Milk, Honey, & Mount Zion
How the Eucharist Reorients Our Worship Towards Eden (Part 1)
“Christ, then, feeds His Church with these sacraments… ‘A dropping honeycomb are your lips, my spouse, honey and milk are under your tongue (Song of Songs 4:11)” -St. Ambrose, 4th century, De Sacramentis
Dear Friends,
I recently had the privilege of giving a lecture to the Institute of Catholic Culture concerning the Eucharist in the early church, and I was joined by hundreds of wonderful people from across the country. It was a truly wonderful time together! They have now shared this lecture for free, and so I thought I would pass it on to you as well. Tonight (Tuesday, March 12th), I will be giving another talk on the same theme to the Institute if you would like to join us at 8pm Eastern time: Here is the link: https://instituteofcatholicculture.org/events/milk-honey
I have also expanded upon this talk below into a 2 part writing series below. Part 1 is free while Part 2 will be coming out for paid subscribers only. Enjoy!
Part 1: The Eucharist as Milk, Honey, and Manna
Did you know that the Eucharist was associated with milk and honey in the early church? In the ancient world, milk and honey represented luxury and abundance and so it is fitting imagery for when God gives us His best, which is the gift of Himself. The imagery is also connected to Biblical typology. In the same way that Moses led God’s people from captivity in Egypt to “a land flowing with milk and honey,” so Christ, the New Moses, leads us through the wilderness to feast on the new food of the Promised Land which has become His own Body & Blood.
We should also note that on the way to the Promised Land, the Israelites were fed by God with a ‘heavenly food’ called ‘manna,’ which tasted “like wafers made with honey” (see Exodus 16:31). It seems that God was providing an appetizer of honey before the great feast of honey to come! Later, the Scripture refers to manna as the ‘bread of angels” which the fathers of the church saw as a foreshadowing of the Blessed Sacrament.
“Yet he commanded the skies above, and opened the doors of heaven;
he rained down on them manna to eat, and gave them the grain of heaven.
Mortals ate of the bread of angels; he sent them food in abundance.” (Psalm 78:23-25)
In John 6, Christ makes an explicit connection between Manna and His own flesh in the Eucharist:
“54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink… 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
St. Paul also connects manna with the Eucharist in 1 Corinthians (10:2-4; 16) when he warns the Corinthians Christians to take this sacred meal seriously:
“All were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, [i.e. Manna] 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink… 16 The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?”
The Eucharist is both our food for the journey as well as our feast upon arrival! But there is more.
The Eucharist as the Tree of Paradise
The Eucharist not only connects us to the Exodus story but also to the story we lost in Eden. Although Adam and Eve could eat a variety of foods with ease throughout the Garden, it was the Tree of Life that was their ultimate ‘milk & honey.’ It was the Meal of meals and even imparted immortality to them. This Divine Meal wasn’t an arbitrary feature of God’s Creation, but it was intentionally given by God to complete their human nature. Since man is composed of both heaven (God’s breath) and earth (soil), it is fitting that he should be continually fed with food that is also composed of both both heaven and earth.
Someone might ask, “If Adam and Eve were already Divine, then why did they ‘need’ the Tree of Life to sustain their divinity or immortality?”
It seems that God ordained that 'through eating,’ the first humans could be energized and grow more and more into God’s likeness (see my article on theosis in C.S. Lewis). We Christians follow this same pattern. Just as Adam was made divine at his creation through the gift of the Holy Spirit and was sustained by partaking of the Tree of Life, we are made divine in the waters of baptism and are sustained by prayer and the Eucharist thereafter.
Another question a person might ask is, “Why did God choose ‘eating’ as the pathway for deification?”
A. God likely chose this ‘pathway,’ because He created human beings to encompass both the spiritual and physical realms of the created order. We are ‘like the animals’ as well as ‘like the angels’ while not being identical to either of them. Animals eat but do not pray or directly commune with God. Angels pray and commune with God but do not eat or build within the material creation. Adam represents the overlap of the animal and angelic worlds. He ate AND communed with God, and it was actually through eating and participating in the material Creation that he advanced spiritually.
St. John Damascene describes how Adam was meant to be energized through the Tree of Paradise. He writes,
““When God was about to fashion man out of the visible and invisible creation in His own image and likeness to reign as king and ruler over all the earth and all that it contains, He first made for him, so to speak, a kingdom in which he should live a life of happiness and prosperity. And this is the divine paradise, planted in Eden by the hands of God, a very storehouse of joy and gladness of heart (for “Eden” means luxuriousness)... It is flooded with light, and in sensuous freshness and beauty it transcends imagination: in truth the place is divine, a meet home for him who was created in God’s image…
The Tree of Life ... was a Tree having the Energy that is the cause of Life, or to be eaten only by those who deserve to live and are not subject to death… The tree of life too may be understood as that more divine thought that has its origin in the world of sense, and the ascent through that to the originating and constructive cause of all.” (c.675-749): De Fide Orthodoxa 2, 11.
In the same way that the Tree energized Adam, so the Eucharist energizes and deifies us. In another place, St. John Damascene writes,
“Let us receive the body of the Crucified One… in order that the fire of the longing, that is in us, with the additional heat derived from the coal [reference to Isaiah 6] may utterly consume our sins and illumine our hearts, and that we may be inflamed and deified by the participation in the divine fire.” (The Fount of Knowledge 3.4)
In conclusion, the Story of Eden and the Story of the Exodus have become our stories today in the Church. Through encountering Christ in the Eucharist, we have once again gained access to the Tree of Life and are being fed with the food of angels in the Promised Land (even if we have not fully arrived yet.)
But what does this have to do with Mount Zion and human civilization as a whole? You will have to wait for Part 2 (!) (only paid subscribers) when we will dig deeper into the symbolic world of the Eucharist, ancient Jewish-Christian worship, and the mission of the Church today.
Be entirely His,
Kyle
