Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics: Scripture, Sacrament, and the Jewish Body of Christ

I take this not only as prescriptive but also descriptive; that is, Florovsky accurately describes the interplay between Eucharist and scripture even in traditions that do not formally acknowledge or exploit this interplay. Indeed within the scripture itself the deep connection between word and sacrament is made clear. On the road to Emmaus the disciples do not recognize Jesus until biblical (Old Testament) interpretation and broken bread have come together (Luke 24). When Ezekiel encounters the glory of the Lord he is commanded to eat the scroll, to ingest the word (Ezek. 3:1-2). And John in his Revelation describes the angel commanding him to take and eat the Word of God that is both bitter and sweet (Rev. 10:9-10). Eating and reading, digesting the text, feeding on the flesh that is the Word -- these interplays of food and language point to the deep correlation of word and sacrament through which the one Christ is revealed and reiterated in the liturgy.

In Telling God's Story, Gerard Loughlin has brilliantly brought to the foreground the connections between Eucharist and interpretation, between the body of Christ in the meal and the story of Christ embodied in the church. [23] Loughlin describes the Eucharist as

The Eucharist is a summation of narrative theology, since it is precisely the practice whereby the community is engrafted into the story. God's story becomes our own story; we become participants in the ongoing drama of God's reign. [25] Loughlin suggests that in Revelation 10:9--10 the scroll which John eats is "both Christ's risen body in the bread of the Eucharist and the divine logos in the word of Scripture." Eating and reading become one, for the single Word of God is made present in both. The reading/eating of Christ means "becoming part of the story as the story becomes part of oneself." [26]

the meal in which the one and the many are united, the Body and the Word with the bodies and words of the enstoried Church. The great theme of eucharistic theology -- that the Eucharist makes the Church by which it is made -- is paralleled in the teaching of narrativist theology: the scriptural story makes the church by which it is made in the telling of the story. But the two themes are closer yet, for the Eucharist is the telling of the story that is at the same time the telling of the church as the very Body of Christ. [24]

While Loughlin's account of the eucharistic Word helps us understand its relation to the written Word, his appeal to narrative tends at times to float above the actual biblical witness to which he points. Thus, instead of locating the masticated Word within the nexus of Jerusalem, Passover, and Jesus' redemption of Israel, Loughlin turns to the ontological quandary raised by Jacques Derrida concerning the possibility of true gift-giving. Contextualized within this alternative narrative, the Eucharist becomes a challenge to the Derridean claim that there can be no gift that is not already caught up in an economy of exchange. By reading Eucharist as an answer to this ontological concern, Loughlin pushes the narratives of the Last Supper into the background, allowing the Eucharist to be circumscribed by the conditions of possibility for gift-giving. [27] As the body and blood are drawn into the general category of "gift" their particularity as Jewish body and blood recedes from view. The question goes unasked w hether it matters that the body offered in the Lord's Supper is a Jewish body or that the practice enacted is a Jewish practice.