Friday of the Third Week of Easter

There are few things I love more than reading a thought-provoking book. It does things to my brain! Recently I read Karen Armstrong’s A Case for God, published last year. Ms Armstrong is a former Catholic sister and she sometimes seems to have an edge against Catholicism, but she is a good scholar and she knows whereof she speaks.

A Case for God considers the devolution of the idea of God from a mystery shrouded in silence, darkness and unknowing to an almost known quantity under scientific instruments. It’s a dense book and I won’t try to condense it, but she describes how Christians and Jewish believers took up the task of proving God’s existence by the evidence of his works, as if that were necessary for faith. Of course, when the scientific community, which was sometimes hostile to religion, dismissed the half-baked theories of the religious, it seemed God himself had died.

During the Easter season we hear often hear the word mystery. As Ms. Armstrong speaks of mystery, and as I learned in theology class almost forty years ago, it is not a puzzling situation like a dime-store novel. For that matter, it is not something that can be defined with words. Mystery is what we encounter in prayer, both our personal devotions and our public liturgy. 

Armstrong describes the earliest evidence of religious belief in human history, cave paintings found throughout Europe. Some were created 40,000 years ago; some were visited as shrines for as long as 10,000 years! We’re impressed by the Roman churches that predate Christianity, but hunting tribes frequented these deep, dark caverns for millennia!  

Doing what? They were probably conducting initiation ceremonies, introducing boys to manhood. As the lads struggled through pitch black passages older men beat drums, piped music, and sang mystical songs that signified their reliance on the god of the hunt. Arriving in the caverns they found torch-lit ceilings festooned with strange symbols. The images moved as the flames dances and voices spoke to them. In a world without paper, some of the initiates may have never seen a picture before; the images of beasts and shamans looked like living gods.

Of course we cannot recreate these rituals and my last paragraph is largely speculation, but the point is this: religion is mysterious. It is stories, music, rituals, dance, smoke, fire, water and silence. It is practiced, not explained. The rituals did not define the gods; the caverns were certainly not classrooms and their gatherings were not CCD, PSR, or VBS. The rituals forced the children to come face to face with fascinating, terrifying holiness. Years later, when the same men would conduct the ceremonies for their children, although they had mastered all the tricks that so terrified them in their youth, they still believed in the gods who danced on cavern ceilings. 

Whatever we believe about our god or gods is not so important as our belief in the deity. And that comes not through memorization of catechism answers but through the raw experience of mystery.

Which brings us to today’s scripture passage, Jesus’ teaching on the Bread of Life. Do you think you know what it means? Do you suppose he is talking about transubstantiation? Do you suppose that the Church found John 6 too much mumbo-jumbo and decided to explain it all in the Baltimore Catechism?

Then read it again and this time, don’t know what it means. Experience Jesus’ challenging words that sound like cannibalism; and be shocked by its graphic imagery. You will hear in tomorrow’s gospel the response of many of Jesus disciples, “This is a hard saying! Who can believe it?”

Scholars believe the early church did not explain these words to their catechumens before the Easter Vigil. They may have been told how to receive the host – hold your hands in the form of a cross, receive it on one hand and place it in your mouth with the other, then return to your seat – but they were not told what it meant.

Later they would hear this sixth chapter of Saint John and try to understand how their lives were changed forever. And they were told to reveal this mystery to no one outside of the Church. “We must not permit the Jews or Romans to hear that we are eating flesh and drinking blood!”

Mystery is not puzzle; it is ritual in which we meet God face to face in the total darkness of ignorance and the brilliant light of faith. 

Come let us worship.