MAKADIOSTA.COM

Would you like to react to this message? Create an account in a few clicks or log in to continue.
MAKADIOSTA.COM

MAKADIOSTA stands for 'Mga Kaparian sa Diyosesis sa Talibon' (Priests of the Diocese of Talibon). This is an internet forum for priests and their friends of the Diocese of Talibon, Bohol, PHILIPPINES. Welcome!

New forum updates are in effect. See the forum tutorial/announcements for instructions.

2 posters

    CORPUS CHRISTI SUNDAY

    solomon
    solomon


    Male
    Joined : 2008-03-02
    Age : 55
    Location : San Isidro, Pilar Bohol, Philippines
    Status : single
    Hometown : Candijay,Bohol
    Ordained : 1995-04-27

    CORPUS CHRISTI SUNDAY Empty CORPUS CHRISTI SUNDAY

    Post by solomon Sat May 24, 2008 9:45 pm

    pag inom daan ug kape aron di magduka panahon sa wali big grin:D

    25 May 2008
    CORPUS CHRISTI SUNDAY
    John 6:51-58

    - from Barclay's New Testament Commentary

    HIS BODY AND HIS BLOOD

    "The bread which I will give him is my flesh, which is given that the world may have life.' So the Jews argued with each other. `How,' they said, `can this man give us his flesh to eat?' Jesus said to them: `This is the truth I tell you--unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you cannot possess eternal life within yourselves. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. My flesh is the real food and my blood is the real drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. As the living Father has sent me, so I live through him; and he who eats me will live through me. This is the bread which came down from heaven. It is not a case of eating, as your fathers ate and died. He who eats this bread lives forever.'


    Let us see now if we can find out something of what Jesus meant and of what John understood from words like this. There are two ways in which we may take this passage.

    (i) We may take it in a quite general sense. Jesus spoke about eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

    Now the flesh of Jesus was his complete humanity. John in his First Letter lays it down almost passionately: "Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God." In fact, the spirit which denies that Jesus is come in the flesh is of antichrist (1Jn.4:2-3). John insisted that we must grasp and never let go the full humanity of Jesus, that he was bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. What does this mean? Jesus, as we have seen again and again, was the mind of God become a person. This means that in Jesus we see God taking human life human problems, battling with our human temptations, working out our human relationships.

    Therefore it is as if Jesus said: "Feed your heart, feed your mind, feed your soul on the thought of my manhood. When you are discouraged and in despair, when you are beaten to your knees and disgusted with life and living--remember I took that life of yours and these struggles of yours on me." Suddenly life and the flesh are clad with glory for they are touched with God. It was and is the great belief of the Greek Orthodox Christology that Jesus deified our flesh by taking it on himself. To eat Christ's body is to feed on the thought of his manhood until our own manhood is strengthened and cleansed and irradiated by his.

    Jesus said we must drink his blood. In Jewish thought the blood stands for the life. It is easy to understand why. As the blood flows from a wound, life ebbs away; and to the Jew, the blood belonged to God. That is why to this day a true Jew will never eat any meat which has not been completely drained of blood. "Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood" (Gen.9:4). "Only you shall not eat its blood" (Deut.15:23). Now see what Jesus is saying--"You must drink my blood--you must take my life into the very centre of your being--and that life of mine is the life which belongs to God." When Jesus said we must drink his blood he meant that we must take his life into the very core of our hearts.

    What does that mean? Think of it this way. Here in a bookcase is a book which a man has never read. It may be the glory and the wonder of the tragedies of Shakespeare; but so long as it remains unread upon his bookshelves it is external to him. One day he takes it down and reads it. He is thrilled and fascinated and moved. The story sticks to him; the great lines remain in his memory; now when he wants to, he can take that wonder out from inside himself and remember it and think about it and feed his mind and his heart upon it. Once the book was outside him. Now it is inside him and he can feed upon it. It is that way with any great experience in life. It remains external until we take it within ourselves.

    It is so with Jesus. So long as he remains a figure in a book he is external to us; but when he enters into our hearts we can feed upon the life and the strength and the dynamic vitality that he gives to us. Jesus said that we must drink his blood. He is saying: "You must stop thinking of me as a subject for theological debate; you must take me into you, and you must come into me; and then you will have real life." That is what Jesus meant when he spoke about us abiding in him and himself abiding in us.

    When he told us to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he was telling us to feed our hearts and souls and minds on his humanity, and to revitalize our lives with his life until we are rifled with the life of God.

    (ii) But John meant more than that, and was thinking also of the Lord's Supper. He was saying: "If you want life, you must come and sit at that table where you eat that broken bread and drink that poured-out wine which somehow, in the grace of God, bring you into contact with the love and the life of Jesus Christ." But--and here is the sheer wonder of his point of view--John has no account of the Last Supper. He brings in his teaching about it, not in the narrative of the Upper Room, but in the story of a picnic meal on a hillside near Bethsaida Julias by the blue waters of the Sea of Galilee.

    There is no doubt that John is saying that for the true Christian every meal has become a sacrament. It may well be that there were those who--if the phrase be allowed--were making too much of the Sacrament within the church, making a magic of it, implying that it was the only place where we might enter into the nearer presence of the Risen Christ. It is true that the Sacrament is a special appointment with God; but John held with all his heart that every meal in the humblest home, in the richest palace, beneath the canopy of the sky with only the grass for carpet was a sacrament. He refused to limit the presence of Christ to an ecclesiastical environment and a correctly liturgical service. He said: "At any meal you can find again that bread which speaks of the manhood of the Master, that wine which speaks of the blood which is life."

    In John's thought the communion table and the dinner table and the picnic on the seashore or the hillside are all alike in that at all of them we may taste and touch and handle the bread and the wine which brings us Christ. Christianity would be a poor thing if Christ were confined to churches. It is John's belief that we can find him anywhere in a Christ-filled world. It is not that he belittles the Sacrament; but he expands it, so that we find Christ at his table in church, and then go out to find him everywhere where men and women meet together to enjoy the gifts of God.
    mags
    mags


    Female
    Joined : 2008-03-02
    Age : 84
    Location : North Pole

    CORPUS CHRISTI SUNDAY Empty Re: CORPUS CHRISTI SUNDAY

    Post by mags Sat May 24, 2008 10:27 pm

    salamat kay wa kalimot. big grin big grin

      Current date/time is Fri Mar 29, 2024 4:06 pm