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Taste and See the Goodness of the Lord.

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7 August 2009 - 1:07pm — jpriest

 

Today we see Elijah being hunted down by Jezebel’s rage. He struggles to keep going and God feeds him during his journey of 40 days and 40 nights through the desert to Horeb, God’s mountain. In the simple bread and water that Elijah received he found hope to sustain him along the way. Hope is not a fleeting promise in the future. Rather, we are blessed with hope when we receive a down-payment on what is to come fully later-on. This hope is pledged to us in that God “has also put his seal upon us and given the Spirit in our hearts as a first installment,” (2 Cor. 1:22). 
 
“First installment,” or down payment translates the Greek word, arrabon, which was a technical word used in financial circles to indicate the good-faith payment that a person makes when he buys something on long-term loan. So it is with God and us, for we “have been purchased at a price” (1 Cor. 6:20). God’s down payment has been given to us in Baptism and Confirmation “because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5). 
The trick is this: we have to keep opening up our hearts to receive the weekly installment.

 

 

Whoever Eats this Bread Will Live Forever
What do we have to do to get the weekly installment? It’s hard for us to receive, but this is what Jesus asks us to do. We want to do something for it: “‘What can we do to accomplish the works of God?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent’” (John 6:28-29). 
 
This receiving isn’t something passive. Actually, receiving is rarely something passive. Receptivity opens out to receive the gift and in that reception a new relationship is formed. Besides, Jesus isn’t going to do the eating for us: we have to eat His body and blood, soul and divinity. Receiving Jesus in the Holy Eucharist is the regular payment that Jesus makes on you; the regular way that you open yourself out to Him and receive him bodily. 
 
The Challenge: opening ourselves out in trust, like Elijah, to take and eat all that Jesus gives to us; to all He is and asks of us. This opening of ourselves is described by St. Paul: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2). Similarly he tells the Ephesians “that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.”  So put away “all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling…along with all malice” (4:17, 31). Leave that life behind by being “kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ” (Eph. 4:32). 
 
See: Transformed by Food
The path along the way toward our inheritance, toward the full payment, passes through the Eucharist: as we eat His body, and drink His blood we shall be “changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another,” for we “shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (2 Cor. 3:18, 1 John 3:2). We are transformed by what we see and eat. In the ancient world both the act of seeing and eating was conceived of in terms of taking the object into one’s body (the first, spiritually, and the latter, physically). Normally we transform food into ourselves and it becomes part of us. Yet, in this case, we behold His glory and take Him into our bodies with our eyes and through our mouths, and we are changed, slowly transformed into the image and likeness of Christ—and we become part of His Body!