember how the NPR reporter dropped his voice into a deep and husky reverence, as he breathed his final, burning question: "Do you believe, doctor, that Christians will one day think of the Gospel of Judas as a fifth gospel alongside those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?"

Christians in Wonderland

Ah, hmmm, "No." Christians aren't likely to recast Judas as the hero of the Passion anytime soon, which is how he is portrayed in the Gospel of Judas. Nor are we likely to replace our concept of the Trinity with the idea that Yahweh, the God of the Jews, was actually one of the lesser gods in the pantheon of aeons that emanated from the Monad, that he is really the twisted, evil offspring of Sophia, the aeon of Wisdom, who emanated from one of the descendants of the aeons that emanated from Christ, who was himself the offspring of Barbelo and the Monad, as described in the Apocryphon of John, another Gnostic text. With several entire books of the New Testament dedicated to opposing Gnosticism, Christians are not likely to add any of the scores of Gnostic gospels, acts and apocalypses to the canon of the Scriptures, now or ever. 

Indeed, a Christian who enters the world of Gnosticism feels like Alice descending into Wonderland, into a world turned upside down, where not only Judas but all the villains of the Bible are transformed into heroes, and where Yahweh--God himself, who the Gnostics call 'Yaltabaoth'--is the principle villain. It is a world in which God orders Adam and Eve to refrain from eating of the tree of knowledge in order to enslave them with ignorance. In which the serpent who tempts Eve is really a liberating spirit from the realm of light, whose tempation leads not to a Fall, but to freedom from the Garden and escape from the clutches of Yaltabaoth. It is a world in which Cain and Abel are the products of the rape of Eve by God. In their writings, the Gnostics delight in heaping insults upon the God of the Jews: He was conceived in a moment of sinfulness by his mother Sophia, who "wanted to bring forth a likeness out of herself without the consent of the Spirit, - he had not approved - and without her consort, and without his consideration." When Sophia looked upon her offspring, she found it deformed and hideous, with the "form of a lion-faced serpent. And its eyes were like lightning fires which flash. She cast it away from her, outside that place, that no one of the immortal ones might see it, for she had created it in ignorance." He became the "Demiurge," the semi-creator, not powerful enough to create a world on his own, but the one who would shape the matter that was thrown off of his mother into the world as we know it, a world, like Yaltabaoth himself, of ignorance, evil and deception. He stupidly believes that he is the ultimate source of Creation. He is "full of ignorance," the "god of the blind," "the arrogant ruler," the "deceiver." His rape of Eve "planted sexual desire in her" and is the source of all lust in the world, for it "inspired [her descendants] with his counterfeit spirit." These are not ideas that can be easily incorporated into orthodox Christianity.

The Neo-Gnostics

If the NPR correspondent I listened to three years ago didn't realize the absurdity of his question, some unconscionable reporting by the National Geographic Society at the time no doubt bears some of the blame. The Society, which funded the translation project and made it the cover story of their May 2006 issue, as well as the subject of three books, advertised their findings with this teaser:

The Gospel of Judas gives a different view of the relationship between Jesus and Judas, offering new insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus....

During the first centuries A.D. Christianity grew from humble origins to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Through time lines, maps, and photos explore the world of early Christianity. And learn where the Gospel of Judas fit into the divergent philosophies within the new religion.

The picture presented here is that Gnostic and orthodox Christians were in the earliest days all part of the same big, diverse Christian family, and that the Gnostic gospels have the same claim to historical truth as the canonical ones. These ideas have been most famously advocated by Elaine Pagels, a professor of Religion at Princeton University who advised the Society on their story, and whose book The Gnostic Gospels is widely viewed as having spawned a modern, modest resurgence in Gnosticism. In her book she writes:

[I]deas that we associate with Eastern religions emerged in the first century through the gnostic movement in the West, but they were suppressed and condemned by polemicists like Irenaeus. Yet those who called gnosticism heresy were adopting--consciously or not--the viewpoint of that group of Christians who called themselves orthodox Christians. A heretic may be anyone whose outlook someone else dislikes or denounces. According to tradition, a heretic is one who deviates from the true faith. But what defines that "true faith"? Who calls it that, and for what reasons?

...If we admit that some of these fifty-two [Gnostic] texts [discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, including the Gospel of Judas,] represents early forms of Christian teaching, we may have to recognize that early Christianity is far more diverse than nearly anyone expected before the Nag Hammadi discoveries.

...[T]he canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure [of the Church] emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. Before that time, as Irenaeus and others attest, numerous gospels circulated among various Christian groups, ranging from those of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, to such writings as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth, as well as many other secret teachings, myths, and poems attributed to Jesus or his disciples. 

...Yet by A. D. 200, the situation had changed. Christianity had become an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, who understood themselves to be the guardians of the only "true faith." The majority of churches, among which the church of Rome took a leading role, rejected all other viewpoints as heresy. Deploring the diversity of the earlier movement, Bishop Irenaeus and his followers insisted that there could be only one church, and outside of that church, he declared, "there is no salvation." Members of this church alone are orthodox (literally, "straight-thinking") Christians. And, he claimed, this church must be catholic-- that is, universal. Whoever challenged that consensus, arguing instead for other forms of Christian teaching, was declared to be a heretic, and expelled. When the orthodox gained military support, sometime after the Emperor Constantine became Christian in the fourth century, the penalty for heresy escalated.

The story presented is this: that in the century and a half after Jesus' death, Christians struggled to come to grips with the meaning of his ministry, with many different viewpoints being expressed--some somewhat Gnostic, others more orthodox--but none with any more valid claim to fidelity to Jesus' teachings than any other. And out of this cacophony of voices there arose, sometime around the end of the second century, a new outlook, which we today think of as "orthodox" Christianity, that sought to unify Christianity by suppressing any Christians with Gnostic tendencies. This is an eminently coherent, self-consistent story that would be perfectly sensible, if we were given a different set of historical facts than the ones we have. As it is, I find this viewpoint profoundly a-historical and illogical.

Rebuttals

Because from the very beginning, the historical evidence shows us that there was an orthodox, Apostolic Church that organized itself around the Apostles and their descendants, that carefully preserved the succession of its bishops from the original Apostles, and that perceived a crystal clear delineation between itself and the Gnostics. Irenaeus, in his book Against Heresies, written around the year A.D. 180, which was no more than 80 years after the last of the New Testament Scriptures were written, has this to say:

We have learned the plan of our salvation from none other than those through whom the gospel came down to us. Indeed, they first preached the gospel, and afterwards, by the will of God, they handed it down to us in the Scriptures, to be the foundation and pillar of our faith....They went forth to the ends of the earth, spreading the good news of the good things which God has sent to us, and announcing the peace of heaven to men, who indeed are all equally and individually sharers in the gospel of God. Matthew also issued among the Hebrews a written Gospel in their own language, while Peter and Paul were evangelizing in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also handed down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord who reclined at His bosom, also published a Gospel, while he was residing at Ephesus in Asia.

...It is possible, then, for everyone in every Church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the Apostles which has been made known throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the Apostles, and their successors to our own times: men who neither knew nor taught anything like these heretics rave about. 

And elsewhere Irenaeus says:

[T]he Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although she is disseminated throughout the whole world, yet guarded it, as if she occupied one house....For while the languages of the world are diverse, nevertheless, the authority of the tradition is one and the same. 

Neither do the Churches among the Germans believe otherwise or have another tradition, nor do those among the Iberians, nor among the Celts, nor away in the East, nor in Egypt, nor in Libya, nor those which have been established in the central regions of the world. But just as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere and enlightens all men who desire to come to knowledge of the truth.

Of course Pagels would have us believe that Irenaeus was, through statements such as these, making himself one of the principle architects of a new orthodoxy, one that had not existed before he and like-minded people began this campaign against the Gnostics. But if we look at what Irenaeus is saying here, we can see that he is not arguing that the Church must become catholic and Apostolic, he is arguing that it always has been that way. He is saying that the Church has so jealously guarded the succession of the bishops from the Apostles, that he could, from his vantage point in history less than 80 years after the death of the last Apostle, list the men called upon by the Apostles to become bishops, as well as every one of their successors down to his own day. He is saying that the Church has worked so hard to maintain the unity of its teachings that he can confidently say that the churches in the far Western end of the known world, the churches in the far Eastern end of the world, and the churches dispersed everywhere else in between, maintain a single tradition, and speak with a single voice. 

Anyone who would wish to dismiss statements such as these as fabrications should think about the reason they believe in the existence of China. Most of us have never seen China and never will, so we cannot personally verify its existence. We believe that China is a real place, and cannot be a hoax, because we know that it would impossible to prevent such a hoax from being exposed, given the ease with which other people can determine the facts. So too would it be impossible for Irenaeus to publicly proclaim these things about the Church, and to believe that his proclamations will carry weight with his readers in his fight against Gnosticism, if they were a lie. 

As for Pagels' claim that the Church only "became an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons" at the end of the second century, Clement of Rome, writing 100 years before that, sometime around the years A.D. 80 - 99, would disagree. In his Epistle to the Corinthians he writes:

The Apostles received the gospel for us from the Lord Jesus Christ; and Jesus Christ was sent from God. Christ, therefore, is from God, and the Apostles are from Christ. Both of these orderly arrangements, then, are by God's will. Receiving their instructions and being full of confidence on account of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and confirmed in faith by the word of God, they went forth in complete assurance of the Holy Spirit, preaching the good news that the Kingdom of God is coming. Throughout the countryside and city they preached; and they appointed their earliest converts, testing them by spirit, to be the bishops and deacons of future believers.

Clement's letter is so ancient it was written before some of the books of the New Testament. But we don't even have to take Irenaeus' or Clement's word for it, because the evidence that the Church had this perception of itself from the beginning, and that it considered Gnosticism as being something other than Christianity, can be found in the New Testament writings themselves. As we will see in my next post, it can be found specifically in the first letter of John.

Wanderings along the road to Emmaus

On the day of the Resurrection two companions, disciples of Jesus before their hopes had been dashed by his death, were walking along the road from Jerusalem to the town of Emmaus, when they met a mysterious stranger, and struck up a conversation. They spoke of the tumultuous events in Jerusalem of the previous few days, of the Messiah and of the reports of Jesus' Resurrection. And then, "beginning with Moses and all the prophets, [the stranger] interpreted to them what referred to [the Messiah] in all the scriptures." Luke continues:

As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. But they urged him, "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over." So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.

Then they said to each other, "Were not our hearts burning (within us) while he spoke to us on the way and opened the scriptures to us?"

So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the eleven and those with them who were saying, "The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!" Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread. Luke 24:28-35

"The breaking of the bread" is what the earliest Christians called the celebration that we today call the Mass (see, e.g., Acts 2:42). And if the liturgical significance of this episode still isn't obvious enough, consider that both halves of the Mass are represented in this story: the Liturgy of the Word, in which the Scriptures are read and explained, and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the re-enactment of the Last Supper. How important then must be the Mass! In Luke, the institution of the Mass is both the last thing Jesus does in this world before the Passion, and the first thing he does once he was raised.

But that only begins to hint at the incredible mystery and significance of the Mass. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you" Luke 22:20, Jesus says. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood." With these words Jesus places the Mass at the very center of God's salvation plan. It is the covenant. It is the Passion. Indeed, the mystery of the Mass is woven throughout the whole of the salvation story laid out for us in Scripture. It appears at all of the most significant moments in history. In God's ancient covenant with Abraham, the covenant that created the Jewish people and bound them forever to God, the covenant that Jesus fulfills and supersedes with his "new covenant" at the Last Supper. It appears on the doorstep of the Exodus, on that terrifying night when the Angel of Death spared only the children those who had marked their doors with the blood of a lamb, a night ever after commemorated by the Jews in the Passover celebration, by Jesus at the Last Supper, and by Christians in the Mass. It is there with the Jews in their Exodus through the desert, in the manna, the mysterious bread from heaven that sustained them on their journey, just as the Eucharist sustains us on our journey through life: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world" John 6:51. It is there in Abraham's sacrifice of bread and wine with the mysterious, ancient pagan priest Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18), before there even was a Jewish people, in a time so ancient that Abraham still had no problem worshiping God with pagan priest. It is there in Jesus' parable of the grain of wheat that must die in order to produce fruit (John 12:24), it is there when he says "I am the vine," (John 15:5), in the multiplication of the loaves (John 6), and in the "give us this day our daily bread" of the Our Father. It saturates the Book of Revelation. It is present throughout the long history of sacrifice by the Jews in the temple, all of which was intended to prepare us to understand the sacrifice that God would one day make for us.

The Bible is an amazing thing, easy enough to lead even the simplest people to God, hard enough to occupy the greatest minds, the minds of men like Aquinas and Augustine, for a lifetime. I once read a review of Moby Dick in which the reviewer noted that the story was so saturated with metaphors layered upon imagery layered upon story elements, each interacting with another, deepening the others' meaning, adding new perspectives and twists, that the story became something that even Melville himself could never have explained. The Eucharist in Scripture is like that. Each thread is a path leading to a deeper understanding of God's salvation plan, but the paths soon intersect with and weave into one another until no mind is subtle enough to comprehend the tapestry of the whole. I certainly am not able to follow every path. In Revelations and in the priestly sacrifice of the Jews I can perceive at a distance whole continents of meaning, the journey through which I have not the time nor the training to undertake.

But to have a blog you have to have words. So I will try to follow a few of the paths that have most occupied my mind throughout my life. To start, I have to say that I am not a fan of the term, "the Mass." It is a random, meaningless word unconnected with the early Church. It serves only as a barrier between Catholics and other Christians, separating us from one another with its other-ness. According to Mike Aquilina, author of The Mass of the Early Christians,

Mass is a medieval English coinage derived from the Latin rite's words of dismissal: Ite, missa est ("Go, it is ended"). The first generations of believers called their worship by many other names, each evocative and some even poetic. In the beginning it was most commonly referred to as "the breaking of the bread." This, however, was immediately supplemented by "the sacrifice," and related terms such as "the offering" and "the oblation"; for the Mass was understood to be the Church's participation in the once-for-all sacrifice of the new covenant. Some called the new rite "the liturgy," from the Greek leitourgia, meaning "public service." The Latins, from an early date, used the term "sacrament," while the Greeks favored "the mysteries." Some terms were merely descriptive, such as "the table of the Lord," "the Lord's supper," "the chalice," and "the altar." Others were compact, but rich in meaning: "the passion of the Lord," "the presence," "the communion." Overwhelmingly though, the title that won the day was "the Eucharist," from the Greek eucharistia, which means, literally, "thanksgiving."

Using this spectacular web site we can see that "εὐχαριστήσας" (eucharistia) is the Greek word used by Luke and the other New Testament authors to describe Jesus' actions at the Last Supper: "and he took bread, gave thanks (eucharistia), and broke it, giving it to them." So for the rest of this post I will use the word "Eucharist" in place of "the Mass." This helpfully blurs the distinction between the ceremony and its object. This is useful because Jesus and the Church themselves blur the distinction between them, and between the Passion and the covenant and the mystery of salvation itself. "This cup is the new covenant in my blood." In the Eucharist we are transported back to Calvary. The past is made present, and the covenant is made manifest.

In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis says that he found in Christianity just that aura of the unexpected that characterizes real things. "Reality," he says, "is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity....If it offered just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have." Nowhere is this more true than in the Eucharist. Not only is it unexpected, it is shocking and often scandalous, unasked for and even unwanted. We would not have thought to ask God for it, and had we thought to ask, we would not have dared to do so. One of the saddest scenes of the Bible occurs in John 6, when Jesus was abandoned by his disciples because of his teaching about the Eucharist: "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him," he said, and "then many of his disciples who were listening said, 'This saying is hard; who can accept it?'....As a result of this, many (of) his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, 'Do you also want to leave?'"

It's impossible to read this passage without contemplating the sad loss of fellowship between Catholics and Protestants, who because of the sinfulness of the Reformation-era Church abandoned, not the person of Jesus, but his teaching about the Eucharist, or at least the long unbroken understanding of those teachings that the Church had held since the earliest days, since Paul penned the first known written description of the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians 11, and warned that "anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself." Because of the neo-original sins of the Reformation-era Church, which drove out the Reformers, and because of the sins of the Reformers themselves in turning their backs on a Church that Jesus himself promised never to abandon, we find ourselves in the sad state we are in today, unable to come together as Christians and share in the profound mystery of the Eucharist, the mystery of salvation itself.

"This cup is the new covenant in my blood." With these words Jesus ties a thread from the Eucharist into God's ancient covenant with Abraham, the original covenant in blood. With this covenant God promised the land of Israel to Abraham and his descendants. With this covenant God bound himself to the people of Abraham, with his promise that "I shall be your God and you shall be my people." With this covenant the Jewish people came to be. In Genesis 15 God said to Abraham, "I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans (in modern-day Iraq) to give you this land as a possession. 'O Lord GOD,' he asked, 'How am I to know that I shall possess it?'" Abraham asked this not because he lacked faith in God's promise, but because it seemed appropriate to him that the bond be formalized by some concrete act. He asks God for guidance, and God answers, "Bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old she-goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle-dove, and a young pigeon."

The ceremony that God then performed was one familiar to the ancient Semitic tribes: it was the formation of a covenant relationship. When we today hear the word "covenant", we tend to envision a kind of contract, but that is not at all the picture that the ancient Semites would have had. In a modern contract, two sides agree to be bound by the terms of the agreement, or else to face the consequences of the law. But among the wandering tribes of the deserts of the ancient Near East, law was not the strongest force that bound one people to another; the strongest bonds were those of family, clan and tribe. When two tribes formed a covenant with one another, those were the bonds they were attempting to extend to one another. They were saying, "Our two tribes are now united, we are one and the same family, and we will treat an attack upon you as we would an attack on one of our own." A contract may be nullified if one of the parties fails to live up to the terms of the agreement, and the two parties may then go their separate ways. But a covenant can never be nullified, any more than your father can stop being related to you just because he breaks a promise to you. Tribes entering into a covenant relationship were pledging a kind of union that by its very nature cannot be broken. It is exactly like marriage used to be: indissoluble, "the two become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). This is why the Passion and the Eucharist are so often referred to as the wedding ceremony between Christ and the Church, particularly by Paul and in the book of Revelation. The new covenant, like the old one, is a marriage, an indissoluble union between God and humanity, the two made one flesh, God and man united as never before conceived. From here lead other threads that may be followed to a deeper understanding of the Eucharist, but that will have to wait for another day.

In the ancient world of Abraham, when two tribes formed a covenant they would perform a ceremony that seems strange and barbaric to us today: they would cut a cow in half, the two pieces would be separated, and the tribes would walk together between the pieces. Blood would have been everywhere--this was intended to be a very bloody ritual. Blood was the symbol of life among the Semitic tribes. By walking together through the blood the tribes were signifying the new unity of their formerly separate lives. This also explains why the sign that God chose to mark his covenant with the Jews--circumcision--is such a bloody one, and together with the location of the cut obviously signifies the union of the life of Jews and their descendants with the life of God.

"[Abram] brought him all these, split them in two, and placed each half opposite the other; but the birds he did not cut up." Lest we doubt the gore of this scene, performed in the heat of the desert sun, Genesis continues, "Birds of prey swooped down on the carcasses, but Abram stayed with them. As the sun was about to set, a trance fell upon Abram, and a deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him....When the sun had set and it was dark, there appeared a smoking brazier and a flaming torch, which passed between those pieces." In a change-up, God walks alone through the bloody pieces, while Abraham remains in a trance. This will be an unequal covenant, a covenant of God sharing his life with us; we have little to offer to God in this arrangement. Jesus' new covenant would be similarly one-sided, a bath of blood through which God alone must walk, in order that his life could be shared with us. But from Jesus' side on Calvary flowed not just blood, but blood and water, and the sign of the new covenant in the people of God would not be a bloody one like circumcision, but Baptism, a sign of water. Blood, the symbol of life in the flesh, would be superseded by water, the symbol of life in the Spirit. Thus in the new covenant are we united to God in a new and deeper way, and even Baptism is enmeshed in the threads that emanate from the Eucharist.

If the blood of the Passion, which is the blood of the Eucharist, derives from the blood of the Abrahamic covenant, it derives no less from the blood of the Passover lamb, for the Eucharist is nothing other than the continued Christian celebration of the Jewish Passover meal. On that terrifying night of the Passover, when God unleashed the tenth and final plague upon the Egyptians for their enslavement of the Jews, the Jewish people were spared from the wrath of the Angel of Death only by the blood of a lamb splashed across their doorways, the blood of an innocent shed to protect the guilty. We as Christians also have the blood of Christ upon our dwelling places, marking us as a people set apart, protecting us from Death and freeing us from our slavery to sin. And just as the Jewish Passover meal was celebrated with unleavened bread, so too is the Eucharist today, celebrated with the waybread of a traveling people, a people who can't tarry long enough in one place to give their bread time to rise. Thus the Eucharist is also food for the journey, "our daily bread" that sustains us in our long travels through the deserts of this life.

So through the Eucharist Jesus' sacrifice upon Calvary is made present for us; we are allowed to receive it directly, in person, not as something that happened long ago in some distant land. We are given a seat at the wedding feast of the Lamb, the marriage covenant that binds Jesus to the people of God. We are allowed, like Abraham, to witness God walking through the blood of the new covenant. And we, like the Jews in the deserts of the Sinai, are blessed with the daily miracle of the bread that comes down from heaven, which becomes food for our long journey through the deserts of life.

All this we can perceive and, within our limited capacity, can understand by following the trails that are woven through salvation history as recorded in Scripture. And yet none of this lessens the raw shock of the central truth of the Eucharist: that God, creator of all the universe, loves us so much, so desires intimacy with us, that he wishes to literally feed us with himself. "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you." The long ages of sacrifice by man, Jew and pagan alike, of food for the gods to eat, has been turned on its head, and we are faced with a God who wishes to sacrifice himself for us, that we may have him as food to eat. There would appear to be no bottom to the insane humility of this God, who descended from the heights of glory to become one of us, as if a man were to want to become a worm in order to save worms from their sins; who washed the feet of his disciples; who underwent an unjust, unspeakably tortuous death for us; this God wants also to become the food that sustains us in our journey through life. We cannot truly fault the disciples of Jesus who abandoned him over this insane teaching, nor the Protestants who could no longer trust in a doctrine as shocking and bizarre as this, when delivered by a corrupt and broken Church. All we can do, when faced personally with the question that Jesus posed to the Twelve when the rest had abandoned him over this teaching--"Do you also want to leave?"--is to recall, as did the disciples on the road to Emmaus, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us and opened the Scriptures to us?" and to answer as Simon Peter answered: "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."