5 of 5

Now, how do bread and wine draw us into a participation in the life of God in the world? Bread and wine disclose the union we have with Jesus, which, as I have said earlier, is not a mere standing but a true and real participation that is lived out in this life as we become the story of God in this world individually in all our ways and corporately as the people of God. First, we are to ingest eucharistic bread and wine. In contemplation we look on with steadfast delight in all that bread and wine disclose, pulling back the curtain to the divine embrace. In participation we first reach out and take the whole world into our hands. We lift the Alpha and Omega to our mouth. We take God's whole story into our stomach, let it run through our bloodstream, let it then energize our entire living-our relationships, our work, our pleasure-all of life is to be lived now as Jesus lived his life for us, and for our sake, dying for us, rising for us, showing us how to live in the pattern of his dying and rising. As he took into himself the suffering of all humanity, so we are to take into ourselves the suffering of the world and do something about it. As he rose above all that is evil in the world through his resurrection, so we, too, are to rise to the new life by the Spirit of God. All our death to sin and rising to life finds its true and ultimate meaning in him who lives in us, living in our sufferings, living in our struggles with evil, living in our resurrections to new life.

So bread and wine is no abstract object out there, no thing to be observed as an object of interest, no mere ritual to be taken in a perfunctory or mechanical way. No. We move from a delightful contemplation of all that bread and wine disclose to participate in God's story by letting the Jesus who comes to us by bread and wine be given anew and poured out again to the world through our individual lives and through the community of the people of God, the church.

Used by permission of Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright © 2006. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published to other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Baker Publishing Group.

The Divine Embrace is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.

first page |  5 of 5

share this page

April (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51