Reflections On Scripture: Food for Thought and the Soul

Reflections On Scripture: Food for Thought and the Soul

 
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes. - Corinthians 11:23-26 

 
There is a tendency to define the Church solely as an institution, while neglecting that the reality of the Church is also and most importantly an event, the Eucharistic event. By reflecting upon the nature of the Eucharistic celebration we discover that the Church is not just another human institution or even just another religion within the pantheon of world religions, rather it is the event in which God transforms humanity through The Prayer of Great Thanksgiving = The Eucharist.  By receiving together as brothers and sisters in the Lord, his Body and Blood, the faithful constitute the Ecclesia of God.

 
What needs to be recaptured is a sense of the sacred in all its dimensions.  What we do at the Eucharistic Liturgy is not merely a meal but a Holy Sacrifice, we worship at not only a table, but a Holy Altar, we are not only fulfilling a personal obligation, but we are worshiping with the Angels, Saints, and the Church Universal, we not only consume bread and wine, but the Body and Blood of Christ.  This Divine Supper which we are participating in deserves the best we have to offer: from the building, to the vestments, to the music, and the hearts we bring full of hope and longing for salvation, love, and peace. 

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Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

 
St. Paul instructs what the character of a Christian should be like.  Remember he was always in battle against those who wanted the Gentile converts to also embrace The Law of Judaism.  He sees no need for them to embrace the character of those who embraced The Law, before it was possible to embrace the new life in Christ.  To live in Christ is not to live by laws but to live by love.  While laws are mean’t to restrict, love is an extension of the freedom of salvation.  While laws are for behavior in this world, love is of the Kingdom of God.  St. Paul proclaims that the person who has embraced God’s adoption is patient, kind, not arrogant or rude.  The person of love rejoices in the truth and bears and endures all things because of it. 

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THE LEGENDARY LETTER OF KING ABGAR TO JESUS:

 
Abgar legend, in early Christian times, a popular myth that Jesus had an exchange of letters with King Abgar V Ukkama of Osroene, whose capital was Edessa, a Mesopotamian city on the northern fringe of the Syrian plateau. According to the legend, the king, afflicted with leprosy, had heard of Jesus’ miracles and wrote to Jesus acknowledging his divine mission, asking to be cured, and inviting him to come to Edessa as a safe refuge from persecution. In his reply, Jesus allegedly commended the king for his faith, expressed regret that his mission in life precluded a visit, but promised that after his Ascension into heaven a disciple would visit Edessa and heal the king.

 
A developed form of the legend exists in the Doctrine of Addai, a Syriac document containing suggestions of primitive Christianity in Edessa. In any event, the letters, probably composed early in the 4th century, have been considered spurious since the 5th century. They were translated from Syriac into Greek, Armenian, Latin, Arabic, and other ancient languages, clear evidence of the popularity of the legend. - from Britannica

 
This exchange of letters between King Agbar and Jesus is of course not actual, but it did influence early Christianity to some degree, especially Syriac Christians; it even was translated by the early Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea.  What it does remind us is that the written Word of God is contained in the Sacred Scriptures; and was produced by Patriarchs, Prophets, Apostles, and Scribes.  The only mention of Jesus writing was when we was writing in the dust, if you will, on the ground when the woman was about to be stoned for adultery.  In the three year public ministry of Jesus he wrote with preachings and miracles that revealed the will of his Father; he wrote with love and left the indelible mark of the Holy Spirit.  
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But as for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who, when they have heard the word, embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance. - Luke 8:15

 
“The Church is not an association that wishes to promote a certain cause.  It is not about a cause.  It is about the person of Jesus Christ”- Pope Benedict XVI. These words of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, further our understanding of the meaning of Luke 8:15.  The word that we hear is Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word of the Father.  We as members of the Church, the very Body of Christ sojourning in this world, we embrace “The Word,” Jesus himself, and in the power of the Father’s Holy Spirit we are “His Body the Church,” the living People of God.  

 
Once we realize and accept our lofty calling of being a Christian, we are called to “embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance.” In other words we are called to “put on Christ,” the One who did not even break the bruised reed.  This is why being a Christian is a calling that is a “life calling,” a calling that we can never perfect, a calling that by God’s grace and election extends unto “eternal life.”  

May we become the “rich soil” that the Lord can grow his grace in, and extend his love and saving message.
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Now this is the message that we have heard from him and proclaim to you: God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.  If we say, “We have fellowship with him,” while we continue to walk in darkness, we lie and do not act in truth.  But if we walk in the light as he is in the light, then we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of his Son Jesus cleanses us from all sin.  If we say, “We are without sin,” we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we acknowledge our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from every wrongdoing.  If we say, “We have not sinned,” we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. - 1 John 1:5-10

 
This beautiful passage from the First Epistle of John is very pertinent to our Christian lives today, if not everyday in the life of the Church and the People of God which constitutes it.  

 
First, what is proclaimed to us in the epistle is that God is light, meaning of course that God is the essence of truth, love, peace, and goodness.  If we continue to walk in the darkness, yet say that we have fellowship with God, “we lie and do not act in truth.”

 
Second, if we truly walk in the light we are cleansed by the blood of Jesus and we have fellowship with the Father through the Son and we have therefore fellowship with one another, constituting the Church.   

 
Third, (and this is truly the challenge of our time) “if we say, ‘we are without sin,’ we deceive ourselves, and truth is not in us.” This speaks to two of the essential problems in our contemporary society; that we have on the one hand made ourselves the arbiters of right and wrong, goodness and evil; and on the other hand we have discarded the fundamental Christian principles of what is holy, what is right, and what is sinful.  We have, at least in the greater part of the Western World or the often called Developed World, allowed secularism and not Christianity, to be the foundation of our laws and morals.  As the late Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel remarked in the middle of the 20th century, in his book The Mystery of Being:

Don't you feel sometimes that we are living, if you can call it living in a broken world? Yes, broken like a broken watch. The mainspring has stopped working, Just to look at it, nothing has changed. Everything is in place.  But put the watch

to your ear, and you don't hear any ticking. You know what I'm talking about, the world, what we call the world, the world of human creatures it seems to me it must have had· a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had stopped beating. - Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being

We could say that Marcel has found the deepest problem of our society, that is the lack of true passion.  Passion in the true Christian sense of the word means sacrificial love. God calls us to be Christ-like, meaning to love, to lay down our lives for others as Christ laid down his life for us.  Our modern world had deadened our senses, deadened our passion; for the sake on conformity, telling us to acquiesce to the the zeitgeist (the spirit of the age).   

 
Our faith in Christ, challenges us to look upon His Cross, for the Cross is the saving symbol of truth over falsehood, active love over inactive acquiescence.  As Sacred Scripture reminds us, to paraphrase Matthew’s Gospel: For even if you were to gain all the wealth and power of this world—at the cost of your own life—what good would that be? And what could be more valuable to you than your own soul?

 
- Rev. David A. Fisher