The heaven-earth dilemma and the scandal of God-become-dirt

In his talk on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, which has now amassed almost three million views on YouTube, Bishop Robert Barron calls Christ’s “bread of life” teaching in John 6 a “standing and falling point,” a stumbling block—an “either you’re with me or against me moment.”

That perilous edge can be found in the recent comments by YouTuber and Christian convert George Janko about the Eucharist. On his podcast (clip here, and full episode here), which has almost three million subscribers, Janko says,

I don’t look at things that are dirt and put it to the holiness of God. I could never do that. Differently with the Bible: I get uncomfortable when the Bible’s on the ground just because it’s the Word of God, and God was the Word and became flesh. . . . But like when they take the Eucharist, when they take this, and they truly believe that it is actually his Body and his Blood, to me, that’s a big no-no. . . . I need somebody to come with biblical terms and show me in the Gospel, because as of right now, we’re just taking dirt and worshiping it as if it’s our presence of God, and I just—I can’t wrap my head around that. . . . They treat it like it is actually my God that’s in that bread. I can’t get behind that. Now, if any man has a Scripture and says ‘No, this is exactly why,’ I will bow my head and I will bite my tongue. I’m never trying to go against God. But I think little movements like this could . . . move a man away from God.

In reacting to this dismissal of the Eucharist—which, though certainly not new, was amplified far and wide to hundreds of thousands of listeners—it would be easy enough for Catholic and Orthodox believers to fall into a fit of blind rage: “How dare he call the Eucharist dirt?”

But Janko seemed to make these comments in a spirit of good faith and honest questioning. Why not respond in kind?

One could point to the biblical basis he says he’s looking for, however well trod it might be in these discussions: not only in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel but also the Last Supper narratives in the Synoptic Gospels; in 1 Corinthians 11:23–34 and the “breaking of bread” in Acts (2:42–46, 20:7); in the liturgical resonances in the book of Revelation (beautifully explored by Scott Hahn, a former Protestant, in The Lamb’s Supper); and in the many Eucharistic types in the Old Testament, from Melchizedek to the Passover to the manna in the desert.

One could also point to the historical record, which sooner or later all Christians have to confront. We can continue to argue ad nauseum over the precise meaning of these passages—but what did Christians believe and do over the past two thousand years, especially in the early Church? Bishop Barron’s talk, again, offers a phenomenal overview of the doctrine of the Real Presence, from John 6 to the present. He also offers a sample of the teachings of the Church Fathers on the Eucharist, which are profoundly Catholic in character.

St. Ignatius of Antioch (AD 35–108), to mention just one striking example from the first century, calls the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality” and even warns about those who “abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.” Even Protestants like the rapper Flame and the preacher Francis Chan have recently witnessed in powerful ways to the unanimity on this doctrine for 1500 years, up until the Reformation era.

Personally, I also want to untangle the theological dilemma in Janko’s own comments, which is where we find the crux of the issue. He twice refers to the Eucharist as “dirt” in sharp contrast to God—to God’s holiness, his presence. In other words, how could something as lowly and fragile and finite as bread—which grows up from the ground and passes through our hands, mouths, and stomachs—possibly be the bearer of the eternal and all-powerful God? How could we worship him then?

This is what I’ve termed a heaven-earth dilemma: God and his perfection are on the one side, this world and its dirt on the other; and either we take God and move away from the bread, or take the bread and move away from God. We can’t have it both ways.

But Janko’s own response references a line from Scripture that’s critical to this conversation: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). That is to say, God became fully human. The shocking logic of the Incarnation—in tandem, of course, with Scripture and Tradition—is precisely what has compelled apostolic Christians to affirm the Real Presence for two thousand years.

On the face of it, God’s becoming human and God’s becoming bread are two wildly different things. We have rational souls; bread doesn’t. We are alive; bread isn’t. But in the poetry of Scripture, we find deep linguistic and conceptual ties between the dirt of the ground and human life: “The Lord God formed man [adam] from the dust of the ground [adamah]” (Gen. 2:7). Man, as countless Christians will hear on Ash Wednesday, is “dust”—and to dust he shall return (Gen. 3:19).

And though the idea of God becoming man is taken for granted today by most Christians, it was met with the same astonishment, disgust, and even horror that many believers feel today at the idea of God becoming bread. In both cases, it’s God’s intimate connection with the earthly that scandalizes. Augustine, reflecting on his pre-Christian Manichean days, captures a common view of the time: “I feared to believe the Word made flesh lest I be forced to believe the Word defiled by flesh.” Many brilliant and devout Christians feared to draw God too close to the “dirt” of this world by saying that Christ had a human body, a human will, a full human nature.

How could we worship him then? Wasn’t this, too, blasphemous? Idolatrous?

But God did become man, fully taking on all our “dirt.” And what we see in the Incarnation—the communion of God and man in Christ—is the beginning of a broader story: the communion of heaven and earth in the Church. God gathers and reconciles to himself things above and things below (Eph. 1:20; Col. 1:20).

This same logic undergirds not only Eucharistic worship (which predates the New Testament) but also the veneration of icons, which also came up in the same podcast discussion. Indeed, Janko’s own admission that he shows reverence and respect to the physical book of the Bible—which, after all, is composed of ink and paper, and no less “dirt” than bread—bears witness to the same incarnational logic. Rather than follow Janko in holding to the Incarnation and sacredness of Scripture but, in a strange inconsistency, stopping short of the Eucharist, we should follow John of Damascus, that great defender of icons, who deftly ties all three communions together:

“I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake, and in matter made his abode, and through matter worked my salvation. . . . I reverence it not as God, but as filled with divine energy and grace. . . . Is not the ink and the parchment of the Gospel matter? Is not the life-bearing table, which offers to us the bread of life, matter? . . . Before all these things, is not the body and blood of my Lord matter?”

And, as G. K. Chesterton put it in his 1904 essay “The Protestant Superstitions”:

Heaven has descended into the world of matter; the supreme spiritual power is now operating by the machinery of matter, dealing miraculously with the bodies and souls of men. It blesses all the five senses. . . . It works through water or oil or bread or wine. . . . I cannot for the life of me understand why [a Protestant] does not see that the Incarnation is as much a part of that idea as the Mass. A Puritan may think it blasphemous that God should become a wafer. A Moslem thinks it blasphemous that God should become a workman of Galilee. . . . If it be profane that the miraculous should descend to the plan of matter, then certainly Catholicism is profane; and Protestantism is profane; and Christianity is profane. Of all human creeds and concepts, in that sense, Christianity is the most utterly profane. But why a man should accept a Creator who was a carpenter and then worry about holy water, . . . why he should accept the first and most stupendous part of the story of Heaven on Earth and then furiously deny a few small but obvious deductions from it—that is a thing I do not understand; I never could understand; I have come to the conclusion that I shall never understand.

Catholic World Report