Jesus' body & God's words - sacraments?

As it’s a Thursday I’m struggling away at Calvin’s doctrine of the Supper again – partly with a view to thinking about whether or not the Bible may usefully be called sacramental.

I’m not sure I really get all this but this little bit of Calvin’s interaction with Lombard has got me thinking:

But the foolish imagination, of which Lombard was the author, that eating Christ’s flesh is the sacrament, has perverted their minds. Here are his words: “The sacrament and not the thing are the forms of bread and wine; the sacrament and the thing are the flesh and blood of Christ; the thing and not the sacrament, his mystical flesh.” Again a little later: “The thing signified and contained is Christ’s proper flesh; signified and not contained, the mystical body.” I agree with his distinction between the flesh of Christ and the effective nourishment which inheres in it; but his pretending it [the flesh and blood of Christ?] to be a sacrament, and even one contained under bread, is an error not to be endured. (Institutes 4.17.33, p1406)

It seems to me that there’s an important question here about what constitutes the real “thing” and where it is to be found. There could be a problem about describing the sacrament in contrast to the thing. The sacrament broadly conceived surely involves a union of the thing signified (the real substance) and the signifier. The more narrow use of sacrament refers only to the outward sign making a distinction between the sacramental sign and the substance of which it speaks.

For example, could Jesus’ human body be called a sacrament? In a fairly weak sense that it is a created thing that somehow significantly mediates the divine, surely so. There is a union of the divine and the human in Jesus. But in the case of Jesus’ human body, what you see (the sign) is the real thing: the substance of the human body of the God-man Jesus. Lombard wrongly seems to imagine some third thing called “the mystical body”.

The case is very different in the case of the bread of the Lord’s Supper: it is the sign or sacrament (narrowly understood) of the body of Christ, not that physical body itself, which is now seated at the Right Hand in glory. Yet the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (broadly understood) offers the true Christ (including his body) to be received spirituallu by faith.

A problem with thinking about the words of the Bible as sacramental is that it might lead one to suppose that the real action is elsewhere: that these words only point towards the true Word of God which is somehow beyond these words. One can see why liberals would see this as an attractive way of downgrading the words while still retaining them (just as we use bread in the Supper but we don’t confuse it with Jesus’ body). Granted the written words are given to lead us to the Living Word, they are nevertheless themselves the real words of God, not just signs of those words.

I guess the issue is more complicated however when one speaks of Bible translations. They would seem to be pointers to the words of God, rather than his very words – secondary signs.

The ink markings on the pages of our Bibles could be said to be the form and not the thing of the words of God, rather as the bread is not the physical body of Christ.