Hunger, Poverty, and the Eucharist

What to give to the person who has everything? This is something sometimes asked in jest. The Queen of Sheba may have asked herself that question when she was preparing to leave Solomon’s Jerusalem. Had she visited him again later, though, she might have better gifted him a slap across the face with the question: What are you thinking? He had grown weak of mind, dizzied by his success, influenced by the flatteries of his courtiers and wives, and by the gods of the nations he permitted to be propagated in his kingdom.

Poverty is a reality of the human condition with as many faces as there are vulnerable conditions. Solomon was more vulnerable than he knew. And his greatest poverty, his greatest vulnerability, we could say, was his not knowing how poor he was.

The precariousness of our vulnerabilities is a given in human life. We do not like it; we would prefer not to think about it, and we would like to overcome it. Yet, we teeter about like a little boat on the Sea of Galilee, trying not to think about the storm that might appear on the horizon. Until it does.

In the mission of Jesus, the gift is crafted to suit the need. Its gratuity is pristine and childlike, yet its arrow is deliberately poised to strike what we did not even know we were missing.

The Incarnation itself is the gift most suitable. The Lord’s public ministry is a pedagogy of deeds and words that, when combined, form signs of things God would have us learn to hunger for. The pedagogy of desire is the moving dynamic of the Kingdom. We are taught what to hope for, and how to attain it. Not everyone who approached Jesus came seeking the forgiveness of their sins. The paralyzed man lowered from the rooftop did not say anything; his action and that of the friends who lowered him was expressing an unspoken ache for healing (Mark 2:1-12).

Jesus spoke and acted. First he forgave the man his sins, and then told him to get up and walk: a sign of who he was and what he came to do. A sign also that engendered opposition.

John’s disciples were sent to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?” Jesus responds: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me” (Luke 7:18ff.; Is 61:1ff.).

The crowds hear about these things, and they want to go see him. “Blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear” (Matt 13:16). A kind of hunger, primal almost, to be near his goodness. The crowds sensed the particular character of his goodness; it was the overflowing of generosity from his person and the selflessness of his accessibility.

The cynicism of those days was not so different from our own: “What is in it for him? What is the game here?” In that springtime of his passing by, many perceived, “No game here.” There was just the gift. Goodness attracts, even though the attracted are not always so good.

There is both abundance and pedagogy in Jesus’s generosity. There is a feeding and a progressive teaching of what to hunger for: poverty of spirit, purity of heart, meekness, and justice. “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness [justice], for they will be satisfied” (Matt 5:6)—a hunger for a right relation to God and neighbor; a hunger for communion amongst the children of Adam.

In the face of a famished crowd and helpless disciples, he tells them: “Give them some food yourselves” (Mark 6:37). There are so many hungers: a hunger in Christ to have us hunger to feed the weary; a hunger for forgiveness of sins, and a hunger for being able to forgive; a hunger for every word that comes forth from the mouth of God, and a hunger for a true enfleshment of the words spoken; a hunger for a pure act of generous love given, a hunger for a true act of generous love received, a hunger for a pure act of generous love given in return.

Catholicism is the religion of the response to the gift, of the graced arrow that hits the mark to generate a grace that returns the gift. Salvation is in the response. “Faith works through love” (Gal 5:6). We move in response to the love given, or we, and our faith, are still dead.

Nicodemus, for example, seems to have been a well situated individual. He asked questions. Jesus gave him time and responses, both generously suited to his need. What he lacked was an initial openness of mind to how the Spirit of God could work in bringing about a new birth in us. There is a gift of the Spirit to the mind, opening it to what the Spirit can do. Nicodemus learned, arduously, to hunger for this gift. There is the vulnerability of not knowing what it is most vital to know. Jesus would have us know what we do not know we need to know.

In the sixty-ninth of his Tractates on John, Augustine points out that it is possible for a Christian not to know what he or she really does know. As when Jesus tells the disciples in John 14: 4-5: “And you know where I am going, and you know the way. To this Thomas says: Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” Jesus then says: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” So, as Augustine points out, they did know the way, because they knew him; they just did not know that they knew. Jesus had to tell them.

So it is with us. We know him in the Eucharistic mystery. But, it is possible not to know him, precisely in this mystery, as the Way for us to the Truth and the Life. We have to let him tell us how we are to move along towards the Father through this Eucharistic Way.

What Amazes Me About the Incarnation

In Javier Sicilia’s novel La Confesión (2016), a poor priest recalls a conversation with his Cardinal Archbishop about the poor Christ, on how the vulnerable Word addresses power.

“Do you know what amazes me about the incarnation?—I continued—, that it is the complete opposite of the modern world: the presence of the infinite within the limits of the flesh, and the fight, the relentless fight, against the temptations of the devil's excesses. You don’t know how much I have meditated on the temptations of the desert. ‘Assume the power,’ the devil told him; that power that gives the illusion of disrupting and dominating everything. But he remained within the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard. Our epoch, however, under the face of an enormous kindness, has succumbed to these temptations. ‘They will be like gods, they will change stones into loaves, they will dominate the world.’ . . . To this we have handed over the Christ and we do not even realize it.”

To this we have handed over the Christ. To this we have also handed over the poor—to an unrivaled pursuit to overcome the limits of our flesh, to overcome our poor, fragile, time-limited particularity, as if this overcoming were the Kingdom on the eschatological horizon.

The illusion of invulnerability, and its twin ambition, self-sufficiency, is proposed as the principal aim of the epoch, and it has its own pedagogy of word and act, designed to instill and stir desire for limitlessness. This pedagogy says “repeat after me”: I want what I need so as not to need anything. I have a right to get what I need. . . . And you have a right to try. But, you have no right to expect me to help you. Woe to you if you get in my way. We have a hunger for it.

“But He remained within the limits of his own flesh, in his own poverty, in his own death, so poor, so miserable, so hard,” as Javier Sicilia puts it. Our flesh is the sign and source of our vulnerability, our limitations, our poverty. We have one, time-bound life. What shall we do with it?

Christ Jesus, the WORD made flesh, had one time-bound life among us—his limited flesh, his poverty. From the Cross he needed someone to give him a drink—his insufficiency. What did he do with it? He embraced the limit—not as a curse, but as the path of his gift to us. He gave it up for us, offered it to the Father as a gift of love—one of us offering what we could not—and rose from the dead still bearing the marks of his wounds.

And he gives us his flesh to eat. And in his risen body, he breathes the Spirit into us, that we might be able to join him in the offering.

It is striking that the Risen Christ reveals himself to the Eleven through the signs of his wounds—that is to say, through the glorified wounds themselves, or through the act of breaking the Bread. To my mind these are roughly equivalent signs. The wounds speak of the vulnerable One. And the bread-breaking is a sign of, well, breakability. Pius XII talks about this in Mediator Dei; so do the Didache and Justin Martyr in the First Apology. This is ubiquitous in the Tradition: he is recognized in the sign and act of the Sacrifice.

The Risen Christ desires to be recognizable and recognized under the sign of his vulnerability, handed over for our sakes.

Jerome translated the Greek mysterion into Latin using either mysterium or sacramentum. (It is not always clear what his criteria were.) The Liturgy does this also: where in English we say “the Mystery of Faith,” translating mysterium fidei, the Spanish missal translates: el sacramento de nuestra fe. Jesus is present in mysterium, that is to say, in the sacramentum.

This is instructive. We tend to think of a mystery as a dark cloud, hiding things deep inside, which it is; and we tend to think of a sacramentum as a visible sign, which it is. But each one is a translation of the same New Testament word. Each one is the other. A darkly bright cloud, yes, but one that visibly signifies. A visible sign, yes, but one that hides more than it shows, like the pillar of cloud that guided the Israelites by day.

The mysterium signifies. It shows us something we can understand. But it is also a cloud we must enter, in the form of an action that offers his poverty: Take this, all of you, . . . his vulnerable life, as a sacrifice of love to the Father, for the sake of his poor, vulnerable little flock. One solitary vulnerable life, so poor, so hard, so miserable.

The mysterium/sacramentum of the Eucharist is an act that re-presents to us some-thing that the Some-one who is the Son does. It is presence and action, the action of perduring gift—“to make us rich,” as St. Paul says (2 Cor 8:9). But rich in what sense? In what way? How are we to understand this? How can we enter into it?

Rich by sharing in the wealth of his poverty, now revealed as the glory of the Kingdom in all its dispossessed fullness.

At the Savior’s Command, and Formed by Divine Teaching

The traditional placement of the Lord’s Prayer after the Great Amen and before the elevation of the Lamb of God and Communion is enormously significant. It is the formative prayer expressing compactly the desires of the Kingdom, and the desires of the Church at this moment.

The response of the Father to these simple petitions is Communion with him through the gift of the Son, the Lamb once slain who dies no more, the food of the new life in the Holy Spirit. The food of the journey, the Way.

Thy Kingdom Come would seem, then, to be the primary posture of a Christian poised to receive Communion. That would be the Kingdom where the blind and the lame are invited; where the law is for the sake of man and not man for the sake of the law; where mercy flows generously like the wine at a wedding; where the widow and the orphan are not exploited, and Lazarus at the door of the rich man is hungry no more.

You have to want to be at that kind of banquet. Not wanting to is part of our poverty, that neediness that we do not know we have. We can be so trapped in our self-made frozen lakes.

Matthew 25:31: “For I was hungry and you gave me food . . . .” Without Matthew 25:31, where would we be? We would be without a vivid expression of how Jesus understood himself in the figure of the Son of Man: the Son of Man, head of the human race, present in each member. He who chose to share in our flesh makes us common sharers in his. There is no turning away from another that is not a turning away from him. “You did it for me; or not.”

We would be without an explicit link between “This is my body” and the bodies of every member of the human race: the vulnerable bodies, our woundable, limited, poor, miserable, flesh bodies—our common poverty. This is our great connection to him and to each other.

We would be without the parabolic crescendo to the prophetic tradition defending the unjustly oppressed, the widow and the orphan, the defenseless who are without resource to hold in check the manipulations of those who have the power to do so. Head of the human race: he is in us and we in him, even in what by shorthand we call the natural order. All the more so in the order of grace, where his headship is recognized and acclaimed.

In the Apocalypse, and in the Eucharistic Liturgy, the Christ is envisioned as the Lamb who was slain, but who dies no more, as the triumphant vulnerable. The way of Christ is not the way of putting all our energy into a provisional invulnerability. Self-preoccupation is slowly killing us.

We stop focusing on procuring our own invulnerability so as to offer some relief to the vulnerable around us. In Christ the Communion of the vulnerable makes us a people who strive to supply to the other what they may lack, as they supply what we may lack—opening us to the truth that our incompleteness, our congenital lack of self-sufficiency, is not a curse but a blessing that invites relation, communion, and the possibility of love.

In the Eucharist we learn that we cannot feed ourselves with what we most need. It has to be freely given by another. What we most need is a love that hungers to feed another. This is the love he feeds us with. It breaks through.

“‘Why, you’re one of my babies,’ she said, as she reached out to touch the Misfit. Right before he shot her.”[1]

“By his poverty we were made rich,” says St. Paul (2 Cor 8:9). Rich with what? As I have done so must you do. . . . A generosity that gives outside of ourselves—that clothes the naked because we have been clothed with the baptismal garment; that feeds the hungry because we have been fed by his sacrificial Eucharistic act; that welcomes a stranger because we were once strangers and have been made members of the household of God; that visits the prisoner because we were prisoners once, and have been set free. By this is the Father glorified.

Reality is supposed to look different on the other side of the Sacrifice, on the other side of the dying and rising of Jesus—our vision of what is, informed by the light of what has been done for us, given to us, handed over for us, fed to us, breathed into us. Love acts, or it is not love. In Christ there is no love of the Father that prescinds from the flesh-and-blood condition of the neighbor.

When we walk out of Mass is there something we can do, or make plans to do? I do not ask the “to do” question out of my American proclivity to always seek measurable results, but rather from a Gospel insistence that love and justice must touch flesh and blood, or they are just words we have emptied of content. There is a further opportunity to meet Christ in the flesh-and-blood encounter with the suffering of another.

The Eucharistic encounter summed up in “This is my body given up for you” envelops the entire dramatic unfolding of the Liturgy; it is mirrored in the outgoing search for some manifestation of “the least of mine, for they are me.” There should be a hunger to find him in our midst: on this campus we inhabit, in this city and neighborhood, in a soup kitchen, a refugee center, a juvenile detention facility, a prison cell, in a nursing home or hospice center.

The point is that the searching is something that he initiates in us, so that he can be found by us. Better not to go alone. He tended to send out in pairs, and the Church better expresses herself when the practical encounters are communal. We are not lone rangers.

The Mysticism of the Christ Glimpsed

The hunger and thirst for justice is not different than a hunger to go to Christ in his humiliated and broken condition. This is like the hard mysticism of Dorothy Day.

Mary Magdalene searched for him, his corpsed body. She was found by a Gardener. The words she uses are meant to remind of us the Song of Songs: “Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him” (John 20:15); “The watchmen came upon me as they made their rounds of the city: Have you seen him whom my heart loves?” (Song of Songs 3:3).

Recognition is the sweetest grace of the New Testament: “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni,’ which means Teacher” (John 20:16). This ardent desire for a glimpse of Christ in the flesh is a Eucharistic consequence, a Eucharistic desire. But it seems a decision of his inscrutable goodness to us that we look for him marred, bloodied, rejected, hungry, imprisoned, Alzheimered, drug-addicted . . . .

Out of his generosity, he insists we learn to see and serve him there, to embrace the leper as St. Francis did. We have to see him there before our eyes can see the Christ that the baroque masters tried to capture in his risen glory.

The Eucharistic sacramentum is a broken host, and a wounded side filling an overflowing chalice. The Eucharistic mysterium is a making sturdy of the heart to go to the difficult places, the places that offer a glimpse of Christ—so poor, so thirsty, so miserable, so hard. A consolation, not a comfort—it is a love suited to our circumstance: “For stern as death is love, relentless as the nether world is devotion; its flames are a blazing fire” (Song of Songs 8:6).

Christ hidden, Christ loved and searched for, is the only suitable way to get us out of our pervasive self-preoccupation, and onto a road like the one to Emmaus that allows him to join our company and show himself. If we cannot empty ourselves in some way, we are not really receiving the sacramentum we are consuming. We are worse than lost in the cosmos.

So pervasive are our webs of self-concern, that to leave them is like slowly waking up from a dream or a deep sleep. It is a kind of rising from the dead.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was first delivered as a lecture in the "The Only Solution is Love: The Eucharist and Catholic Social Teaching" series hosted by Michael Baxter for the McGrath Institute for Church Life.