Broken Things

"Broken Things"--August 27, 2018

While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” [Mark 14:22]

Pay attention to the action that goes along with the words. The only way Jesus can give bread away and share it is if it’s broken.  The only way Jesus can give himself away is the same. 

Taking a look at today’s verse, I have had a song lyric running through my head.  It’s a Julie Miller song, and the opening verse goes, “You can have my heart/ Though it isn't new/ It's been used and broken/ And only comes in blue.” Then the refrain opens with this offer:  “You can have my heart… if you don’t mind broken things.” Wow.

I have to admit, I am hearing Jesus’ words—the same words and the same story it is mine to tell week by week at the Communion Table—in a whole new way, held up against that song.  There is vulnerability in them.  There is tenderness.  There is love.  All of that was there all along in Jesus’ words, in his single simple sentence, “Take; this is my body.”  But all too often, we let Jesus’ words get starchy and stiff, like he is giving a theological lecture with charts and graphs, rather than graphically depicting what he is about to do for his friends.

We read, “This is my body,” and for a lot of Christian history, we have decided he is giving us a metaphysical statement that we are supposed to diagram, and then agree to, and then commit to memory.  So over the centuries, lots of well-intentioned smart religious professionals have jumped on these words and picked fights with one another over them.  “He means that the bread transforms into his body in a literal sense, and if you don’t agree on that point, you are going to hell,” insist some.  “No, he is telling us that the bread is like his body as just a symbol, and anybody who believes differently is lost in superstition and magical thinking,” say others as they wag their fingers.  (Lutherans, I will confess, have their own way of saying it, and we have reasons for our position, which would go something like, “It’s not magic, but it's not just a nice metaphor, either. It's a mystery, and the real Jesus is really there in, with, and under the ordinary, everyday stuff of bread.”  But that is a conversation for another day.)  And so the fighting goes back and forth, with each party condemning the other’s supposedly incorrect diagram of what Jesus surely meant when he said, “This is my body.”

How easily we forget that the action comes with the bread and the words.  “He took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it, he broke it and gave it to them….”  The only bread Jesus gives is broken bread.  He tears the bread in two (or more probably, since it would have been flat unleavened bread for Passover, cracks it in two along jagged lines).  It doesn’t pull apart neatly into perfect little perforated squares or circles like the tidy ways it often happens in churches.  It is ripped, pulled, torn—it is broken.  And in the breaking, Jesus says, earnestly, tenderly, and vulnerably, “This is for you.  This is me.  You can have it, if you don’t mind broken things.”  

Jesus’ words have the exposed intimacy of a love song.  They had it all along, but we were busy making charts and graphs to decide whose theology was damnable because of what they believed the bread did, or did not, turn into.  We so easily miss the beauty and the infinite preciousness of what Jesus is doing.  He is not saying, “Here is some quasi-magic bread, and if you eat it with the correct theory about how the magic gets in there, you will get more heaven points.  So take it...but only with the proper diagram in your head while you do... or you'll go to hell.”  He is saying, “See this?  See this broken thing?  It is broken for you.  This is me.  I am going to be broken for you.  If you want me in your life, the only way you get me is broken.  It’s the only way I come.”

The cross, the Communion Table, the whole life of faith—they are all in one way or another all about Jesus giving himself away for us.  And the only way we can receive him… is broken.  There is no Christ without a cross, no Jesus as "conquering, invincible warrior-god",  or “just a nice moral teacher” or “just a guy with some good spiritual insights.”  The only way Jesus comes is crucified.  Risen, too, certainly.  Triumphant over death, absolutely.  But having come through death to get to resurrection.  And that means Jesus himself was broken… for you, and for me.  If we miss that, we can get all the rest of our diagrams right and still miss the point.  Pay attention to the action  at the table that comes with the words.  Receive the gift and take in what it is Jesus is holding up for you and me:  This is my body.  You can have it, if you don’t mind broken things.

Lord Jesus, we can scarcely take in what you have done for us.  Don’t let us miss the awesome beauty of your love in our attempts to reduce you to theories and theology.