ONE OF THE MEN WITH CHRIST IN THE Garden of Olives ran away naked. When the crowd came, they grabbed this man too; he was wearing only a linen cloth wrapped around him; they held it and he ran out of it, into the night. This is in the Gospel of Mark. We do not know who he was; so he entered history and remains in it as a man running naked in the dark. Maybe he was not at the Last Supper, but joined Christ and the eleven as they walked to the garden. But imagine him at the Last Supper, one of the first people to receive the Eucharist. He knows in the way Christ’s hands hold the bread and wine, and in the way He speaks about them, that something is happening; he is not certain of what it is. The bread and wine are familiar; he eats, drinks. After the meal, he sings hymns with the others, and Christ. He feels peaceful: understood and loved. They walk to the garden, where he sits on the ground. Then he lies on it, looks up at trees and stars. His stomach is full and soon he is asleep. The noise of men wakes him; then someone is holding him, and he runs naked in the night air, which he wants to keep breathing. He will do anything to be able to breathe, and when he runs far enough, he feels grateful, then ashamed. Now he walks, gaining his breath, and he feels alone; but he is not. He is us.
Maybe a few days later, he walks with a friend on a dusty road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Christ has been crucified and buried. Now the women say they have seen Him alive, they have embraced His legs and feet, and Mary Magdalene says He spoke to her and she spoke to Him. His tomb is empty. Peter and John have seen it. The man who ran and his friend are sad, confused, afraid. On the road, a man joins them, walks with them, and asks why they are troubled. The two are surprised. Where has this man been? How could he not know what has happened in Jerusalem? Their faith and hope and love have been broken and scattered there, and now pieces of them are returning, as though on the wind, in the voices of the women who saw Him alive, and the men who saw the empty tomb. But what can they do with these pieces? On the road, they tell all of this to the man who has joined them, and He says: “Don’t you understand?” Then He teaches them the Scriptures they already know, the words that predicted Christ’s coming. They reach Emmaus and invite their companion for a meal at an inn. At a wooden table, He sits opposite them. A young woman brings a basket of bread; He blesses the bread, and breaks it, and hands pieces to them. Then they see that He is Christ, and He vanishes. Now they know what they were feeling, walking on the road, and the man who ran says: “Weren’t our hearts burning? When He talked to us, on the road?” Later, the Holy Spirit will come in flames to the gathered disciples, and the church will move over the earth, in the voices of men and women and children, in their flesh.
Or maybe the man who ran is with Peter on a boat at night. Christ is dead and life goes on and they are trying to catch fish. From the shore at dawn, a man calls to them, tells them to fish on the other side of the boat; John says: “It’s the Lord,” and Peter swims ashore where Christ waits with fish He has cooked over coals, and with bread. He eats with them. Or the man is one of those in a crowded room, and suddenly Christ is there, showing His wounds, and talking to them, and they give Him fish to eat.
Christ kept eating with people after He was dead. He still does. The Last Supper is not in the past, but in the present. Before Abraham was, I am means the time and mortality the man ran naked for and from are real, and are to be feared and loved; but that before time and mortality, God is, and so love is; and God’s love entered them and mortality as a baby, a boy, a man, to show itself through the flesh. Knowing that those few years of physical presence are not enough, He remains in the flesh: in bread and wine, in the acts of eating and drinking. The Communion with God is simple, so we will not be dazzled; so we can eat and drink His love and still go about our lives; so our souls will burn slowly rather than blaze.
We can live with this miracle, for it requires so little of our bodies and minds and hearts. We simply have to be where the Eucharist is, and open our mouths to it. We can even receive it without eating it. On most mornings after my accident, I did not have the energy to go to Mass, then prepare meals and write and try alone to run a household. A priest brought me the Eucharist when he had time to, and once he said: “Every day you are receiving Communion of desire; other people are receiving it for you.” So the Last Supper did not take place on one night in one room, and to eat God’s love, we do not even have to open our mouths; we can be walking, sorrowful and confused, with a friend; or working on whatever our boat is, fishing for whatever it is we fish for; we can be running naked, alone in the dark. The Eucharist is with us, and it is ordinary. To me, that is its essential beauty: we receive it with wandering minds, and distracted flesh, in the same way that we receive the sun and sky, the moon and earth, and breathing.