The Last Supper

It is one of the most revered images of Christendom, Leonardo da Vinci 15th century mural painting of the Last Supper in the Upper Room, as is now commonly called. The event itself recalls the institution of the Eucharist, now the central symbol of one’s partaking of the vision and mission of Jesus mythologized to be the Christ, in the “theos” metaphor of Rome, the son of the living God!

“Experience the power of God” is the calling card of evangelical groups, focusing on “power” over curses and sickness, of salvation and blessing. To understand this stance, we revisit two phrases separating the Catholic and Reformation communities in its relationship to power. The first is the “infallibility of the Pope” that use the Episcopal Office as the source of defining faith and religion; the second is called the “inerrancy of Scriptures” interpreted by groups and bodies that sometimes deteriorates into a book idolatry, affectionately called Biblical faith.

Both cases define the ultimate source of authority for the facticity of power.

In the ’60s, existential methods revealed the illusion on both the fantasy on the papacy, and disastrous Bible idolatry; laser beamed on the whole point of religious metaphors as pointing to being saved from “illusions.” Christians discovered what it meant to witness to the truth. What was real was the authority of authenticity, the new language of profound humanity.

Imagine yourself in the desert. Seeing a “mirage,” engendering a dependency on the illusion that one sees, from which one has to be saved. Every human needed to be “saved” from the propensity to take illusions seriously. The Christ-word shatters such illusions so one can really face the authority of authenticity rather than fall into the widespread Jesus idolatry.

I hold no beef on those who still use the metaphors of “power” and genuflect before its symbols. After all, societies still operate out of social stratification, and anyone who is a “manager” of something is raised up and revered. Why else do we want to frame those certificates of recognition but to polish our egos, and enhance our social power? Why else do Mamas parade the #1 rating that their child got as a sign of superior accomplishment and qualifies one to leave one’s footprints in the eternal sand of time? OK. We will skip the poetry.

In the Upper Room, as the Protestant loves to call it, was the institution of the Eucharist, not a hocus-pocus power of the elements, of ostia con vino, but on the giving; not power over but surrender of one’s self totally and unconditionally for the sake of the other. “This is my body that is given for you.” What in that simple sentence is it hard to understand? We try very hard to scour the bottom of hidden meanings. How about taking it as an ordinary discourse?

There is a subterfuge in the story. The Judas betrayal underscores the individual and personal nature of the offense, for the price of “thirty pieces of silver,” exonerating the Roman authorities and the Jewish synagogue from direct complicity in a crime; it is not too difficult to see Judas as the escape goat, also to not let us forget of the paradigm of evil in every worthwhile endeavor lurking in the persona of someone who even gets to buzz the victim on the cheek. There will always be, we say, a turncoat who will mistake self-interest as separate from and in conflict with the corporate good.

This is not foreign to our current ethos. Not too long ago, it was looking after #1 that graced the halls of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. But we do not need to go that far. On each of the tellers at Oleai FHB is the sign: “Giving is good. Saving is better.” That may be great for the savings account, but the truth about life is that, being focused solely on one’s self is a limited context to focusing on the “we” of our relationship to others, the planet, and the universe. Savings is good for the financial bottom line, but giving, the emptying of one’s self, is so much better. That’s just the way life is.

“The Way Life Is,” is the literal translation of the Tetragrammatons’ word in the Jewish theonym, the YHWH of North-Africa-and-the-Middle-East (NAME) that Judah and Israel appropriated, having lived through the exodus out of the Pharaoh’s Sun God into Sinai wandering in the wilderness, and Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian captivity that saw the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem; the Jews found solace in Cyrus the Great (from Kuros, the Sun) of Persia who sent the captives home, tolerating their religion.

The worship of the Sun or anything transcendent is not the object of the Last Supper. Rather, it is the total giving of one’s self for the sake of another that was crucified the following day. “This is my body, that is given, … this is my blood, that is poured, for you.” Those who embody this understanding will be crucified. But death shall have no dominion. On Sun Day morning, the sun rises on an empty tomb. Quite a story; quite a Supper!