on paradox and cannibals

Kisembo preached for communion this morning from John 6.  As he re-told the story, the language Jesus used in talking about his body and blood implied that the Jews were bhalogo, cannibals, a shocking insult that would have riled them to violent reprisal.  It is good to take the Scripture into African culture and see some things that do not make sense in America, such as the taboo of cannibalism, the raw boldness of Jesus' speech.

So what was Jesus saying?  Clearly, murder and the eating of a fellow human being are perhaps the ultimate acts of destruction, the furthest from godliness.  Yet just as clearly, partaking of the body and blood of Jesus through the Lord's Supper is the ultimate act of communion with God.  I'm reading GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, and he makes the point that non-Christian culture tends to find a moderate medium between two extremes.  In this case, that could be either asserting that human bodies are no different than animal life so that the act of eating human flesh would be the same as eating a cow or a goat; or glossing over the language of John 6 as purely symbolic metaphor.  Maybe.  But Christianity is rooted firmly in paradox, that two apparently contradictory things are both true.  The heart of our faith is Jesus, very God and very man, not a compromise between them, but the furthest extreme of both.  

So we enter into worship through the service of the Lord's supper. In this case, "bread" is not really part of the culture, so the leaders buy little packages of cookies in the market, alphabet-shaped crackers.  And "wine" is also nowhere to be found, so we sip flat syrupy soda.  Through experience they've learned not to pour it out until the moment of the drinking, after ants one time infested the table during the sermon.  But munching my S-shaped cracker and sipping my modicum of soda seemed appropriate to the truth:  common daily humble items transformed by the power of love into life-giving substance.  A paradox, Christian cannibals, looking for mercy.