QUOTE:God is taking the world somewhere. He has promised to do for us what He did for Jesus after He died. God really does love the whole world, and He wants to make it alive in a new way, like He did with Jesus on the first day of the week. And when He does we will meet Jesus Himself! When we take the bread break it and eat it, and when we take the wine and share it around it isn’t only that we seem to be there with him at his last supper. We are with Him in His new world. What we do in this meal brings all the past and the future all together into one moment. (The Meal Jesus Gave Us, N. T. Wright, 2003)
COMMENTARY:
The supper of the Lord is an inter-participation with Him in a way that surpasses the limitations of our temporal understanding. The corporal body of Jesus, which by his power or energy enters into the bread and the wine, becomes food and drink for the believers to take into their own bodies. Upon consumption of it, both spiritually and physically, we become fused with the Lord who acts through the bread and the wine. Thus, it connects us with the eternal God who is Jesus, and He takes us into eternity with Him. When we take of the bread and wine we enter into eternity- Kairos. Hence, for the believer, it is a great blessing to experience the goal of their life, salvation, and for the non-believer it is their self-inflicted curse that they experience. The bread and wine of communion are the time-machine that leads to eternity.
“And he that sat upon the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new’.” Rev 21:5
ReplyDelete“Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” Rom 6;3
“When Christ died, he ended his relationship to sin. He now lives in unbroken fellowship with God. So you too, must consider yourselves as having ended your relationship to sin. And the life you now live, you live in unbroken fellowship with God .” Rom 6:10-11 Williams Translation.
“The time is coming, and now is..” he said to the woman at the well.
“He that was, and is, and is to come”, and “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” is how He is presented elsewhere.
In the Messianic sense, time is not linear. Men like Abram/Abraham, Moses, Aaron, Barak, Gideon, David, Solomon and countless others were sinful and fallible men. Yet God’s Spirit empowered them. How? Theologians state that God , because of the finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, retro-actively stamped them with the righteousness of Christ, which from their viewpoint, was a future event.
A little easier for me to conceive, is that Christ’s death in the past stamps me with His righteousness. Since time “seems” to flow from the past to the future. Just as I “see” my past in my rear view mirror and the future is seen through my windshield, rushing toward me.
Now my death? From the viewpoint I have now, it is in my future. Yet God’s CEO, Paul the Apostle tells me that the future event of my death, is linked with a past event, Christ’s death. The scientific term is simultaneous.
Even further, he pleads with me, that I live my present life in the future. My post-death, resurrected “future” life.
Now.
Simultaneously.
It is a certified blessing, if not a downright miracle, that King of Glory Anglican Church has as its pastor a man who sees new things in new ways and describes them in new terms.
The Eucharist IS a time machine. The past events of His life, death, resurrection, and ascension, the present of His life living in unbroken fellowship with God, collapse into the singularity of the bread and wine. Together the inadequacy of my past, and my yearning in the present to be whole, connect through the sacrament to my future resurrected life with Him. All compacted into one moment of faith.
The Apostle Peter- using the authority given him by Jesus- correctly changes the tense of the words of Isaiah from “by His stripes are we healed” to “by His stripes ye WERE healed.” Past tense.
Even my "future" healing is seen as a "past" event from a Messianic viewpoint.
Romans chapter 6 tells us to live our present life connected to the past but anchored to the future. Father Carlos asks us to set our time machine, the Eucharist, to eternity.
Amen.