The Divine Art of Subverting Expectations

Gospel Reflection for June 7, 2026, the Solemnity of Corpus Christi - John 6:51-58

51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven.

52 If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.

53 The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat?

54 Then Jesus said to them: Amen, amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.

55 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day.

56 For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed.

57 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.

58 As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me.

(John 6:51-58 DRA)

I wouldn’t describe myself as an avid movie-goer or movie-watcher, but I’ve watched quite a few movies in my time, and I have to say that the worst movie I’ve ever watched (not including TV shows, like Game of Porn or Rings of Trash) is Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I know I’m not alone in this view, or even in total agreement with every Star Wars fan, but within a few minutes of the movie starting, I knew: this movie is terrible. As scene followed scene, this impression was further solidified, and by the end, I knew: I’ve never watched a movie this bad before.

But what made it so bad exactly? I didn’t understand it at first, but upon reflection I realized: the true problem with this movie is the director Rian Johnson’s favorite filmmaking method, which he and others call ‘subverting expectations.’ Throughout the long story, he repeatedly brought up plot points which fans hoped would go a certain way – only to pull the rug out from under us, not merely by surprising us but by doing the exact opposite of what we expected.

This was not the surprise factor of a eucatastrophe, as Tolkien explained and mastered, but a frontal assault against what worked and made sense for the story itself. From the pointless space chase to the meaningless Jedi training of Rey by the sarcastic mockery of Luke Skywalker to the absurd death of the archvillain Snoke to the epic duel between Luke and Kylo Ren that turned out to be a fight against a Force projection – all of this and more ruined every plot point, including those from the previous movie, The Force Awakens, and even Johnson’s own storylines in the movie itself.

But even though subverting expectations is a terrible method for storytelling, except perhaps in farcical comedies and parodies, it is one of God’s favorite methods for His providential orchestration of salvation history. From His preference for younger over older heirs in Genesis and beyond to His Temple rites which directly subverted the sacrifices of pagans to His anti-worldly wisdom in the prophets and wisdom books, He continually went against what everyone expected Him to do. Finally, in Christ and the New Testament, God’s plans culminated in His greatest subversion of expectations ever: not only His Incarnation as a mere man, a shocker in itself for the Jews, and the countercultural laws of the Gospel, but also His Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection, all of which, although prophesied in the Old Testament, were utterly surprising to Jew and Gentile alike.

Nothing, however, subverts expectations more than what we celebrate for this Solemnity of Corpus Christi: the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, when Jesus tells us to eat His flesh and drink His blood. When the Jews are shocked at this, reacting as Protestants do today and really as all of us would if we thought about it deeply enough, Jesus doesn’t deny what He said but doubles down on it, using His ‘Amen, Amen’ formula of emphasis and switching from merely saying ‘to eat’ His flesh to the even more visceral ‘to gnaw’ it. Even though He later says, “It is the spirit that quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing” (Jn 6:64), this doesn’t negate His previous words but only proves that the Eucharist is an unbloody sacrifice of His spiritualized, resurrected Body – but still a real and true eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood.

We must ask then: why did God do this? Didn’t He tell the Israelites repeatedly in the Old Testament that cannibalism of human flesh and drinking of any blood whatsoever are wrong? Well, we could also ask, why did He die on a cross, when He previously said, “he is accursed of God that hangeth on a tree” (Dt 21:23)? It may seem obvious to us now – ‘because He took the curse of our sin onto Himself, of course!’ – but this was not obvious to the first Christians or Our Lord’s Jewish audience.

Why, indeed, did He become human at all, when we are all wicked sinners and He knew that we would just persecute Him and finally kill Him? Why did He continue to seek after His people throughout history ever since the Fall, no matter how many times we betrayed Him and wasted His promises? Why did we hear in last Sunday’s Gospel, “For God so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting” (John 3:16)?

One answer is: because God loves subverting our expectations. He hates what the world loves; He punishes what the world ignores; He rewards what the world despises; He loves those whom the world ignores; and He chose to save us through the very things from which we need salvation, namely, sin and death. In all of these, He subverts our expectations and shows that He is, while never contrary to reason, still infinitely beyond it and our earthly assumptions.

The Eucharist is truly a mystery. Even the pagan Romans charged the early Christians with cannibalism because of it. The Protestants revived the same accusation against us centuries later. And now, Catholics disbelieve in the Real Presence largely for this reason: because it subverts their expectations. The Eucharist is embarrassing. We’re ashamed of it, of Him. How can we tell others that every Sunday or even more often, we gather together to reenact and participate in the murder of our God, all so we can have a ritual feast wherein we consume His flesh and blood, and that by doing so, we receive His salvation and eternal life through incorporation into His Mystical Body? The lamb-feast of the Passover and the mass slaughter of animals in the Temple sacrifices look triflingly ordinary by comparison. And yet, as Christ said, “For he that shall be ashamed of me and of my words, of him the Son of man shall be ashamed, when he shall come in his majesty, and that of his Father, and of the holy angels.” (Lk 9:26)

So, on this Corpus Christi, each one of us should ask ourselves: am I ashamed of Christ? If He subverts my expectations, will I respond with the revulsion and frustration I felt after watching The Last Jedi? Will I be like those disciples in John 6 who left Him after His Bread of Life discourse? Or will we throw away our worldly expectations and let ourselves be surprised by His wondrous plan? As J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote,

It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded of him – so incapable of being ‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to be I am’ (John viii). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John ix); or the promulgation of the Blessed Sacrament in John [vi]: ‘He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life’. We must therefore either believe in Him and in what he said and take the consequences; or reject him and take the consequences. I find it for myself difficult to believe that anyone who has ever been to Communion, even once, with at least right intention, can ever again reject Him without grave blame. (However, He alone knows each unique soul and its circumstances.) (Letter 250)

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