Water To Wine: Some of My Story

by Brian Zahnd

The ultimate imitation of Christ is to patiently absorb sin and offer pardon in the na...

When grace is pierced, it bleeds

pardon. When grace is crucified, it doesn’t condemn. Crucified grace is even cognizant of how nearly impossible it is for sinful persecutors to act otherwise.

We lessen the sin of the world by joining the Lamb of God in bearing sin and pardoning sinners.

It was never the “rank and file” sinners who gnashed their teeth at Jesus, but those for whom the present arrangement of systemic sin was advantageous.

Communion turned out to be an artesian well of endless mystery.

If we hold to an orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation, we believe the flesh and blood of Jesus were divine, the flesh and blood of God.

But the body of Christ is sacred. The corporal body of the risen Jesus, the ecclesial body of the church, and the eucharistic body of Communion are all sacred.

The church in the post-Christendom West is walking the Emmaus road, confused and disappointed, just like those two disciples on the first Easter (see Luke 24:13-35).

“They told what had happened on the road, and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35).

Jesus will not be with us as a means of conventional political power. Jesus will be with us as bread on the table. Christ is present as sacramental mystery, not political action committee.

Karl Rahner famously predicted, “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’, one who has ‘experienced’ something, or he will cease to be anything at all.”[2]

Jesus has always intended to transform the world one life at a time at a shared table.

The point is that all work necessary for human flourishing is not just legitimate, but sacramental.

Secularism is not a state of being, it’s only a way of misapprehending the world.

Feasts and banquets are Jesus’ most common metaphor for the kingdom of God.

In Luke’s Gospel alone there are nearly three dozen references to eating, drinking, and sitting at table.

The most radical aspect of Jesus and his moveable feast was his penchant for sharing the table with all the “wrong” people—the sinner, the outcast, the excluded.

Jesus relocated the holy of holies from a veiled chamber reserved for a solitary high priest, to a shared table to which all are invited.

When the unclean touched Jesus, Jesus was not made unclean, rather the unclean were made whole.

The temple is protested while the table is blessed. During Holy Week, Jesus prophesied the demise of the temple and the rise of the table. Jesus shifts our thinking from temple to table. As Jesus sat at the table with his disciples during the last supper, he told them he would not drink from the fruit of the vine until he drank it with them anew in the coming kingdom of God (see Matthew 26:29, Mark 14:25, Luke 22:18, 28).

The risen Christ did not appear at the temple but at meal tables.

temple is exclusive; table is inclusive. Temple is hierarchical; table is egalitarian. Temple is authoritarian; table is affirming. Temple is uptight and status conscious. Table is relaxed and “family-style.” Temple is a rigorous enforcement of purity codes that prohibits the unclean. Table is a welcome home party celebrating the return of sinners. The temple was temporal. The table is eternal. We thought God was a deity in a temple. It turns out God is a father at a table.

Communion was not an invention of Jesus, it was an innovation of Jesus.

The exclusivity of the temple is giving way to the inclusivity of the table.

Caesar is a crucifying king who reigns by force. Christ is the crucified king who reigns without force. Christ’s kingdom is built upon co-suffering love, not violent force.

Because to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus is to ingest the infinite.

Week by week we feed upon the flesh and blood of Christ that we might be an incarnation of the flesh and blood of Christ within the world.

It’s the Eucharist that teaches us how to belong to God’s good world—a world that is more sacred than we ever dreamed.

We are stardust and we are children of God.

I merely insist that when empiricism has said all it can say, there is still more to be said.

The celebration of natural creation is entirely compatible with Christian spirituality. We cannot love the Creator and be dismissive or abusive toward his creation.

T.S. Eliot said, “A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.”[3]

When we lost our vocation as gardeners, the planet lost its God-ordained caretakers.

Mary Magdalene’s Easter “mistake” of thinking Jesus was the gardener is a poetic hint of how the Last Adam leads us back to our first vocation.

Karl Rahner predicted that “the devout Christian of the future will either be a mystic or he will cease to be anything at all”

Mysticism is no outlier to orthodox Christianity. We worship the one who turns water into wine.

If you like we can call it the genesis of love as light and all that is. What is light? God’s love in the form of photons. What is water? A liquid expression of God’s love. What is a mountain? God’s love in granite, so much older than human sorrow. What is a tree? God’s love growing up from the ground. What is a bull moose? God’s love sporting spectacular antlers. What is a whale? Fifty tons of God’s love swimming in the ocean. As we learn to look at creation as goodness flowing from God’s own love, we begin to see the sacredness of all things, or as Dostoevsky and Dylan said, in every grain of sand. All of creation is a gift—a gift flowing from the self-giving love of God.

The “wrath of God” is but one way of describing the shards of suffering we inevitably subject ourselves to when we go against the grain of God’s love.

The judgment seat of Christ is not a theology quiz, but an evaluation of love. If we assume the criteria of judgment is something other than love, we are taking a huge risk. This is why Jesus taught that the commandments are fulfilled by loving God and neighbor (see Matthew 22:34–40). This is why Paul said that if we get everything else right, but get love wrong, we get it all wrong (see 1 Corinthians 13). This is why Augustine said, “Love, and do what thou wilt.”[8] No one who loves ever comes to a bad end.

We cannot make spiritual progress if we stay tethered to our certitude like the nervous tourist who dares not venture beyond the parking lot.

Don’t we sometimes sense we are perhaps too comfortable in a place where we don’t really belong?

You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.[2]

a move toward greater ecumenism and a more generous attitude toward others was viewed with suspicion.

I did what I had to do and they did what they had to do. Time heals all wounds, but the process can be very painful.

Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning,

Growing up and moving forward is rebranded as backsliding; maturing is perceived as falling away.[3]

If we are stuck in a reactive form of Christianity, any move toward a contemplative form of Christianity is viewed as a kind of betrayal. It’s often condemned as “falling away from the faith.” But that’s not what it is. It’s leaving behind childish things and growing up into the fullness of Christ.

We’re in a situation where it is often very difficult, if not impossible, for a pastor to make spiritual progress while being a pastor.

The Orthodox give us the Christ of Glory.