Tearing Apart the Body of Christ

Yesterday I presided at the opening worship for the synod youth gathering at a nearby amusement park.

For our celebration of the Eucharist, we used a substantial loaf of bread, one that was very hard to tear apart at points. Following worship, my wife, who preached that day, commented that there was a lot of truth in that "difficult to tear" bread. Her exact words were, "The body of Christ should be hard to tear apart. There's a lesson in that." Wonderful, heavenly wisdom.

The Body of Christ in the Eucharist should be hard to tear apart, because it was broken for us in such a terrible way: on the Cross. The Body of Christ should be hard to tear apart, because it was given to us at so great a cost. The Body of Christ should be hard to tear apart, because God's work of redemption is excruciatingly difficult work.

But there are churchly dimensions to this "tearing apart" too. For we also confess that the communal, corporate reality of the Church is also the Body of Christ. And that should be hard to tear apart too. In the Eucharist we are given the visible presence of Christ himself, who pours out and is torn apart for us, the gathered Church, that in our life together as Brothers and Sisters in Christ we might manifest a communal life that is like the whole loaf, "bound together and finely woven in love," to quote a turn of phrase from Ken Medema.

I think there is also a word of judgment in this rending, insofar as we as Christians have become quite content and comfortable with our churchly divisions, to the point of almost rejoicing in them. The Body of Christ is not for us to rend. When we do, we participate in a tearing apart that is not the Lord's will for the Church (see John 17). The late Pope John Paul II has even written on this very topic.

Yes, the Body of Christ should indeed be hard to tear apart.