Bread Throughout the Scriptures Eucharistic Miracles Conference

Transcription

1 WITH YOUR PERMISSION LORD Bread Throughout the Scriptures Eucharistic Miracles Conference Many years ago there was a serious coal mining accident in the ALLEGHENY MOUNTAINS. While most of the miners escaped, three men remained trapped somewhere deep in the earth. No one knew if they were dead or alive It took over 48 hours to assess the situation and put together a RESCUE TEAM willing to enter within THE CONTEXT of a collapsed mine. Just before descending, a news reporter interviewed one of the team members and said to him: You are aware of the NOXIOUS GASES and the EXTREME DANGER of the mine aren t you? "YES," came the immediate response. "Are you still going down?" asked the reporter. "Those men MIGHT STILL BE ALIVE." Then, without another word or explanation, he put on his gas mask, climbed into the elevator, and descended into the Depths of the Mine "ARE YOU STILL GOING DOWN?" I wonder if a similar conversation took place between God the Son and God the Father a little over 2000 years ago? Oh how even THE ANGELS MUST'VE ASKED HIM OVER AND OVER AGAIN; Are you still going down into that world where darkness reigns? Into that place where MIGHT MAKES RIGHT and weakness is crushed! Are you still going down into the NOXIOUS TERRAIN of the Evil One? JESUS - are you still going down??? Without another word or explanation, the Son of God EMPTIED Himself of all Heavenly GLORY and incarnated within the confines of Mary's womb into that place where He put on our Human Nature over His Divine Nature and once perfected within THE CONTEXT of our human weakness HE WAS BORN!!! While it took 48 hours to assemble and present THE CONTEXT of a collapsed mine to a rescue team in order to ensure for the best chance of a successful rescue, it has taken thousands of years A PAINSTAKINGLY LONG TIME for the Holy Spirit to present and to ASSEMBLE THE CONTEXT ready to welcome and to ensure for the best chance of an Eternal Rescue for the human race. And that context is BREAD But not just bread in and of itself, bread combined with the lived out life experience of God's chosen people and WHAT bread has come to signify throughout centuries of ritual and worship of the one True God. For before we get to the BREAD of the Eucharist, we must begin with the importance of Ordinary Bread in the lived out CONTEXT of God s Chosen People: ISRAEL So intertwined is the Natural Element of Bread with the Unnatural Experience of Eternal Life being extended out to us by our Creator that in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John where we find the heaviest concentration of language about Our Lord s heavenly dissent, His words center in all around The Bread of Life. As a matter the whole of chapter 6 in the gospel of John is referred to as the Bread of Life Discourse. When Jesus boldly exclaims before everyone: "I AM the bread of life!" (John 6:35) What we have before us is the unknowable God who answered Moses from the burning bush: "tell the people my name is I AM that I Am has sent you to rescue them from slavery. Now the unknowable God who has become known in the person of Jesus Christ reminds us all that he is here with us: "I AM but he doesn't end there, he adds THE BREAD OF LIFE! 1

2 IT'S UNDENIABLE: what we have before us is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob identifying himself with the word BREAD in such a way that the two are no longer divisible. To BUMP into the one is to encounter the other and vice versa That's a SHOCKING STATEMENT!!! And in the gospel of John we come face-to-face with the reality that the BREAD OF LIFE and the LIVING BREAD experience, which are so frequently spoken of by the Master, have no parallels in Judaism or in ancient religions. The CLAIM of Heavenly FOOD Dispensing life is one that is unique to Jesus is unique to Christians. So let's situate the context that gave rise to this shocking revelation. The word bread in Greek is αρτος/artos, and it occurs 330x throughout the corpus of Scriptures. 98 of those times being in the NT. In Hebrew, the word BREAD comes from the root word LECHEM and within the context of both Hebrew and Greek the proper use of the word always carries with it the connotation of AN ACTION TAKING PLACE. Here's what I mean by that: Salvation History demonstrates for us how for God's chosen people, bread literally meant the sustenance of their earthly life its very presence meant THE ACTION OF SURVIVAL! Jesus is consciously aware of all of this as he goes about identifying the element of bread with himself. Through his words, Jesus is intentionally directing our attention back in time and He s grounding us in the concrete experience of Israel's salvific history. Case in point: the Exodus experience of God's chosen people from Egypt is and will forever serve as the FOUNDATIONAL CORNERSTONE that has paved the way for believers of today to understand and appreciate the wondrous existence of bread TOUCHED BY THE DIVINE SPIRIT FROM ABOVE For in the book of Exodus, we encounter a detailed analysis concerning a time in history when God's chosen people, Israel, found themselves radically and completely dependent upon God for their existence. We must never forget how for our Jewish brothers and sisters, their ancestors Exodus experience is FOUNDATIONAL TO THEIR VERY IDENTITY IN THE WORLD. An identity that was ASSUMED COMPLETELY in the life experience and person of Jesus Christ. As theologian Fr. Jeremy Driscoll puts it: THE EXODUS OF ISRAEL out of Egypt is the EXODUS OF JESUS FROM THIS WORLD TO HIS FATHER, and every believer discovers in penetrating the meaning of the Scriptures that he too is living this one and only exodus. Our very existence on earth is an EXODUS towards the Promised Land of Heaven! and to get this message across to his Chosen People, the Lord himself demanded of them distinguishing features and behaviors that actually served to separate Israel from all the other nations on earth and to remind them of this Truth. For you see, it was very unique to Israel as a nation, in comparison to the other religions and cultures of the times, that instead of having feasts which celebrated the passing of the seasons and cosmic activities, Israel was commanded by Moses, who received his orders from God himself, to focus the celebration of feasts and seasons based on the strict remembrance of GOD'S SALVIFIC POWER which had acted in their lives during the course of their history. Meanwhile, other nations that surrounded them, nations like the Canaanites, they also celebrated feasts and seasons year after year, but they narrated their understanding of why they celebrated such feasts based on a completely different historical understanding of their own gods and the work of creation. 2

3 These pagan nations celebrated feasts that HONORED A PRIMORDIAL PAST, that gave rise to a cosmic cycle which was now just part of their year in and year out way of life. Essentially what is revealed in these differences is God's unique relationship to Israel as his chosen people: For it is He, through the Prophet Moses, who established feasts for Israel to celebrate, feasts like the Passover, so that they might recall what He did for them for all future generations. "This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a Feast to the LORD; throughout your generations YOU SHALL OBSERVE IT AS AN ORDINANCE FOR EVER!" Everything that Israel lived through, especially the 40 years they wandered through the desert in search of the Promised Land, everything is meant to be understood as A CONTEXT that was BEING PREPARED for a REVELATION that was YET to Come. A context that when seen through the Lens of Salvation History, served to prepare the way for the coming of the Savior. I mean even if it s just on a spiritual level itself, the lesson we re meant to walk away with concerning the 40 years in the desert is that of AWAKENING TO THE KIND OF DISPOSITION HUMANITY IS MEANT TO HOLD BEFORE GOD AT ALL TIMES. For the spiritual truth that s being revealed to us by means of Israel's experience of wandering through the desert for 40 years is that OUR natural disposition towards God, at all times, is to be one of complete Dependence and Thanksgiving. It s precisely BECAUSE Israel found themselves radically and completely dependent upon God for their very existence that during the course of their 40 years in the desert, "God rained bread from heaven" for them in order to keep them alive And so it came to pass that those 40 years in the desert ended up paving the way for a New Found Appreciation and RESPECT for the element of BREAD and its role in the sustenance of life that it came to represent for the Jews. To put it quite simply, BREAD MEANT SURVIVAL while no bread meant certain death That's why when Jesus BURST OUT the following words in front of hundreds of people, it caused quite a stir: "I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE! Your fathers ate manna in the desert and they are dead: this is the bread which comes down from heaven, so that a person may eat of it and not die. I AM THE LIVING BREAD which is come down from heaven. Anyone who eats of this bread will live forever! And the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world For as the LIVING FATHER sent me and I draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will also DRAW LIFE FOR ME. This is the bread which is come down from heaven! (John 6:48-51) When those words are seen through the lens of Israel's history, coupled with the understanding that the second person of the Trinity he who is the Word made flesh the one who prepared the context for his own presence on earth: when he exclaims before everyone the "I AM" statements in CONJUNCTION with the element of BREAD, everyone back then, just like everyone today is forced to acknowledge that for God's chosen people: It is Jesus HIMSELF! And not manna, THAT is God's LIFE-GIVING GIFT to the world!! But to get there to have THAT KIND OF FAITH there s still more dots left to connect. After Israel had been sustained by the Manna in the desert for over 40 years, UNLEAVENED BREAD took on and entirely new meaning for them as a people. Unleavened bread had now become intrinsically associated with their lived out 3

4 history. So much so, that one of the FEASTS INSTITUTED BY MOSES under the direction of the Lord himself was the ANNUAL OBSERVANCE OF THE FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD. It's a celebration whereby which 12 loaves of the Bread of the Presence were placed on a special table in the sanctuary as an offering before the Lord. And after it was placed on that table, that bread, which had been consecrated/offered up to God by a priest of the old law, was no longer recognized as common/ordinary, for it took on the dimensions of HOLY/CONSECRATED. Recall the interaction we read about in the book of Samuel when David and his men approached the Priest Ahimelech while escaping from the clutches of Saul and they asked him for bread to eat. Here's how a couple of translations from the original languages gets across to us that the bread these guys were asking to consume was no longer ordinary bread: RSV: "I have no COMMON BREAD at hand, but there is HOLY BREAD; if only the young men have kept themselves from women. (1 Samuel 21:3) NJB: "I have no ORDINARY BREAD to hand; there are only CONSECRATED LOAVES of permanent offering-provided that the men have kept themselves from women?" (1 Samuel 21:3). Though the TRANSLATIONS DIFFER SLIGHTLY in their selection of the adjective used concerning bread, one thing is certain, bread that had been consecrated/offered up to God by a priest, even of the old law, was no longer recognized as common/ordinary, for it took on the dimensions of holy/consecrated. It had been set apart in such a fashion, that certain requirements had to be met in order for it to be consumed; in this case, the requirement was abstinence from women. THE CONNECTION TO BE MADE HERE is that just as David's men had to be purified in order to consume the Holy Bread, so in the same way Christians must be purified by the cleansing waters of Baptism prior to participating in the Eucharistic meal. For Baptism incorporates Christians into the body of the Risen Lord while the Eucharist we receive through the hands of Mother Church strengthen and cement our union as God's children born and sustained through Christ the BRIDEGROOM S SACRIFICE on the cross! And now, I WANT TO SWITCH GEARS and add an entirely new dimension to the meaning and the experience of bread on a cultural level. So as to add more depth of meaning You see, Jesus was well aware that in Israelite culture THE GREATEST HONOR bestowed upon someone was to share a meal with them. It's not for nothing that many of our Lord's miracles throughout the Scriptures take place within the context of a meal. It's not for nothing that the culmination of our Lord's life takes place within the context of His Last Supper A privileged moment of INTIMACY Breaking Bread and Sharing Life We've lost this in our generation the richness of sharing life and breaking bread with those around us has been replaced with FAST FOOD and an even FASTER-PACED CULTURE. OH YEAH, and there's one more thing we need to add to all of this before we encapsulate the end for which BREAD in the Scriptures exists to ULTIMATELY SIGNIFY. 4

5 We have to keep in mind what it takes for bread to exist in the first place. In order for bread to exist, two things are required: the cosmos working in union with human history. Bread exists only in so much as both of these realities function together harmoniously. There is bread because there is wheat, and there is wheat because somebody planted it and then harvested it. If it has grown, it is because seasons have passed, and the sun came out and the temperature was right and there was enough water and all the rest. I mention all of this just to point out that bread does not grow from the ground, wheat grows from the ground and HUMAN BEINGS MAKE BREAD. In other words, BREAD, when it stands alone in and of itself, represents the entire cosmos being channeled under a different form thanks to human beings made in the IMAGE and LIKENESS of God. Bread is CREATED. Safe to say that Our Blessed Lord, during his Last Supper DRAWS ON ALL OF THE ABOVE- MENTIONED HISTORICAL FACTS AND REFLECTIONS concerning Israel s way of understanding the importance of BREAD in the world. For what we see in the context of our Lord's Last Supper / the Passover meal, is Christ intentionally, INTENTIONALLY recapitulating all of creation / the entire cosmos along with all of Israel's history in himself!! THIS IS HUGE!! In the SIGNS OF THE MEAL, namely through bread and wine, the second person of the Trinity is bringing about the Divinization of the Cosmos and ushering in a NEW CONCEPT OF TIME. Creation, which was bound by history is about to experiences freedom as its chains are shattered by the dawning of eternal life. In other words, when Jesus takes the bread from the table he is fully aware of the fact that at that very moment: he holds all of Israel and all of Israel's history in his hands... it's as though he is saying to his disciples: "Here in my hands I hold the whole of our history and from this moment on, the entire history of our people will find its fulfillment in my body which will hang on the cross, in the blood that I will shed there so that sins may be forgiven and so Eat this bread in memory of me because: "I AM" the bread of life!!" Again, it s though Christ is saying to his Apostles gathered around him; HERE in my hands, this BREAD (my body) represents the whole of creation that came into being through me. And now, at this very moment, I draw all things to myself so that in me, with me and through me, a New Creation might come into being. Understood in this CONTEXT, we find that Jesus here is a prophet telling us what his death on the cross means before it HAPPENS!! His Last Supper and the foretelling of his death is all about getting this point across!! I am the Living Bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life and lives in me and I live in that person." (John 6:51, 54, 56). Jesus Christ's Paschal Mystery now becomes the NEW FRAMEWORK in which the whole of Israel's history finds its perfection and completion. And right there, after Christ says that he has given his life for his disciples he issues a commandment, DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME. Here we have the fulfillment of the psalmist's words the Lord has made a memorial for his wonders. (Psalm 111:4). And the Memorial that has been established is the HOLY SACRIFICE OF THE MASS 5

6 whereby we gather together from all walks of life in order to be nourished with LIFE GIVING bread from heaven. Bread DIVINIZED by the Spirit that s the Eucharist and it s available to all who BELIEVE!!! Last week while on retreat, Archbishop Smith shared with us an experience he had a while back when he was up North for an ordination of a Bishop. Now, when I say UP NORTH, I'm talking way up there in the land where the sun shines for most of the year and at other times not so much! Following the Episcopal Ordination, the people of the village INVITED ALL THE GUESTS, including the bishops who had flown in to join them, for a huge celebration set to take place at the communities gathering space the town gymnasium. As Bishop Smith walked in, he saw people running around setting up huge tarps all over the floor. Next, they brought in cardboard and set that up flat on top of the tarps. And then, with great excitement, they USHERED IN the Smorgasord Banquet Spread All the food came through the front door in Huge Garbage Bags frozen chunks, and some not so frozen, of mystery animal carcasses All these tasty treats were spread on top of the cardboard which lay on top of the tarps. There he beheld with his own eyes chunks of blubber mingled in with mystery meat. Every once in a while, an ANIMAL HEAD would be displayed on one of the tarps while elsewhere, INNER ORGANS were spread about that came from God only knows where He said that it was right about that time that his stomach started to turn upside down while he was looking for the EXIT DOOR meanwhile, it was also right about that time when A CONTAGIOUS JOY CAME UPON ALL THE LOCALS as they ran around with little knives in their hands carving out portions of food from whatever they wanted in order to bring them back to the table and they ate this STUFF with great delight. We as Catholics live on a very RESTRICTED Spiritual diet: THE EUCHARIST a reality that exists for the sake of FILLING US UP with Love, Mercy, Forgiveness, Kindness, Compassion, Hope, faith Meanwhile, people of the world also live on a very specific diet: service of self, selfishness, latest trends, EXPRESSION of GENDER, Pleasures of the FLESH: whatever fills up the fallen appetites of our animalistic nature And so what happens when people of the world BUMP into practicing Catholics when they see us eating the Flesh and Drinking the Blood of the Son of Man which in turn translates into a life of Forgiveness, Love, Peace, and Joy their stomachs begin to turn... This is where Archbishop Smith made an interesting observation: He said that while the VERY SITE of what lay on that gymnasium floor made his stomach turn - the SHEER JOY that radiated out from among the people FEASTING FROM THEIR BANQUET TABLE inspired something within him to ask himself: "I should really try some of this cause, cause maybe it s absolutely delicious I mean, just look at how happy they are! A QUESTION to PONDER before the Enfleshed Presence of Our Blessed Lord in this Eucharist the place where he sees us in all SINCERITY without any wax. 6

7 Does the way I live out my Catholic Faith, nourished with Bread From Heaven, really TURN THE STOMACH of those around me who are of the world? Cause at first, it should for the world does not feast from the same Banquet Table as that of Believers. But let s not stop there: AM I SO FILLED WITH JOY, HOPE and LOVE, O Lord, thanks to your presence in the Holy Eucharist that my life is causing others to think: "I should really try some of this cause, cause maybe it really IS THE REAL THING I mean, just look at how happy they are! Back in the 2 nd Century, Church Father Tertullian wrote about how the Pagans viewed Authentic Catholics: LOOK, look at how they love one another ready to die for each other. As far as Our Lord is concerned, that s THE CONTEXT for exactly how it s supposed to be for all who find themselves BLESSED enough to be called to the Supper of the Lamb in the Holy Eucharist: By this EVERYONE will know that YOU ARE my DISCIPLES if you have love for one another. 7