Boundaries of the Play

In large part, The Play of the Sacrament offers the form of play as an interesting medium to re-enact the death and resurrection of Christ. With Jonathas the Jew as the ring leader of the perpetrators who desecrate the host, the play considers the boundaries erected by society to be irrelevant in the presence of Christ.  This boundary between symbol and reality is further broken down when the host, which is meant to be a symbol of Christ’s body, literally bleeds when it’s boiled and roasted. Even when they boil the host, in hopes that this will prove the absence of Christ, instead it sticks to the hand: “Out, out, it werketh me wrake!/ I may not avoid it owt of my hond!/ I wille goo drenche me in a lake.” Sarah Beckwith’s article introduces interesting historical context with which to consider this act of boiling the host. “Jews, in the fantasy of some Christians, boiled communion wafers in oil and water and stole and bought hosts to desecrate and profane the body of Christ. The bleeding host shrines of the late Middle Ages, which ‘usually had their basis in miracles involving host s which began to bleed’, were often claimed to be the site of ‘a claimed act of profanation or ritual murder by members of Jewish communities.” Here the bleeding of the host is depicted as both a miracle and a murder. The boundary separating life and death, one Christ crossed when he resurrected.

This trend of defying boundaries continues until the end of the play when the narrator at the end of the play finally addresses Jonathas the Jew as “Ser Jonathas” as if to address a certain transcendence between his former self and his newfound Christian faith.

Jonathas lead his men as they put Christ to a new Passion and despite the atrocities of their torturous acts are referred to as a Passion. According Beckwith, “the work of the play is to convert all its outsiders to insiders” and seamlessly does so.  With “Passion” as a symbol for the torture of the host and the reborn Jonathas into an almost priestly figure, it’s as if the stolen host could never be stolen because to do so is to remove it from where it ‘s meant to be, in the hands of those who truly believe in the miracles of Christ.

The nature of Christ is to reveal the truth to those who doubt because these are the only instances in which we make contact with Christ. Christ’s second miracle is to heal the deformed hand of Jonathas. The dismembered hand was a physical symbol of the Jew’s sin and Christ healed him.

Do these boundaries depicted serve us in our understanding of the nature of sign and symbol? How does it connect with this idea of the Jew as an archetypal outsider?