The following is a meditation given at a service held at Canberra Baptist on Wednesday afternoon, 12th March 2008. The speaker is Rev Roy Henson, a retired Baptist minister, who celebrates the fiftieth year of his graduation from the Baptist Theological College of NSW.

THIS IS MY BODY

I want to share some thoughts on the words of Jesus when He said, "This is my body". But first let me put a question to think about. What do Oscar Schindler, Fred Hollows and Dr Edward (Weary) Dunlop have in common?
Matthew tells us that “as they were eating, Jesus took bread and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, Take, eat, this is my body” (26.26). “As they were eating” refers to the roasted lamb, which was the principal food of the Passover meal. A lamb would have been sacrificed in the Temple earlier in the day, on behalf of Jesus and his disciples: its’ blood was sprinkled on the altar, it would have been skinned and gutted, and them taken and cooked on a spit roast, and eaten by Jesus and his followers that night. Now who cooked it? I can’t see Jesus wearing a BBQ apron, but who knows? Anyhow, it was while they were eating their portion of roast lamb that Jesus took some bread, broke it, and gave it to his disciples to eat. Now some people think that the broken bread was intended to symbolise the breaking of his body. In the past some of our hymn writers have told us so.

“His body broken in our stead
Is seen in this memorial bread,
And so our feeble love is fed
Until he come”    (George Rawson)

Hymn writers have a lot to answer for!

In John’s Gospel (Chap 19. 31-37), we are told that the soldiers intended to break the legs of Jesus in order to hasten his death, but found he had already died, and so did not do it, and this fulfilled an OT Scripture which said “not a bone of him shall be broken”.

The real reason Jesus broke the bread was so he could share it with his disciples. But when He said the bread represents His body, they must have wondered what He was on about. This was a completely new idea. There is no obvious connection between bread and body. Clearly Jesus is foreshadowing his coming death, and suggesting that His life will be soon “laid down” for them. But it is a mistake to think of that body as broken, or weak, or at the end of its tether. On the contrary, it is more the case that He had a body which was strong, and virile and tough, and that He was at the height of His powers at this time in His life. 

For many years I have had hanging on the wall this picture by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali. It is an interesting interpretation of the crucifixion by virtue of what he leaves out of the scene as much as what he puts in. There is no crown of thorns on Jesus’ head. There are no nails in his hands and feet. All evidence of pain and suffering has been eliminated. Note that the view is taken from above, as if God is looking on. And note the emphasis of the well formed broad shoulders and arms of Jesus. They are the sort of muscled arms you’d expect of one who had presumably worked as a carpenter. And as the artist saw it, these strong arms and broad shoulders are symbols of him taking the part of a burden carrier. No doubt Dali had in mind the words of Isaiah 53 where it is said “Surely he has born our griefs and carried our sorrows….and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” As two other hymn writers have put it:

Quiet was Gethsemane
camouflaging priest and soldier;
the most precious Word of life
took the world’s weight on his shoulder
for the good of us all.
J Bell and G Maule

In his book on Miracles, C S Lewis writes of the Grand Miracle of the Incarnation. “In the Christian story, God descends to re-ascend. He comes down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity… But He goes down to come up again and bring the whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift, He must almost disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders”. (p115)

Throughout his life Jesus had been a bearer of other people’s burdens.  He carried the weight of those around Him who suffered, who were hungry, who were afraid, who had lost their direction in life. He felt the burdens of the outcasts, the underdogs, and the disgraced. He said to them all “Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light”. (Matt 11.28-30). So He graciously offers to be yoked with us in all our circumstances, and to stand with us when we feel the weight of living crushing us. “Do this in remembrance of me”. Remember His presence and remember his strength. True, there are some burdens we are meant to carry in our lives. There is the burden of personal responsibility which we need to carry. In one sense it is true that we are the “Masters of our fate and the Captains of our souls” And there are some burdens that only Christ can carry for us. The weight of failure, the heaviness of regret, the burden of past mistakes, in some way beyond our understanding he assumes in his body on his cross, and we find freedom and release.

But how does Jesus “lift the burden from the heavy laden” in our everyday existence? Paul told the Christians in Galatia that they were to “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ”. (Gal 6.2)  Yesterday I went to see the film “Black Balloon”. It is an Australian film all about a family in which one of the two sons is autistic. His name is Charlie, and he is about 18, and he causes all sorts of problems for his pregnant mother, his father who is in the army, and his younger brother who is particularly affected because he has so much responsibility for keeping an eye on Charlie. Charlie runs out in the street in his underpants. Charlie throws tantrums at the checkout in the local food store. Charlie annoys the neighbours by sitting in the back yard for hours hitting a stick on the ground. Charlie is an embarrassment. Charlie is destructive. But Charlie can also be quite funny and lovable, and his family loves him, and does their best to protect him and care for him and carry the load that his existence produces on them. And there’s nothing special about this family. In some respects it seems to be quite dysfunctional. Their language would suggest that they don’t attend any church. I’m not sure they’d fit in among us here in Canberra. And yet I came away from that film feeling that here was a family that was fulfilling the law of Christ. They represented all those whose names will never appear on any church roll, who never read the Bible, and who rarely pray, and yet unconsciously are upholding the law of Christ by their willingness to share the load of those around them.  There are the Oscar Schindlers, who protected his Jewish workers from the gas chambers in WW2, and the Fred Hollows, who carried the burden of thousands of Aboriginal and Nepalese and Eriteans affected by eye infections, and the Weary Dunlops, who lifted the weight of illness from the lives of many of his fellow prisoners on the Burma Railway when captured by the Japanese in 1942, all around us.

And I believe that every time we come to the Lord’s Table, and take the bread, we are affirming our desire to carry someone’s burden, and to lighten someone’s load. We are the body of Christ.  Jesus says to the world, “This is my body, given for you.”