The Body and Blood...All Over the Floor

With my increasing interest in the Anglican tradition I’ve been blessed to experience the Eucharist in a variety of settings. A few weeks ago, during Morning Prayer in the Div. School’s chapel, we celebrated the Feast Day for St. Michael the Archangel (also known as Michaelmas). The priest blessed the Cup of our Lord then smoothly turned and offered it to her assistant right before the chalice lurched and a couple ounces of wine splashed across the floor. Now less than a year ago this would have meant very little to me. Perhaps I would have felt pity or shame on behalf of those administering the sacrament, or God forbid even found it funny. This particular morning of September 29, however, I did not laugh.

The blood-red wine made scattered streaks across the cool, Duke-furnished stone of our Goodson Chapel. The robes of the priest and of her attendant bore similar stains, as if dropped from some gaping wound. My eyes widened as the drink poured out in front of us all, gathered round the altar of God’s grace. Even as the smell of fermented grapes reached my nose I already knew that I was not looking at wine poured over so much brick. My breath stopped, my head felt light, and if I could remember correctly I would wager I even experienced a bit of a cold sweat. “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” The words of the priest came down on me; the wine had been hastily cleaned and no longer marred the clean stone, but the robes still bore the stains.

We try to keep it neat; the wine rests peacefully in a glistening chalice and the bread sits silently on so many plates upon the altar. We call it the Blood and the Body, we treat them both with reverence, we experience something during their consumption, and then we go on with our lives as if we never came close to the Crucifixion. But when that wine splashed across the floor, I felt like I was finally seeing the Blood of our Savior. The same Blood that was not kept in aesthetic cups or in the bellies of well-fed Americans, but torn from the body of our redeemer with whips, thorns, fists, and rods. It flowed along the ground of the governor’s palace, marked a trail up the Via Dolorosa, before flowing over a spear and mingling with water as it fell over a Roman soldier who became the first to experience the Cup of our Salvation.

Now what in me, a Baptist boy who always thought of the Lord’s Supper as anything but the literal Body and Blood, came to witness the Eucharist as something much more significant to the life of the Church? I’ve spent a lot of time on that question, and to be quite honest…I have no clue. I think that is the point. I am not supposed to know; in an age where mysteries only exist on the History Channel and the only unknowns are what we forget to look up on Wikipedia, God refuses to be completely known. In fact, it is an impossibility to know God. This too does not sit well for a well trained Baptist who learned early on about how one can know God through the Incarnation, through Jesus Christ. Yet while I believe God knows me and I know God, there remains an eternity to discover the rest of the God I know. So in the meantime, I shall sit quietly in my pew and wonder how the Blood of a Crucified God still grips me
as we faithfully consume loaves of wheat bread and $10 bottles of wine for the remembrance of our Lord. Such things are the mystery. Such mystery is the Gospel.