I have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with tacky religious puppetry. I'm not really sure where it began, but I have my suspicions that it comes from my childhood as a Baptist. The main thing about these videos that strikes me as odd is that they always try to take a rather serious theological principle, and condense it so much that it becomes a parody.
In this video for instance we see an elderly puppet, rightly, making the comparison between the lamb that was sacrificed by the Israelites for the salvation of their first born and Christ who is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. We then see an actual, puppet, lamb singing and imploring us to "Eat of my body, drink of my blood too." This is problematic on several levels.
The first one being the confusion between the symbolism of the Old Covenant, and the Sacramental reality of the new. While the lambs song is obviously not meant to be taken literally, the words Our Lord spoke were certainly meant to be taken that way. The Greek word used in the New Testament is "trogo." This word is never used symbolically, and it literally means to gnaw or to crunch on something the way that an animal would. Christ is in no way being ambiguous in his speech, and that is reflected by many of his disciples leaving him as seen in the Gospel of St. John 6:66.
The second problem with the song is when the lamb says that "If you eat and drink of me I will be part of you." Pope Benedict XVI explains "In the normal process of eating, the human is the stronger being. He takes things in, and they are assimilated into him, so that they become part of his own substance. But in the mutual relation with Christ it is the other way around; he is the heart, the truly existent being." In the Holy Eucharist, Christ does not become part of us. We through communion with Christ come into unity with Him. We do not have mastery over God, but God allows us to share in the Divine Life of Love manifested in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.
I know that I'm being a bit nit picky, especially since the creators of this puppet show never intended to convey any sort of belief in the doctrine of the Real Presence, but this dumbing down of theology really gets my dander up. I'm fully aware that not everyone shares my theological leanings, but if these people want to be taken seriously they need to get their hands out of their puppets and their noses into some books. I recommend the writings of the early Church fathers, and for some fantastic, if deep, Eucharistic theology St. Thomas Aquinas.
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