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At a recent meeting, another minister and I arrived earlier than the other participants. As we were talking, I noticed an unusual pin in his lapel and asked what it represented. "Oh," he said, "that's an old symbol somebody once designed for our denomination, and it didn't catch on. We all wore them for one meeting and that was it. I just never took mine off my coat. Somewhere, somebody has about umpteen million of them that never sold."
This led to a brief discussion of symbolism, and why some symbols seem to catch on and work out beautifully while others don't ever become popular and merely die out. "When you get down to it," my friend said, "not many symbols in any generation ever work very well, and only a few survive the age in which they were born."
I remembered this conversation as I was contemplating this weekend and the excitement we feel about the Fourth of July. All across the country, bands played, fireworks were exploded, and the flag waved in all its star-spangled glory. What is it about the flag that stirs such deep emotion in us, that prompts those ancient feelings of pride and joy and grandeur?
It isn't easy to explain in a few words. Symbols are never easy to explain. But I like the explanation of one old man whose grandson turned to him and asked, "What is the flag, Grandpa?"
The grandfather thought for a minute. Then he responded: "Well, son, the flag is a bit of cloth and a bit of love and a bit of blood and a bit of hope, all woven together and crowned with stars. It's everything we know this country to be and everything we expect it to be and everything we pray it will be. You might say, it's what we'd all look like if this country were pressed together and cut down the middle. It's a center slice of America, the way God must see it when he looks at it."
That isn't a technical explanation, of course, but I like the old man's explanation, because it implies that the symbol and the reality are one. You can't separate the flag from what America really is.
The best symbols are like that. They aren't mere lapel pins or banners designed by artists to make a few dollars for the manufacturers. They are ideas that participate in the reality they represent, that get all mixed up with the reality so that it is hard to think of one without the other.
Take the Lord's Supper. It, too, is a symbol, the way the flag is a symbol. Yet, for anyone who knows its history and theology, it is much more than a symbol. It is the deepest kind of reality.
It goes back to the night when Jesus ate with his disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem. He took a cup, the scriptures say. Nobody knows what the cup looked like. It was probably a simple clay cup, fired in a kiln—the kind common people used. He filled it with wine, perhaps by dipping it in a supply of wine at the side of the room. He set it before the disciples and said, "All of you drink some of this. It is the new covenant—the new arrangement with God—in my blood." It was a dramatic moment, one the disciples would not soon forget.
What happened to the cup after that night? Did one of the disciples tuck it in his knapsack to keep as a memento? Was it left on the table and did two or three of them go back afterwards, trying to find it? All kinds of legends grew up around the cup in the centuries that followed. One of the most persistent of these was the story that Joseph of Arimathea, the leader of the Jews who removed the body of Christ from the cross, had somehow gotten the cup from the upper room and used it to catch some of Christ's blood as he died. Joseph had then carried this cup of blood to Britain, where it had been guarded by a succession of kings. In the medieval literature of King Arthur, the cup, or Holy Grail as it was called, became the object of a great search by the knight Perceval, or Galahad in the English version; and later the story of Perceval was transformed into the Wolfram von Eschenback story of Parzival, which was the basis for Wagner's famous opera.
Charles Williams, a contemporary English novelist and friend of C. S. Lewis, wrote a novel called War in Heaven, which centers on the rediscovery of the cup in modern times. I especially like the little prayer of the Archdeacon in Williams' novel, as he wonders whether the silver chalice in his keeping really is the Holy Grail. "Ah, sweet Lord," he says, "let me keep this Thy vessel, if it be Thy vessel; for love's sake, fair Lord, if Thou hast held it in Thy hands, let me take it into mine. And, if not, let me be courteous still to it for Thy sake, courteous Lord; since this might well have been that, and that was touched by Thee."
I shall be surprised if we are not one day treated to a science fiction movie, something like Star Wars, in which the recovery of the Grail is an essential ingredient of the plot. Perhaps the cup of our Lord will have been discovered by a poor peasant lad in Ethiopia, where it lay hidden for years inside an ancient carpet, and brought to Rome, where the Pope himself intended to use it for a communion seeking the end to all wars. Then on the eve of the special communion service, interplanetary bandits land at the Vatican, overpower the holy guards, and make off with the Grail. The rest of the movie is devoted to the pursuit and recovery of the Grail, with miraculous events surrounding the actual recovery.
All of which is to say, that person is poor in spirit and imagination who looks at that table and sees no romance in the cup standing there. This person cannot be aware of the many church councils that have debated the nature of Christ's presence in the cup, or the books written about it, or the awe and reverence of a first communion service in an African bush village where Christ has come, or of old enemies forgiving each other at the table, or of newlyweds tasting wine together, their voluptuous young lips poised at the brim of the cup in respect for the mystery it contains.
Most important, this person obviously doesn't realize that Christ is here, standing at the table, his presence reconstituted according to his own promise to be with us always, even to the end of the age.
It is the way with the flag every time it is unfurled, and we can hear the music of fife and drums in our imaginations, and see "the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air." The cup is more than a symbol. Christ actually presides here. He walks up and down the aisles, offering the cup to the man who has lost his dear wife, to a couple who mourn the death of their child, to a young woman who feels all alone in the world, to a man who has just learned he has AIDS. His wounded hands reach out to embrace us all, to bind us together as the church, to empower us with his love. It's real, and that person is poor indeed who doesn't know this, who doesn't feel it in his or her soul.
How would Grandpa explain the cup? Maybe he would do it this way:
"Well, son—or daughter—it's this way. That cup you see there on the table is the most special cup in the world. They say if you look in the wine when it is filled you can see the image of the person God loves best in all the world—you. And then, if you look deeper still, you can see something else. You can see a hill, and three crosses on it, with men hanging on them. And on the middle cross, the man who hangs there is beautiful, the most beautiful man who ever lived. And he's looking right at you, and he's smiling. That's right, he's smiling. Because he knows, when you drink the wine, you're taking him inside you, and he's going to live there always—even after you die. That cup is the bond between you and him, and it will change your whole life if you will let it."
And grandpa would be right.
John Killinger
This Journal is published by Theological Web Publishing, LLC. For more information e-mail us at: webedit@theology.org
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