When I hear the word “paradox,” I think of my high school freshman English class. My teacher, who was excellent, taught us figures of speech, and I remember one vivid example to this day. To explain the meaning of “paradox,” she quoted from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink.”
The class stared at her. What is she talking about? You’re out on the sea in a boat. There’s plenty of water. Sure, there’s water to drink! But, my teacher said, it’s salt water. You can’t drink it. Oh, right, we thought. How could we not see that?
Paradox is one of the most widely used figures of speech in Scripture, and it certainly features prominently in the New Testament. You can’t understand Jesus without understanding paradox. Think of the parables. Think of fully divine and fully human.
And when we talk about Mass and bread, we have to talk about paradox. There’s something about bread that makes it the perfect material substance in which Christ comes to us sacramentally. Here, I’m reminded of how American author Bill Buford describes the bread made by a French boulanger named Bob, whom he knew while living in Lyon: “Bob’s bread was exceptional. . . the bread was more than just bread.”[1]
The bread of which Jesus speaks in John’s Gospel is more than just bread. It’s bread, but it’s also his flesh. It’s eaten by mortals, but it enables immortality. It’s material, and yet it’s spiritual. It’s bread, but it’s more than just bread.
To speak of the Blessed Sacrament, of the Eucharistic Bread, is to speak in mysterious language and to wallow in paradox. Yes, Corpus Christi is about bread, but it’s about more than just bread. The Bread of life does more than just satisfy our hunger. It sustains us when we have lost our way. It offers healing to our brokenness. It convicts us in our idolatry. Corpus Christi is about more than just bread.
But do we really understand this? Look around at our broken world, and we could very well alter Coleridge’s paradox in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and apply it to bread. “Bread, bread, every where,/Nor any crumb to eat.” This may not be universally true on the Main Line or in parts of Philadelphia, but it is true, even blocks from here and in corners of our local community.
How is it that we have lost our way so badly that there are vast quantities of bread in some places and not a crumb to eat in others? Why are there food deserts in one of the richest and most technologically sophisticated nations on earth? How can extravagant wastefulness and profound poverty exist side by side? “Bread, bread, every where,/Nor any crumb to eat.” The one thing about a paradox is that it’s true.
As I said before, the Feast of Corpus Christi is about bread, but it’s about much more than just bread. In the Mass, we see Bread. We revere Bread. We eat Bread. But the Bread is more than just bread. It’s Christ himself, who comes among us in every Mass to offer us eternal life. Paradoxically, when we only focus on the bread, we lose our way.
Look at the stories of our forebears in the faith. In Deuteronomy, Moses speaks to God’s chosen people as they rest on the plains of Moab, awaiting their entrance into the promised land. The land is so near they can smell and taste its many fruits. They have spent forty difficult years in the wilderness after their exodus from Egypt. They are yearning to step onto the soil of the promised land. But they are not there yet.
Moses reminds them not to forget their past, because the greatest sin is to forget that God is God and to forget what God has done for them. What Moses tells the people is strange. God has not brought the pilgrim people the short way to the promised land; God has brought them the long way. God has done it to test the people, to humble them. God has done it not as cruel punishment but as loving discipline, so that the people would remember that God provides. God provided in the past. God provides even now. And God will continue to provide.
On the edge of the promised land, the people needed to recall that, when God fed them in the wilderness with manna, God gave them just the right amount: no more and no less than they needed. After all, the food was more than just bread. When the people disobeyed God and didn’t gather the remaining manna, it rotted and went to waste. God’s abundance does not enable gluttony. It does not favor certain people. It’s just what every person needs, no more and no less. Wastefulness is a sin, and the allowance of poverty is a sin, because they both mean that people have forgotten God. They have forgotten that God’s gift of bread is more than just bread.
Look, too, at the story of Jesus’s disciples in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel. Before Jesus reveals himself to be the living Bread from heaven, he has fed 5,000 from only five loaves of bread and two pieces of fish. The people’s ability to trust is tested. Can Jesus really provide? Will there be enough? Is God inclined towards abundance? And after the people have all been fed, even the crumbs are gathered up. Nothing is to be wasted. The bread is more than just bread.
If God’s gift of bread in the Mass is only ordinary bread to us, we will find that there’s bread, bread, every where, nor any crumb to eat. The bread becomes an end in itself. The bread is merely what satisfies us. Bread that is no more than ordinary bread makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Such bread is a way to wealth, or a way to poverty, because we think we can control the bread. And when the bread is just bread, it has no connection to God.
But when bread becomes for us living Bread by the power of the Holy Spirit, the true Bread that gives life, it is paradoxically, bread and more than bread. It’s God’s gracious gift to us. It’s a sign of God’s abundance. It’s what we need to be fed and only as much as we need. It’s bread that can never be wasted. It’s what allows us to feast on Jesus, to abide in him, to be intimately tied to the only one who will give us true life and who is truly present in the Eucharistic Bread.
Bread, bread, every where, nor any crumb to eat. This awful paradox is the source of many people’s inability to trust in God. They see glaring poverty and assume that God cannot meet these problems or doesn’t want to meet these problems. They assume that food deserts in a wealthy country are signs of God’s absence.
But these very real problems are not arguments for God’s neglect of humankind. They are simply proof that we have forgotten that bread can be more than just bread. When bread is no more than ordinary, we become sinful consumers, and the poor and oppressed are neglected. When bread is an end in itself, people suffer, and some doubt whether God does provide.
On Corpus Christi, the words of Moses and the words of Jesus himself call us back to remember our story. We must remember what God has done for us. We are asked to trust what God is doing for us now. And we are called to hope in what God will do for us in the future.
God has given us what we need, everything and not a crumb more. If some have too much, then it’s the result of a sinful world, not God’s design. If some have too little, then it means that we have lost the ability to be responsible for God’s gift and have forgotten that the bread is more than just bread.
On this feast, we adore Bread that is more than just bread. And because the Bread we eat and adore is more than just bread, there are plenty of crumbs to go around. There is no shortage. There is nothing to waste. It’s just what we need, no less and no more, so that we can live forever.
Sermon by Father Kyle
The Feast of Corpus Christi (transferred)
June 19, 2022
[1] Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 93, Kindle version.