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Twenty-four years ago this summer, a film opened in theaters that featured a hero who gave his all to save humanity, even offering himself up to be eaten alive.
The hero’s name is, simply, the letter K. He is played by Tommy Lee Jones. K is one of the Men in Black, a secret organization that monitors and controls alien life on this planet. K and his partner J go to the Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in Queens, where, naturally, an alien cockroach several times the size of a human being is attempting to steal a tiny galaxy, encased in a cat’s collar medallion. The cockroach wants to exploit the galaxy’s subatomic energy, you see, in an evil plot to commit genocide. It’s just the usual kind of thing that happens to the Men in Black, on a Tuesday.
To stop the enormous cockroach from killing millions, and to save the earth from certain destruction, K jumps out in front of the cockroach and yells, “Eat me! Eat me!!”
The cockroach finds the offer irresistible and swallows K in one gulp. Once inside the cockroach, K finds his ray gun (which the cockroach had eaten a few minutes earlier), winds it up, and fires. The cockroach explodes in a cascade of slimy goo.
The world is saved.
This, friends, is the formula, exemplified vividly by K: you perceive danger; you offer yourself as food; you are then eaten; and eventually you emerge, alive and victorious, to receive the thanks of a grateful planet.
There are some notable departures here and there, but this is more or less the formula of Jesus, too. Except Jesus is not eaten by a giant bug from another planet. He is eaten by us. And he does not emerge alive all by himself: we too are raised to new life.
But this is all so grotesque! When we eat the Eucharistic meal, we soften the cannibalistic tone. We use euphemisms like “bread” and “cup,” and we try to spiritualize it all, to take the edge off. This is understandable. Christians from their earliest years have scandalized observers who can’t stomach these graphic images at the center of our prayer life. And of course we know that in the most concrete sense, whatever we believe about the philosophical substance of the bread and wine, they remain physically bread and wine on our table.
But we would do well to reflect more deeply on this practice at the heart of Christian identity, this discomfiting ritual of eating our Savior. Joseph Campbell studied similar rituals in New Guinea and other Pacific island cultures, and found that they line up intriguingly, and unsettlingly, with the Christian Eucharist. We eat our savior, and inside us, our savior changes us: Christians are not the only, or even the first, human community to think, feel, and ritualize this idea, and to explore the dreadful intimacy at its core.
But once we get used to this idea, and even accept it as a teaching of Jesus, we can begin to see that it is not simply a startling primeval ritual that belongs in the violent past. We see life being set aside, overcome by death, so that life can then rise up. The seed is planted, shrouded in darkness, dismembered by death, and then the sprout of green life rises in the morning sun. Life, death, life: and at the center, a Savior who lays down their life.
The risen Christ survives being eaten by us. Broken and killed, consumed in a frenzy of rage and fear, Christ rises, “trampling down death by death,” and he breathes peace upon us and reaches out to us with his wounded hands. As our Ionian creed says it, Christ is “tortured and nailed to a tree,” but Christ shatters the grave and, rising, he restores our life.
But there’s more.
When we eat the Body and Blood of Christ, unlike K’s giant cockroach, we do not then explode theatrically into goo. But we do take on an unsettling new identity. We become members of the Body of Christ. We are changed. We become like Christ: we are broken and shared. We become food for the life of the world. We lay down our lives.
Ignatius of Antioch, who died in the early second century, is one of the earliest Christian writers. He opens up this idea for us without, thankfully, saying that we get eaten. But his imagery is hardly less startling. Here’s how Ignatius of Antioch says it: “I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.” I am God’s wheat ground fine by the lion’s teeth to be made purest bread for Christ.”
We are invited to follow Christ, but this following is not simply walking behind a friendly sherpa up a twisting mountain trail. To follow Christ means to be consumed like he was: to be torn open, or crushed like dry grain, to use Ignatius’s image.
Here are a few ideas about what this might mean, or look like.
If I let the lion’s teeth grind me like wheat, I give up my usual ways of being, my easy assumptions, my safe patterns. I “lay aside immaturity,” as the writer of Proverbs says, choosing instead the more difficult path of wisdom. I allow my neighbor — I allow you — to be close to me, to challenge me, to take me into a place of discomfort, so that I hear what I need to hear, and do what I need to do. I also draw courage from Christ himself to draw close to you, and challenge you, and “speak the truth in love” as the writer of the letter to the Ephesians says.
When we receive the Body and Blood of Christ — or said more viscerally, when we eat our savior — we take into ourselves his courage, his faith, his vulnerability, his open mind and his broken-open heart, his wounded hands and his breath of peace. We become the presence of the Risen One in this world so wounded by violence, poverty, sickness, and death.
One more saint can help us unpack all this, and understand it more deeply. St. Clare of Assisi, a follower and friend of St. Francis, says this:
“We become what we love, and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved … [W]e are to become vessels of God's compassionate love for others.”
To paraphrase Clare: we are what we eat. We do not pause around this table to merely act in pale imitation of Christ. We eat this bread — we eat our savior — to become what we receive. After the Ascension, when the physical presence of Christ was no longer visible or tangible, the Spirit descended upon his followers, and they recognized him in the breaking of the bread. He went inside them. He gave life to the community by incorporating them. And we too are invited to be incorporated with Christ. We become what St. Clare calls “vessels of God’s compassionate love.”
All of this is contained within two small words of Christ, words of invitation from him to us. All of this change, all of this transformation, all of this breaking open and suffering with one another, all of this vulnerability and compassion and love: all of this is contained within Christ’s two-word invitation:
“Eat me.”
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Preached on the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 15B), August 15, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Proverbs 9:1-6
Psalm 34:9-14
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58