I would guess every person here has bought something this weekend. Maybe it was a ticket to the high school football game on Friday night. Maybe gas for your car, a meal out, food from the grocery store. Maybe a gift for someone else, a gift for yourself, an online impulse buy, or an online automatic purchase. Each one of us looked at an object and said, “That thing has value and I will give something that is mine in order to have it.”
Entire economic courses and divisions of companies are dedicated to the how and why of value attribution and pricing structures. The concept of supply and demand is one part of the equation. There’s also the idea that there is an ideal price point that makes the object affordable for the consumer, but still pricy enough for the seller to make a profit. It’s an amazing psychological dance between seller and consumer that produces a world where things for sale for $999 sounds like a much better deal than a similar item that costs $1,001.
In fact, an object’s price is part of what makes it desirable. If Gucci handbags cost only $3, they would cease to be as desirable because everyone could have one. If Fruit of the Loom came out with a pair of underwear that cost $50, no one would buy it; but Under Armour can sell $50 pairs of underwear without breaking a sweat (pun intended).
Speaking of handbags and underwear, let’s bring it back to Jesus.
Jesus is in a bit of a bind. He knows that his physical body will not last forever; in fact, he knows it will not last much longer. And yet, there is nothing more valuable to the world than Jesus’ flesh and blood. The people need the incarnated divinity in their lives even when he is gone.
The very idea of salvation (that is, an intimate and restorative connection to the divine) is found in the incarnation of the divine into the body of a first-century Jewish man – the Word made flesh. So how would Jesus make the gift of salvation available when creation can no longer gaze into his eyes, touch the hem of his cloak, feel his restorative touch, or hear his stories?
Jesus’ surprising solution is to declare that the incarnation of the divine will continue in perpetuity in something as seemingly mundane as bread and wine.
If church and communion have been a part of your life for a long time, you might take this idea for granted. But try to let it sink in anew. The flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth is just as infused with divinity as bread and wine that is given and consumed in his name.
This idea has to sound bonkers to economists and marketers. Jesus–the most precious and valuable “thing” in the world–promises to be found in two of the most common physical objects in the world. I mean, can you imagine God placing such value on something so mundane? It would be like if God would look at ash and dust and declare that it is valuable.
Which, by the way, is exactly what God does.
Which, by the way, begs the question, “What is it that we value?”
Do we have the capacity to see the divine in something mundane and easily missed, like ashes, soil, wheat, bread, a poor person, a kid who is bullied, or a person with a physical or mental illness?
Do we have the capacity to ascribe value to the things and people who are overlooked and taken for granted our world? If so, we are walking in the footsteps of the incarnated Christ. If Christ is eternal, then the idea of the common and mundane being valued is an eternal truth.
Allow me to approach this idea from a completely different angle.
I am blessed with a spouse who keeps me organized and forces me to purge things I have accumulated. So one day I was in the basement, at my spouse’s request, looking through the boxes of stuff that my parents had dropped off. A couple boxes were full of baseball cards. Then I found my collection of old comic books. I opened the box and found a note on the top that was handwritten on a piece of paper. It read,
