The Real Presence Is So Simple And Still A Mystery

MARY  McGlone's commentary on the story of the Samaritan Woman at the well who Jesus asked for some water is a good example of why the ban on Women preaching in church has led to a partial and distorted Christianity, I'll give you what she says about that passage from John's Gospel beginning with the end of what she says about the first reading for today, Exodus 17:3-7, about God having Moses find water in the rock:

Water is a precious commodity in the desert. Sharing water symbolizes hospitality, openness to the stranger and respect for life. In an inside out image of the God who draws water from stone, the vulnerable Jesus must ask for life-giving water and acceptance, and he does it at the well that symbolizes her heritage of faith in the God of Abraham. Once they have begun their conversation, the tables turn again and Jesus reveals that the divine thirst is not for water, but for a life-giving relationship with humanity.

What happened in the interchange between Jesus and Photina (the name the Orthodox give the Samaritan) should have been more threatening to the guardians of Jewish and Samaritan religion than anything else Jesus preached. When Photina tried to pit the Jewish and Samaritan approaches to God against one another, Jesus led her beyond every expression of denominationalism and dependence on ritual. All that mattered to Jesus was that Photina (and by extension all people) would know God as he did; he thirsted for her to be moved by God’s own Spirit and to abide in the truth-generating relationships that flow from that.

This is exactly what happened. As Photina began to comprehend what Jesus was saying, her feistiness turned to curiosity and then to faith. As the representative of a people who had sought God through a series of shallow affiliations (five husbands), she found a truth and love worthy of her and was impelled to share it.

Too often, we focus on Photina's "five husbands," as if this story were about the conversion of a loose woman. That overlooks the astounding theology and universality of this Gospel message. Theologically, this Gospel story reminds us that our creator invites humanity into relationship, but never imposes. This paints a picture of God as both vulnerable and thirsty, ever waiting near some well to offer life to those who can listen, wonder and respond. The universality of today’s message comes through Jesus' proclamation that real worship and relationship with God does not depend on place or ritual, but on how the people become vulnerable to the Spirit's action in their lives.

Paul preaches this very same message in the Letter to the Romans when he assures us that our "justification" is based on faith.** If we were to put Paul's idea in the context of the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, we would say that salvation springs from relationship with God; it is never bound by any particular deed, creed or ritual. Salvation happens when we attend to God's thirst and respond with personal hospitality. Once we have been affected by a relationship with God, it automatically begins to flow into all our other relationships, making us not just believers, but almost irresistible evangelizers.

Today, Photina may appear to us in many guises. We will recognize her not by her name, geography or appearance, but rather by her enthusiastic love and the way she invites us to respond to God's thirst and enjoy living water forever. Like her, all we need do is respond. As a result, the world's thirst will begin to be quenched.

That is so good I didn't want to interrupt it to say that sharing clean, drinkable water is more than just symbolic, in the very act of providing someone else with it we enact what we are here for, as with the Eucharist of Jesus, the act of giving sustenance, water, food, drink, is the very thing, what comprises the body and blood, the life of Jesus, human enactment of God's sustaining of life.  It's such a profound act that it is always in danger of being treated as merely symbolic or caught up in some philosophical-theological abstraction*, though I'm sure that's not what Mary McGlone intended.  I like that she uses a name for her though, of course, it's probably not her name.   Maybe it's our reservation of the word "symbol" that is the problem, we don't generally deal with the fact that everything to do with our thinking deals in symbolism.

As this commentary notes, the typical focus on the story isn't the act of Jesus asking a Woman from an ethnic-religious group that his ethnic-religious group (Christians are so apt to forget he had an ethnic identity) weren't on the friendliest terms with.  Though I'd imagine that there were plenty of Jews and Samaritans who got along pretty well, as McGlone says, it would have been the leaders of both groups that found that kind of friendliness threatening.  Like those who in the United States promote racism and bigotry to empower themselves.  People just trying to live their lives aren't the biggest problem here.

Typically what some male preacher focuses on is that the woman was married so many times and the guy she's with now isn't her husband. That's something Jesus showed he knew to get her attention but it wasn't his focus.  He preach hell-fire at her, he didn't tell her she was a slut and should move out and stop "living in sin." He offered her nothing less than an eternal wellspring of "living water".  It would be good to know more of her story but that's not recorded, how she might have lived after that encounter, living as a Samaritan Woman living in what Jesus so notably does not call sin.  I do think it's one of the several incidents in the Gospels where Jesus indicates that, despite expectations, his teachings are not confined to "his people" but are for everyone.  Another thing we can be certain of, Jesus wasn't fixated on things like where was the right place to sacrifice, which city or mountain was the right one.  The kinds of things that led to the rift between Jesus's people and the Samaritans.  I'm sure he wouldn't be fixated on which language the mass was said in or the other things that the superficially pious fight about in Christianity.    It's remarkable what a hard time the ministers of religion who are most anti-sex have in not dwelling on sex.  Jesus didn't have that problem.

I think a lot of the passages in the Gospel like his encounter with her, the foreign woman who asked him to heal her daughter who answers him back when he says he'd be throwing the children's food to the dogs if he did what she asked him, some of the passages when he is flouting the expectations of exclusivity, lines that some priest or preacher reads piously and flatly and, frankly, making Jesus sound like a real dick, he probably said in a more sly and joking manner. Probably sounding more like Desmond Tutu could sound than like some stuck up, humorless archbishop.  He always did what they asked him to do, he certainly knew he was going to.  I think he was probably teasing his more exclusivist followers who would be taken aback at him even talking to such a woman or, perhaps, any woman at all. Cajoling them to give up being such snobs, to loosen up and be more giving and generous.

* I was intending to hold Thomas Reese's recent comment on Aquinas's philosophical gymnastics over the antiquated doctrine of transubstantiation for Holy Thursday, when I might revisit it.

Since my critics often accuse me of heresy, before I go further, let me affirm that I believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I just don't believe in transubstantiation because I don't believe in prime matter, substantial forms and accidents that are part of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Thomas Aquinas used Aristotelianism, the avant-garde philosophy of his time, to explain the Eucharist to his generation. What worked in the 13th century will not work today. If he were alive today, he would not use Aristotelianism because nobody grasps it in the 21st century.

So, first, forget transubstantiation. Better to admit that Christ's presence in the Eucharist is an unexplainable mystery that our little minds cannot comprehend.

I hope that any attempt to explain the real presence of Jesus in the "elements" of Eucharist will include the fact that when Jesus did what he did, he was giving food and drink to people, telling them to eat it and drink it, to feed their bodies as well as he fed their souls. That's what Jesus was all about, that's what as well as who he was. It's as if what he actually did is forgotten in the eagerness to abstract it from the very nature of what he did.  It was plainly a human imitation of God through practicing giving the necessities of life, of us as the conscious means of God's will being done, Jesus more than any other person,  is something I've never seen much mentioned in any theological or doctrinal assertions about the real presence of Jesus in the bread and cup.  I can't help but think that's because for the past two thousand years it's been almost exclusively men who probably never made bread in their lives doing that theologizing.

**  Having recently criticized what I think is Luther's distortion of Paul's idea about faith, I think that it's probably as wrong to think about "faith" as if it can be divorced from the physical manifestation of what you do if you have faith.  There is everything in the Gospels, even in Paul's own writing and certainly in James' letter to indicate that real faith will inevitably lead to actions, especially in the very acts of giving what is necessary for life but far more that I think is lost in all of the theological abstractions in regard to the Eucharist. In my understanding of that Jesus said that nothing less than his very body and blood was held within the act of giving food and drink to other people, Jesus breaking the bread, at the Last Supper, with the two disciples who recognized the risen Jesus only through his breaking of the bread on the road to Emmaus, was in the giving as much as in the food. I'm sure those two unnamed disciples ate the food he gave them before they rushed back to tell what happened.