Entering the Biblical Story -- Gil Baile

Entering the Biblical Story at the Eucharistic Table - by Gil Bailie
(My edited transcript of  the presentation: "Violence Unveiled: The Gospel at Work in Our World" Date Unknown)

We should ask more fundamental questions then we ask, and one of the fundamental questions that we should ask is, ‘why are we here?’

Starry sky over Grand Canyon from Mather Point.

Photo by: Tyler Nordgren, University of Redlands.

Why are we here?
The question itself is like looking at the “The Starry Night” or looking into the Grand Canyon. Why are we here? Even if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, and I think we Christians have some answers, but if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, we can’t let go of that question and we must ask it explicitly, because that question will be answered. The world will provide an answer for it and the answer that the world provides will be a silly shallow one. And we will not even notice how silly and shallow it is, because we will not have even noticed that it is the answer to THAT question, because we won’t have heard the question.

The stock answer to that question that the world provides is that we are here to be as comfortable as we can be for as long as we can live. And that is the white-collar nihilism – that is to say it is a world-view that is not even as lively and entertaining as, eat, drink and be merry. It is a kind of terrible grim, make-the-best-of-it-till-you-die world-view. But we don’t even notice how terrible and grim and nihilistic it is because we did not ask the question explicitly and therefore the answer that we operate with is one that has never been brought to our attention, it is just the operating system.

Why are we here?
I have been talking in these presentations about ‘the story’ - reclaiming the story, as we are always forgetting the story and rediscovering it at new levels. Perhaps one of the impressive instances of this occurs in Luke’s Gospel after the crucifixion and resurrection, it is the ‘Road to Emmaus’ story. It is a marvelous story of disciples who had their messianic expectations shattered by the cross – it has all failed and what they see is failure and disillusionment, and for them their story has ended. There was a lot of hope, but the hope has died, the story is over. They are leaving Jerusalem because Jerusalem has become a hostile place. Jerusalem is where the drama of the story took place, and they have given up on it and they are going away. Jesus meets them on this journey. He begins talking with them and they say, ‘haven’t you heard about these things?’ Jesus says, ‘what things,’ to get them to talk. So they go on about what happened and how their hopes had been dashed by the cross. Then it says in Luke, he explained to them how all the scriptures had prophesied all these events.

There is a wonderful poem by William Stafford and it goes like this,

When God watches you walk, you are/
neither straight nor crooked. The journey stretches out, and all of its reasons/ beat like a heart. Coming back, no triumph, no regret, you fold into the curves,/
left, right, and arrive. You touch the door. The road straightens behind you./
It is now. It has all come true.

Our lives meander all over taking different turns, running into dead ends and reverses and suddenly, with God’s grace we arrive at where we are going. We touch the door and the path straightens out behind us. I have a friend who says that if I met myself back when I was 20, he would not recognize me, but I would recognize him. Well, the door for us is the Cross and the scriptures straighten behind us. When we touch that, then we go back and read it again. We read it for the second time and we see its destination, we see its final full revelation about God and about us and both of them are shocking. It is shocking what we do and it is shocking how merciful and all loving God is. Jesus explains this on the road to Emmaus in one verse and then they sit down in the village of Emmaus and break bread. When they break bread they recognize him. They don’t recognize him up to that moment.

Here now the story and the breaking of the bread come together. The disciples on the road to Emmaus are lost and they don’t have a story and Jesus intercepts them and with a few depth-strokes of his brush paints them the picture, tells them the story, which includes the cross, and therefore the story not only can go on, but now has a center. They returned to Jerusalem, which is the place of the promise and it is from Jerusalem that the mission must proceed out to the ends of the world. So they come back and become part of the story and they become part of Luke’s story in Acts, which is the story of the church going out to preach the Gospel to the world.

It brings together the story and the Eucharist in such a powerful way. I have a principle that is that the Biblical text should not be interpreted more than more than 30 feet from the Eucharistic table, or they should only be interpreted on the way to the Eucharistic table, keeping in-line with the Emmaus story. Can we take these texts out and bring them over and plop them on a seminar table at the university and get it? I don’t think so. Good work is done there, but the real understanding – the real truth of these inspired texts takes place in proximity of the Eucharistic table.

I want to talk about the Last Supper and then I want to talk about the Eucharist.

The disciples, as you know, are slow, no slower than we are. We look a little better than they do because we had the Gospel for 2000 years, but they are pretty slow. Another friend of mine refers to the disciples as being ‘25 watts and dimming’.  They never get it. Most of all they never get it when He talks about the cross. Before the cross, the reason why they don’t get it is because the cross destroys the blockage that keeps them from understanding. They are still living inside the world which the cross is going to explode. Jesus at some point realizes that they cannot get it until sometime after the cross. And at that point he begins to say things like this, ‘I am going to say these words, you are not going to get it, just remember them.’  Just remember them and at some point the nickel will drop. The only time they get it was when they once say to him, teach us how to pray, because at that moment they recognize that that is who he is and they want to be like that.

So Jesus has very little time. He gets to Jerusalem and it looks like the hour is approaching. There is no more time for sermons – there is no more time for explanations – there is time for very little, what is he going to do? It is very important to Jesus that he leaves them capable of receiving the truth, which will be available to them after the cross. So what does he do? He has a Passover meal. And the Passover meal is about getting out of Egypt. Some of what I am going to do below will be in a campy/Monty Python way…, but I think that there is something incredible here that we have not come to grips with.

I am going to reverse the order – let us start with the cup. He takes the cup and He says, “This is the cup of my blood which will be shed so that sin may be forgiven.” He is interpreting the cross. This is the cup of my blood, which will be shed so that sins may be forgiven. Now remember, when Jesus shows up, we humans have always had a way of taking away sins. We take away sins by putting it on the back of our scapegoat, getting rid of it and feeling righteous. Jesus is about to destroy that way by showing us the face of the innocent victim. What happens if he destroys that system and walks away and does nothing else? What happens, and in some extent is what is happening, which is, we begin to choke on our own unforgiven-ness, which is a synonym for resentment and virtually a synonym for sin. The world is filling up with unforgiven-ness. When we look out and read the morning paper and we see the 6 o’clock news we see this ignorance and sin and insensitivity and all of the rest of it. Sometimes we establish some sort of moral stance about it, but if we look at it as Christians what we see is this crying out of this massive unforgiven-ness. All the terrible things and we probably evoke Columbine High School perhaps too often at this point, but all the terrible things that are going to happen in the future are going to be committed by unforgiven people.

And Jesus has thrown everything off by destroying the system that used to take away the sins of the world on the cheap at the expense of the scapegoat. And so the unforgiven-ness festers, and festers. Jesus is now giving us another way of taking away sin. The Biblical God is not going to take away sin with a wave of the wand. Why? This has to do with the whole theodicy question, ‘why does God allow all the terrible things to happen in the world?’ God is not going to take away sins by the wave of the wand because that would rob us of our freedom and our dignity. God wants love and love has to be freely offered. And if you are going to create enough freedom so that love can be freely offered you are going to have to live in a world made perilous by what people do with that freedom. You cannot have it both ways. God has put all his bets on love, and therefore on freedom and therefore, what we do with that freedom can be a catastrophe, but God is not going to take away our sins by robbing us of our freedom because it would rob us of our covenantal love for our Creator.

How is He going to take it away then? He will take them away instantly if we ask that they be taken away. All we have to do is, first of all recognize our sinfulness, our complicity, that is to say, hear the cock crow and ask for forgiveness. The key is to ask for forgiveness. And we can’t ask for forgiveness until we recognize our sinfulness. And we can’t recognize our sinfulness until we go to the pit of that little machine that use to wash it away and we see what we have been doing. We hear the cock crow and we have that moment of conversion.

And so His blood is shed so that sins may be forgiven, not taken away on the cheap, but forgiven because we have recognized them and asked for forgiveness. And then Jesus says, “Take this and drink it. This is my blood.” He goes back to the question which Jesus asked about His own passion when people asked him, ‘who is going to sit at your right hand?’ He asks, “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” That question is asked at the end of Mark’s Gospel – at the Eucharist in Mark’s Gospel it said He gave them this cup and they all drank of it, and they all died a martyr’s death. It is that kind of implication.

In the Eucharist we are offered that cup, why? It is because we are incorporated into the forgiving mission of Christ. When Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, you have the keys to the kingdom whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven and whose sin you retain, they are retained - we should understand how significant this statement is. It seems silly to introduce a baseball metaphor at this point, but if a pitcher lets a couple guys on base and the manager decides to put in another pitcher, and somebody gets a hit and those guys come in, they are on the ERA of the pitcher who got pulled out. When Jesus says, whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven, whose sins are retained; they are retained. He is saying, I think, all the unforgiven-ness that you could have solved and didn’t is on your ERA – it’s on your record. You are in charge of all the unforgiven-ness that you could forgive and don’t. Can you drink this cup? Can you drink this cup? What does it mean to drink this cup in order that sins might be forgiven?

All this means, I think, is that we must be able to step into that place, not that we are going to become martyrs, most of us do not have the courage for it, but martyrs in another way. The word means to witness. Simply to be the kind of person who when something begins to swirl, when the melodrama gets set in motion, when accusations are made we can, at the risk of our own reputation, our own standing in the community, our own livelihood whatever it happens to be, can we step into the breach and absorb some of that animosity and break up the little knot that is forming? Not by going in as John the Baptist would do and fighting it back in the other direction. But simply by stepping into that world and absorbing that tension (like the old Rolaids commercial, absorbs 47 times its own weight in access stomach acids…). Can we be the kind of people that can move into that place, and drink the cup and be part of Christ forgiveness? The world is going to choke on its own unforgiven-ness if we don’t. That is our role in the world. This is not cheap forgiveness. The forgiven one has to hear the cock crow, and we shouldn’t go around being lily-white liberals that we are forgiving easy and never being part of the cock crowing. People have to hear the cock crow - we have to hear it. Jesus, when He forgives people, He always says, “go, and sin no more.” It is not forgiveness on the cheap. So it is a subtle process, it requires character and dignity and courage and most of all it requires an enormous moral generosity. So Jesus is inducting us into service for history in a world which is going to now increasingly be deprived of its old mechanism for taking away its own sins on the cheap. He is bringing us into this mission of taking them away in such a way that not only honors our dignity and our freedom, but also rehabilitates us.

And then, remember I am reversing the order, Jesus takes a loaf of bread and he says (now I am going to ham it up a little bit), ‘We all came here tonight to get out of Egypt - and you all want out of Egypt, we are all in some Egypt largely of our own making,’ Jesus says, ‘you want to get out of Egypt, let me tell you how to get out of Egypt.’ He takes a loaf of bread and says, “This is my life.” You have to remember we are talking about Jews here; we are not talking about philosophers. Body means life. This is a big difference between Jews and philosophers, and as I said before that with the disciples being ‘25 watts and dimming,’ it is amazing that Jesus didn’t throw up his hands half way through it all and leave them all and go the Alexandria and get some PhD’s. , but he didn’t and that’s very important…this is the faith of fishermen…this is the faith of Mary, the 15-year-old who said, ‘Let it be done unto me according to Thy Word.’ So her son having learned a good deal of this on her knee no doubt says, this is my life, you want to get out of Egypt, watch carefully. No more sermons, just this. Watch this – this is my life – you take it, give thanks for it, because it is not yours. Now take your life, receive it as a gift, give thanks because it is not yours – it’s a gift, and then you break it and give it away. And the ‘25 watts and dimming’ crowd are looking at each other asking, what did he say?

Jesus says, okay, I know you didn’t get it, I got a few more minutes here; let me go over this again. You see this? This is my life! This is what you people have been following me around for the last 3 years trying to get a piece of, now I am going to give you a piece of it. This is my life; this is what you want. If you want out of Egypt, this is how you do it. There is no other way out of Egypt. It is the most radical, the most costly, the most liberating thing there is. You receive your life as a gift – it does not belong to you – it’s on loan. And you give thanks for it. And the one who gave it to you wants it back, but he wants it back as a free gift. So you give thanks for it, then you break it, or let it be broken, and you give it away. And if you do these things you are inducted into this great mystery, we call the body of Christ. The incarnation is still happening. You and I have the privilege of being a tiny part of it. The major event of the incarnation is something we both celebrate and enter into at the Eucharist, over and over again. We receive the cup, we drink the cup that Jesus drank at his passion and we take upon ourselves this commitment to be the ones who stand into the breach so that sins might be forgiven. We learn that our life is not our own and that it can be broken and given away. In that we are set free and made happy in spite of whatever sufferings we might experience.

Flannery O’Connor was getting an award in New York one time and she had to get all gussied up from her farm in Georgia to go to this award banquet. It was all literary and religious people sitting around eating dinner, there was a conversation going on at her table about theological symbolism of the Eucharist, and Flannery O’Connor is just eating away not saying anything. After a while her silence became obvious and so one of the people who were particularly lively in the conversation turned to her and said to her, “Ms O’Connor, what do you think about the symbolism of the Eucharist?” She glared over the top of her glasses and said “If it is just a symbol, the hell with it.”

It is very important to remember Jesus didn’t say, ‘take this and figure it out.’ He said, ‘take it and eat it.’ There is a huge mystery in the Eucharist, but it is I think, the mystery of our induction into the body of Christ - into the communion of saints – into the work of Christ in history.

Altar at St Meinrad Archabbey

So Jesus says, ‘take this and eat it, this is my body. Take this and drink it, this is my blood.’ People thought that the early Christians were cannibals, but it is interesting, the first sacrifice in anthropological terms, was almost certainly cannibalistic. We don’t need to get into that at this time, but there is something amazing about the Eucharist in that it harks back, in some prime mortal way, to the most primitive human event, the founding of primitive religion in sacrifice and cannibalism. In addition, it prefigures the final culminating event of human history, which is the messianic banquet.

So we have this piece of furniture, and we don’t know quite what to call it anymore, we call it an altar and then sometimes we call it a table, what is it? It must always be both. It is a table that used to be an altar. It is an altar up until the veil of the temple is rent from top to bottom. But we must never forget that it is a sacrificial altar – that there is no alternative to sacrifice. The only question is what kind of sacrifice is it going to be? In Jesus’ re-interpretation of it all, it is the anticipation of the messianic banquet and the induction of us all into the body of Christ. So this piece of furniture and the ritual we celebrate around it is absolutely at the throbbing heart of the Christian mystery. This piece of furniture is like the wardrobe in Narnia – you Episcopalians will always know Narnia better than any other denomination – it’s the wardrobe in Narnia where you enter into the story – the real story – where the story becomes vivid.

There comes a time when we must enter into The Story

For much of my presentation so far I have talked about story, recovering the story in scriptural terms, and of course we have to do that. But there is this place where we actually enter the story. We don’t just learn the story, and say the story, but we become actors in the story; we begin to perform the story. And I don’t think we should be too self-conscious about that kind of language. Refer to the unbelievable central passage from Paul, “I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.” We have to take that at face value. One has to say about that what Flannery O’Connor said about the Eucharist, if it is just a symbol, the hell with it. It is not just a symbol. Christians are here to be incorporated into the work of Christ in history.

Jesus never claimed to be operating on his own. He even says in John’s Gospel, “If I had come in my own name you would believe me, but because I have come in the name of the one who has sent me you don’t believe.” We are asked to be like that. We are asked to re-present Christ to the world. To be actors in the great drama – like von Balthasar’s ‘Theo-drama’, a magnificent orchestration of the grandeur of the Christian drama in history - and so the language of drama is appropriate – and the language of re-presenting it to the world in however way, even though we are all clay vessels, we are all clumsy, we’re all fallen and sinful, we don’t do a very good job of it, despite our clumsiness God knows how to use leftovers and misfits – in fact our clumsiness is part of it, our failures to do it are part of it.

We are called; we are incorporated; we are deputized to receive into our lives - personally and with our communion with one another - the spirit of Christ, and to step into the world and absorb all the anxieties, uncertainty and the confusion and be part of the light of Christ in the world. Having had the rug pulled out from under us as Jesus has done, without our stepping up as Christ-links, the world is going to go to hell in a hand basket. And we see that happening in many parts of the world today.

Jesus says take this cup, which is the cup of suffering. We don’t have to be melodramatic about it; there is suffering in our lives. The suffering that I should understand as redemptive is my suffering. The sufferings that I see other people undergoing I should not think that I am going to take it away, I won’t be able to, but I can be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone in that suffering and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them. They may not be able to experience that unless they know that I am in it with them. That may be their only entrée to the discovery that Christ is in it with them. Being in that suffering with others, and of course, that sometimes means helping to relieve the suffering, is our responsibility. Mother Teresa once answered a journalist’s comment, “…but you’re not suffering.” She said, “I am not worthy.” So all of us in this room have suffered, and some of us a great deal, but those who have suffered the most are worthy of it. And those of us who have suffered less must have admiration for those, and we must try to be there so they can feel God’s present.

Created by aravir

We are called to bring forgiveness into the world, being there with people who are suffering from their own unforgiven-ness and being simply an agent in the presence of whom people can begin to feel forgiveness. Forgiveness is a great mystery; it is not some sanctimonious thing that somebody who has it gives to somebody else. It is a spirit that infects us – it always has an infecting agent. There is always somebody who brings it in and introduces it into a situation of unforgiven-ness, and it is our Eucharistic responsibility to be about that business. In order to be able to be about such business, we have to experience the kenosis (meaning: a self-emptying) of Christian discipleship. So we take our lives, and this is our supreme privilege, we must not see this as some kind of melodramatic act of renunciation, it is the source of our freedom, to take our lives, thank God for them because it is a gift to us, and break them or let them be broken and give them away. And then, Jesus says, “do THIS in memory of me.” Do what? Do this in memory of me. Not just the gesture, of course we do the gesture; of course the Real Presence, but when Jesus says, do THIS, He is talking of something much more vast then that. He means doing that which the gesture represents – being Christ in the world.

I will give you a treat; in my presentations to high school students I tell them a poem by Rumi, a 13th century Sufi. The poem goes like this:

Be like one, who when he walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it.
Be like one, who when she walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it. I usually say it 10 times because it is easy to remember if you have heard it 10 times. Then I re-translate it.
Be like one, who when he walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

I think that is what drinking the cup is all about, so that sins might be forgiven; so that the knot might be broken; so that the animosity might be absorbed or dispersed; so that the healing and forgiveness might be brought into this situation where unforgiven-ness is about to get the upper hand. Be like one, who when she walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

It is at the Eucharistic table that we receive this gift and are nourished for the journey to go back out into the world and be Eucharistic people, be Christ to the world, absorbing that unforgiven-ness and being people who are not there on their own, but rather people who are saying with Paul, I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.

Then there is a little passage of a book on Revelation by William Riley, Irish Biblical scholar who passed away a few years ago that I would like to leave you with. He has a wonderful way of helping understand our work in the church and it also comes out of our Eucharist mandate. He says that Christ often calls us to failure, not success just as He Himself was called to the Cross. “The marvelous religion teacher, the hard working bishop who manages his diocese well, the mother of a family strongly rooted in the faith have done no more works than the dedicated religion teacher whose classroom is like a drudgery, or the zealous and caring bishop whose administration is constantly criticized or the loving mother whose family, despite her efforts, have all abandoned the Church. In many ways the last three have received a higher calling.” Isn’t that amazing? We are called to move into that place of brokenness and to take up our cross. And to do it in such a way that the world hears the cock crow, and that the world feels the forgiveness of God. And that the world recognizes that we are not doing it on our own, or that we are not doing it because we are nice, or morally superior. We are doing it because Christ has laid His Hand on us.


This is the end of the talk.
The following are from the question and answer period after the talk.

Q: The difference between suffering and pain is a matter of choice. Pain is not choice; you are inflicted in some way. Suffering implies a choice. Can you elaborate on this?

Gil: Pain is something that happens to you and that suffering is a choice when you say yes to it. This is something on Christian redemptive suffering. We have so much to learn from so many people of different faiths. I was in dialogue a few months ago in Milwaukee with the Tibetan monk that taught the Dali Lama, it was a great privilege to be in this man’s presence. It was Christian – Buddhist dialogue, which is mostly an exercise in politeness, but we did have dinner together so we did get a little beyond it there. One of the things one has to realize is some of the essential differences we have. The Buddha was trying to avoid suffering by withdrawing desire by essentially, and I know this is a clumsy way to put it, by sequestering desire, by closing it down somehow. The Buddhist recognizes that the problem is desire that is very good, so do we Christians, or at least we should or we used to before we threw Augustine out. But for Christians it is not to shut down desire and it is not to avoid suffering. For Christians it is to awaken desire and turn it toward its proper object. Turn it away from all the fancy glitter things that distract us toward God. And because we humans need to see the face of God, we absolutely needed the incarnation. Jesus gives us that incarnation so that our desires, and we are not talking about the goofy kinds of raw desires, but our longing, like metal filings can be re-oriented in the right way, so that our desire is awakened. This is what Dante is all about, awakening that desires and turning it to all kinds of mediators: Beatrice, the Beloved, Sister Immaculate, John of the Cross, whoever it is, awakened by all kinds of mediators and directed back to its true source. Augustine starts the Confessions with the first paragraph he ends it with, “We are restless until we rest in Thy.” We take that restlessness which is our desire, we don’t try to shut it down, we turn it toward its proper object and we understand that suffering can be redemptive. That is really powerful. When you recognize that this can be redemptive, not just for me, because if it is for me than it goes back to this little project of me getting into heaven, elbowing my way in. But my suffering can be redemptive to somebody on the other side of the planet – to somebody in another age. And this is what prayer can do. We have to believe these things because they are true. We use to have as little Catholic children in the playground we would say prayers or we would offer up our suffering to the poor souls in purgatory, which now today everyone has a little condescending smirk, but it is absolutely true. Our suffering can be redemptive not just for us, but maybe not primarily for us, but for others. It is a great gift and once you recognize that, suddenly this pain has dignity and vocation.

Q: Can you talk about the mechanism of violence and anthropology?

Gil: When the 19th century anthropologist went out, by the way I am talking anthropology – I have a definition of anthropology that I haven’t told you yet. Anthropology is the study of cultures by people who no longer have one.  And you will notice that it was invented by the west about 200 or rather 150 years ago. Somebody once said about poetry; don’t write a poem unless you have to and you could say the same thing about anthropology. Don’t invent the science of anthropology unless you have to. We had to about 150 years ago. And the first anthropologists went out and started studying these other cultures and they came back with all sorts of data and they sorted through it and they said ah-ha! All over the place, wherever you look we have these dying and rising gods. We have these stories that are very interesting. There is a crisis; and there is a death; and there is reconciliation or a resolution or some kind of resurrection. They were all Enlightenment people so that means they didn’t know squat about religion, so they had this insight – the insight was Christianity was just another myth. And that idea was so radical at first that only the academics talked about it. That was before academics became famous and had press conferences. Then it trickled out and people started studying these things and it comes into the modern times, and I don’t want to scapegoat because I have read these people and gleaned a lot from their work, but Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and all those people for whom Christianity is just another dying and rising myth. Gradually that language seeps into the church. Only in the last 30 years have we Christians started talking that way; unbelievable that we would talk that way.

Okay, anthropologists said that Christianity is just another myth because it is exactly the same thing as what they discovered all over the world. And we Christians said, no, no, it is not the same thing - ours is different. Oh yea, the anthropologists asked, how is it different? Well,..., ah,…, ah,…, well, you see, nails hurt more or something like that. We tried to account for it in whatever way or we fled the scene. René Girard said, NO. You have to begin there. You have to say YES, you are right. If you want to recover Christianity’s universality, you don’t flee from that revelation you a firm it. Yes of course it is structurally identical to all of that. It had to be: it has it be, because all of that is a telling of the story that is false. All of that tells you the story from the point of view of the victimizing community. You get the crisis; you get the death; and you get reconciliation, but you never get the innocence of the victim, NEVER. Christianity presents something that is structurally identical and reverses the whole valence by creating a community of people who come together because they have heard the cock crow; they have seen the innocence of the victim; the scales have fallen from their eyes; they have seen the idolatry of the world and they have begun to see the face of the living God. So it has to be the same. And this is what I was trying to say earlier, when the world says no, we don’t counter that with some kind of over-against: yes, yes, yes – no, no, no like some chant in the school yard. We go deeper into the mystery until we can bring up an affirmation that brings in that negation that can affirm that negation itself, which is exactly what happened in this example of Girard saying yes, it is the same.