Walter Brueggemann on the Eucharist as alternative, dangerous bread.
What if Christians began to notice that certain kinds of bread enslave and are the bread of affliction? The most elemental faith decision we make concerns who feeds the body, and if the truth be told we are in various ways into 'eating disorders' of a theological kind. We must reflect on bread and alternative bread. We may begin our reflections with the Eucharist, the relentless enactment of our conviction that only broken bread feeds, only poured out wine contains the power of new life. But we daily resist the brokenness and refuse the poured-out-ness. We have become victims of junk food, the junk of social ideology, the attractiveness of consumerism, the killing seductions of security and despair; we are domesticated, silenced in our satiation. We scarcely notice that all these ersatz bakers have made promises they cannot keep.
What freedom there would be for us exiles if we left off the dominant hopes of our society, if we refused the dominant fears all around us, if we ate bread that hopes only evangelical possibility and that fears only the truth of God's faithfulness, utterly free of every other hope and every other fear! The problem, of course, is that we mostly eat imperial bread and do not notice its costs, that we wind up belonging and being owned, denied freedom for obedience. There will not be genuine freedom until, having new bread, we refuse the offer of Pharaoh's tasty bread. The new bread is, however, happening among us. We are seeing that we have neglected gospel bread and opted for imperial bread; we are left with the deep eating disorder of isolation, despair, and anxiety. The Eucharist is dangerous bread, as that dramatic act mediates to us a fresh way in the world now under the rule of God.
Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home: Preaching among Exiles (WJK, 1997), p.131.
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