3rd June Trinity 2018, Providence

3rd June Trinity
June 10, 2018
John 6: 53 – 69

Jesus answered, ‘Yes I tell you, if you do not eat the earthly body of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my body and drinks my blood has life beyond the cycles of time, and I give him the power of resurrection at the end of time. For my flesh is the true sustenance, and my blood is the true draught. Whoever truly eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. As the life-bearing Father sent me, and as I bear the life of the world by the will of the Father, so also he who makes me his sustenance will have life within him through me. This is the bread which descends from heaven. It will no longer be as it was with the fathers who ate of it and died. Whoever eats this bread will live through the whole cycle of time.’ He said this in his teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Many of his disciples who heard this said, ‘These are hard and difficult words; who can bear to hear them?’ Jesus was aware that his disciples could not come to terms with this and he said to them, ‘Do you take offence at this? What will you say when you see the Son of Man ascending again to where he was before? It is the Spirit that gives life; the physical by itself is of no avail. The words that I spoke to you are spirit and are life. But there are some among you who have no faith.’ For Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray him. And he went on: ‘This is why I said to you: No one can find the way to me unless it is given him by the Father’.

3rd June Trinity
June 10, 2018
John 6: 53 – 69

The story of the creation of the world makes evident that the Creator provides. Step by step and with foresight, the world was created until everything was in place to receive and nourish His final creation: the human being.

We count on this providence, this foresight of God, even today. We know that we must plant in order to harvest, for that is how God made the world; that we must care for the animals in order to have the food and other things they produce and to maintain the balance God created in nature.

In today’s reading, Christ talks about another level of providence. He is speaking

Arild Rosenkrantz

ahead of time about nourishing and sustaining, not physical bodies, but human spirits. At His Last Supper, He gave of Himself as food for our spirits. He poured His soul, His love, His life into bread and wine. He turned bread and wine into His body and blood. And he gave to his disciples, and to all who will come to Him and learn from Him in future ages, the power to do the same, to concentrate his essence, his life and love into bread and wine. His body as bread heals our ills; his blood as wine gives us the strength to clean up our messes, and to deal with what is coming in the future. In His providence, he created something that makes it possible for our spirits to be healed, nourished and strengthened even today.

Out of our mindful remembrance of His deed and through our hearts’ connection with Him, His healing essence is concentrated in bread and wine, even today.  For as a poet said:

….The Four Kingdoms of Earth
Prepare the Way-Bread for healing.
Let us now harvest and press,
Let us grind and bake
And consecrate everything that needs it.

Then Man the Consecrated approaches the Grave-Table,
And with him the folk and the circle
Experience creating the Open Secret
That He gives to them time upon time. *

* Sebastian Lorenz, „Menschen-Weihe“ in Die Christengemeinschaft 10_06, pg 507. Translated by C. Hindes.