The Sources of Political Gridlock and Anger

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 3 March 2016 17 Comments
Please login with your account to read this essay.
 

Question

I was sorry not to see you at the Parliament of World Religions held a while back in Salt Lake City, which was a joyous celebration of love, unity and togetherness as children of God. I wanted to ask your view and interpretation of the celebration of Holy Communion. What is its history? How would you interpret it since you do not subscribe to the blood sacrifice theory? Does it still have its usefulness or would you exclude it from a new progressive Christianity?

Answer

Dear Chiwoza,

I’m sure the meeting the Parliament of World religions in Salt Lake City, was worthwhile. The concept of gathering adherents of the world’s various religions for mutual conversations always breaks stereotypes and challenges exclusive claims. My only problem with it is that it tends to work from the top down and therefore means that it is only a very small number of people who are involved. There is so much work to be done from the bottom up. It is very difficult for people to embrace the concept of world religions when they cannot even embrace the division between Orthodox and Reformed, Shia and Sunni, Catholic and Protestant, fundamentalist and modernist. This does not mean that I oppose such things as the Parliament of World Religions. I think we should walk every path available to us in the quest of human oneness. I simply do not want anyone to be unrealistic about the limitations in every path we human beings walk.

The Christian Eucharist was born in the Passover meal of the Jews where bread was taken, blessed, broken and given in a meal that celebrated the Jewish people’s birth as a nation in Egypt when they passed from a life marked by oppression and slavery into a life of independence and the joy of freedom. Early in Christian history Jesus had been identified with the Passover Lamb. It was Paul writing to the Corinthians around the year 54 CE, who first made that identification. “Christ, our new paschal lamb, has been sacrificed for us,” he wrote.

The history of the Passover according to the book of Exodus was that it began as the final plague that God would visit on the Egyptians to force them to allow the Hebrew slave people to go free. This plague was that God would send the “Angel of Death” to pass through the land of Egypt and to kill, shall I say murder, the first born male in every household. The story reflects a rather vengeful tribal deity. Moses inquires of God as to how the Angel of Death would be able to tell the difference between a Jewish house and an Egyptian one, so that no first-born Jewish males would be put to death. God’s answer was that they were to slaughter a lamb and place the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of Jewish homes. The Angel of Death, seeing these bloody doorposts, would “pass over” the Jewish homes and only slay Egyptians. That is the origin of the name Passover. It was to be while the Egyptians were in shock and grief, mourning the loss of their loved ones, that the Children of Israel would make their “exodus” from the land of Egypt.

The Christian Eucharist was at first a highly symbolic act designed to identify Jesus with the paschal lamb. I suspect that this identification actually grew out of a sermon preached by a follower of Jesus at a Passover celebration seeking to draw the analogy between the crucifixion of Jesus and the slaying of the Passover lamb.

The cross in this sermon was seen as the doorposts of the world, suspended as it was between heaven and earth. On one side it pointed to heaven, while on the other it was rooted in the earth. The blood of the new paschal lamb on that cross served in some magical way, they believed, to break the power of death so that people coming to God through the blood of the paschal lamb could participate in the life of God, which was eternal. It was much later that content from the liturgical day called Yom Kippur entered the Eucharist. That was the time when the blood of the sacrifice entered the Eucharist and atonement theology was born.

Originally, the Eucharist was, I believe, the liturgical context in which the resurrection was understood. It was a gathering of the people of God around the table of the Lord in order to share in his life. That was the meaning that gave the Eucharist its primary power.

The idea that Jesus died for my sins is a much later bit of bad theology, which was subsequently placed on top of the Eucharist. So if we separate the Eucharistic experience from the explanations that gathered around it through the ages, then we might recover its original meaning. In this question and answer format I can only scratch the surface, but I hope the direction is clear.

Stay in touch.
John Shelby Spong

 

Comments

 

17 thoughts on “The Sources of Political Gridlock and Anger

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.