Water To Wine: Some of My Story

by Brian Zahnd

Liturgy is neither alive nor dead. Liturgy is either true or false. What is alive or dead is the worshiper. So what we need is a true liturgy and a living worshiper.

Contemplation is the way out of the cage of fear and anger. But remember, you don’t begin with contemplation, you begin with liturgy. Until you are properly formed in prayer, you’re not ready for a contemplative breakthrough.

What is called “revival” today is mostly spectacle and religious entertainment playing upon the emotions of guilt, desire, and anger.

At the end of his meditation on Francis, Chesterton says, “It is perhaps the chief suggestion of this book that Saint Francis walked the world like the Pardon of God.”[2]

One of the problems with revivalism is its egocentric obsession with the present and its woeful ignorance of the past.

With no long view of church history and no broad view of the church’s global work, everything has to be right now and right here.

Contemporary revivalist movements always seem convinced that they’re the first generation to recover “apostolic purity” and the last generation before the return of the Lord. They misappropriate 1 Peter 2:9 as they brashly claim, “We are the chosen generation.”

Tradition means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.[5]

But shouldn’t Sunday be a Christian Sabbath, a time to quiet our souls and receive the gift of silence? What if, instead of being another contributor to this clatter, our churches became a shelter from the storm offering respite to shell-shocked souls?

In our discordant times we need our churches to be more like Saint Francis and less like Fox News. We need a quieter, less combative, less belligerent Christianity. More quietness and trust, less riot and protest.

“The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust” (Isaiah 32:17). Isaiah sees the result of the reign of God as quietness and trust, not riot and protest.

Almost all of Jesus’ kingdom parables are quiet stories. According to Jesus the kingdom of God is like seed being sown, like plants growing, like bread rising. It’s domestic, not militant. It’s like a woman sweeping her house, like a shepherd searching for a lost sheep, like a wayward son coming home at last.

I’ve come to realize that the main purpose of prayer is not to change the world, but to change me...and I am under the assumption that this will take a lifetime.

The only Christian theodicy which I find credible is the confession that God does not exempt himself from the horror of human suffering, but is fully baptized into it. God in Christ joins us in a solidarity of suffering, and somehow by his wounds we are healed. Christ saves us from sin and death only by hurling himself into the abyss. The ultimate imitation of Christ is to patiently absorb sin and offer pardon in the name of love. This is grace.

We lessen the sin of the world by joining the Lamb of God in bearing sin and pardoning sinners. But as the church has become a powerful institution, a consort with kings and queens, a confidante of presidents and prime ministers, our dispensing of grace has become distorted. We show grace to the institutions of systemic sin while condemning the individual sinner.

Jesus condemned the systemic sin that preserved the status quo for the Herodians and Sadducees, but showed compassion to publicans and prostitutes. This is grace. But the church, courting the favor of the powerful, has forgotten this kind of grace. We coddle the mighty whose ire we fear and condemn the sin of the weak who pose no threat. We enthusiastically endorse the systems of greed that run Wall Street while condemning personal greed in the life of the individual working for the minimum wage. We will gladly preach a sermon against the sin of personal greed, but we dare not offer a prophetic critique of the golden calf of unfettered capitalism.

Communion is a major doctrine and central practice of Christian faith. At the center of Christian praxis we find a table. For the Christian, the holy of holies is the Communion table. No longer is the holiest of all a veiled chamber reserved for a solitary high priest, now it’s a shared table to which all are invited. Jesus is responsible for this monumental change.

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).

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. Blessed are they who are not disappointed.

A generation ago the great Catholic theologian 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]

Grain and grape come from God’s good earth, but bread and wine are the result of human industry. Bread and wine come about through a cooperation of the human and the divine. And herein lies a beautiful mystery. If grain and grape made bread and wine can communicate the body and blood of Christ, this has enormous implications for all legitimate human labor and industry. The mystery of the Eucharist does nothing less than make all human labor sacred.

Feasts and banquets are Jesus’ most common metaphor for the kingdom of God. When Jesus wasn’t talking about a metaphorical table, he was often sitting down at a literal table. In Luke’s Gospel alone there are nearly three dozen references to eating, drinking, and sitting at table. Throughout the third Gospel, Jesus is moving from meal to meal, table to table. Jesus is constantly announcing and enacting the kingdom of God by a common meal at a shared table.

Prior to Jesus, the Jewish concept of holiness was one of ever smaller and ever holier concentric circles.

But Jesus changed all of that. Jesus reversed the concept of kosher. When the unclean touched Jesus, Jesus was not made unclean, rather the unclean were made whole.

The risen Christ did not appear at the temple but at meal tables. The center of God’s activity had shifted—it was no longer the temple but the table that was the holiest of all. The church would do well to think of itself, not so much as a kind of temple, but as a kind of table.

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. It was obviously based on the Jewish Passover meal, but it was reimagined. Instead of remembering the Passover, it would remember a new salvation story, a new exodus.

The crowd that wanted to force Jesus to be king was operating from the dominant paradigm of scarcity. This is the paradigm that possessed Cain to kill Abel, and it lies at the dark heart of human civilization. We are scripted to believe that reality is zero-based and that we live in a closed system. This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin.

The sign of the loaves and fishes was intended to show that with God all things are possible, and that the paradigm of scarcity is a satanic lie.

It is significant that Jesus never softens the scandal of his invitation by saying, “I mean symbolically.” No, Jesus just keeps intensifying his eucharistic theology by saying, “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (John 6:55–56). Even when many disciples complained, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” (John 6:60), Jesus doesn’t relent. And what was the result? “Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66). This abandoned discipleship is sad, but for Jesus, the idea that his followers would feed on his flesh and drink his blood was a nonnegotiable. If we try to remove the scandal of a robust eucharistic theology by reducing it all to mere symbol, we are doing the very thing Jesus refused to do.

Indeed, what is church without the Eucharist? It’s an insightful and important question. In a very real sense the church is the ecclesial body of Christ sustained by the sacramental body of Christ. 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.

This is why for most of church history the sacrament, not the sermon, has been the central aspect of Christian worship. Christian faith is more about connecting our lives with Christ than it is about gaining spiritual information. Making church more about the sermon than the sacrament is a move toward secularism.

What the sacrament of Communion does that the sermon cannot do is offer the worshiper a direct encounter with the life of Christ. Jesus is still saying, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matthew 26:26). Grain and grape. Wheat and vine. Bread and wine. Flesh and blood. 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.

I have no arguments with the consensus of peer-reviewed science. I thrill in their discoveries. I merely insist that when empiricism has said all it can say, there is still more to be said. The Scriptures give voice to the Spirit-inspired mystics who peered into the deeper meaning beyond mere matter and sheer existence.

At the beginning of time there is love. At the bottom of the universe there is love. Admittedly freedom allows for other things too—from cancer cells to atomic bombs—but at the bottom of the universe it’s love all the way down. Cancer cells and atomic bombs will not have the final word. At the end of things there is love. When the last star burns out, God’s love will be there for whatever comes after. In the end it all adds up to love. So when calculating the meaning of life, if it doesn’t add up to love, go back and recalculate, because you’ve made a serious mistake.

I think Elder Zosima is right when he says, “I ask myself: ‘What is hell?’ And I answer thus: ‘Hell is the suffering of being no longer able to love.’”[6]

What is the criteria of judgment? Love, always love. In Jesus’ parable, the rich man ends up in hell, not because he failed to believe the right things, but because he failed to love Lazarus.

In the parable of the sheep and goats, the goats are not condemned for wrong belief or for failing to pray a sinner’s prayer, but for failing to love the poor, the sick, the immigrant, and the imprisoned. If Jesus is to be trusted, it seems we will not be judged by how rightly we believed, but by how well we loved.

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).

The sad lesson I learned is that within Christian cultures that have confused faith with certitude, it’s almost impossible for leaders to make any significant change, which means there is little or no freedom to really grow.

In his groundbreaking book, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, James W. Fowler describes spiritual development in a series of stages, zero to six. Fowler describes Stage Two as the faith of school children, a stage where metaphors are often literalized and a strong belief in the just reciprocity of the universe is held dear.

Canadian theologian Brad Jersak, commenting on Fowler’s stages of faith and the current plight of evangelicalism, makes this stinging observation: Entire streams of Christendom are not only stuck at stage-two faith, but actually train and require their ministers to interpret the Bible through the mythic-literal eyes of school children. Growing up and moving forward is rebranded as backsliding; maturing is perceived as falling away.[3]

As Martin Laird says, “The reactive life is strengthened by these sudden spasms of talking, talking, talking, talking, to ourselves about life and love and how everybody ought to behave and vote.”[4]

Framing Christianity within a dualistic “us versus them” paradigm can be a successful way of achieving numerical growth.

As long as our churches are led by those who view being a Christian primarily as a kind of conferred status instead of a lifelong journey, and view faith as a form of static certitude instead of an ongoing orientation of the soul toward God, I see little hope that we can build the kind of churches that can produce mature believers in any significant numbers.

The Orthodox give us the Christ of Glory. The Orthodox have their beautiful icons and a high Christology. The Catholics give us the Suffering Christ, which is why the crucifix is so prominent in Catholicism. The Anglicans give us Christ the Teacher—so many of our best theologians either come from the Anglicans or eventually find their home there. Protestants give us the Reforming Christ, the Jesus who challenges the Pharisees and cleanses the Temple. Evangelicals give us the Personal Jesus, the Jesus who calls his disciples by name and talks to Nicodemus about being born again. Pentecostals give us the miracle-working Jesus, who heals the sick and casts out demons.

Of course, each of these emphases have their own potential pitfalls.

The safeguard is obvious. We need the whole church to help us enter into the fullness of Christ.