“This Is Not Only Difficult To Hear, It’s Downright Creepy!”

I recently heard about a teenager who, having been a fairly regular participant in the communion services of the Church, might have been expected to remain unfazed by the experience of the Eucharist. However, becoming more consciously aware of what was actually being claimed, this young person was suddenly scandalized by the language and found the whole experience “creepy”. All the talk of eating flesh and drinking blood was more than just a little bit too much.

Many if not most of us, who have made Communion a fairly regular religious practice, participate without offence and barely a second thought to the obviously disquieting words implying that we are somehow, even if only symbolically, eating human flesh and drinking human blood. If we were truly honest, we would have to admit that it all sounds so very vampiric.

Vampires, as depicted in Western myth and legend, are often reputed to, not only risk their life to the light of common day, but, under cover of night, they must rely upon the blood of a human victim to secure everlasting life. Historically speaking, we may very well, and perhaps rightfully, understand these myths as growing out of actual Christian practices - or, at least, popular misunderstandings of them.

Our earliest forbears in the Christian Church quickly found themselves a persecuted minority who needed to conceal their identities in the common marketplace lest they be exposed and possibly face capital punishment. However, obviously, the general public knew these Christians were meeting in secret and, as so often happens with secret societies, the rumor mill started from little distorted snidbits of what these Christians were doing undercover of of their mysterious gatherings. When word got out that they were engaged in consuming human flesh and blood, every person who suddenly went missing was suspected of being victimized for these crazy Christian rites. It was, to say the lest, creepy. It should come as no surprise that Anne Rice, arguably one of the greatest writers of vampiric tales, grew up in a very devout Roman Catholic family and was well-steeped in the practice and ethos of Holy Communion. Mix in the exotically Gothic, ghost-ridden and voodoo-laced charm of N’awlins - where she both grew up and returned in later life, and, voila, we’ve got ourselves a franchise based on these notions of blood victims and the prospect of everlasting life.

However, it bears repeating that even from the earliest days of the Christian church, these notions surrounding the practice of Communion brought about tremendous difficulty and offense to believer, wanna-be-believers, and non-believer alike. The Gospel of John identifies Jesus own disciples as being repulsed by all this talk of Jesus identifying himself as offering his flesh for food and his blood for drinking. For most Jews - and, remember, all of the earliest followers of Jesus were Jews (including Jesus himself) - this kind of talk was just a bridge too far. Why this was true has less to do with its inherent eeriness than an inherent belief about what constituted blood.

In brief, biblical people strongly associated blood with life and life was something which belonged exclusively to God. Naturally, experiences of watching a person or an animal bleed out, led easily to conclusions wherein blood became associated with life. If you have ever witnessed a person receive a blood transfusion who desperately needs one, you would have quite literally seen the color of life return to the pallid face of the recipient. Whatever led our early ancestors to equating the taking of life in blood sacrifices to help appease the powers which sustained life is open to all kinds of conjecture, but it did. All the biblical statutes and regulations prohibiting the ingestion of blood eventually prompted the development of kosher laws which are primarily about making sure that there is not a single trace of blood left in whatever is consumed. Again, the blood - being life itself - was God’s exclusive property and it was verboten to take the life that had been given to another and take it into ourselves.

This was a long way into getting to the biblical image of God we are considering today. However, all our work toward this image is practically complete.

“I AM the Vine,” claims Jesus - among those seven I AM’s equating Jesus with God in the Gospel of John. I AM the Vine. Vines were primarily understood to produce grapes. Grapes were necessary to produce wine. Wine is in that class of alcoholic spirits which, for better or for worse, can bring down people’s inhibitions and contribute to the life of the party. Wine is, generally speaking, red like blood. These associations between blood, wine and life just seem to continually spill over into one another feeding our metaphoric understandings of our religious beliefs and practices.

I AM the Vine is, at its simplest, just a way of claiming that the God we find in Christ is Life, is the Life Blood of All that is. However, as we’ve seen in all the previous biblical images for God that we’ve considered, these are never really about God per se…

“I AM the Vine,” Jesus says, “And YOU ALL are the branches…”