Eucharistic Meditation, first advent

Eucharistic Meditation, first advent November 28, 2004

1 Corinthians 15:45: And so it is written, the first man Adam became a living being. The Last Adam became life-giving Spirit.

We are celebrating Advent, the coming of Jesus in the flesh, but we celebrate it as a people who have never known Jesus according to the flesh. Jesus is absent from us; in His personal human body, He has ascended to the right hand of His Father in heaven.

And yet, He is here with us, and He feeds Himself to us here at this table. How can He do this? How can Jesus give Himself to us as our life and food when He is in heaven and we are on earth, when He has entered the age to come and we are still in this age, when He has entered into the life of the Spirit and we are still in the flesh?

The answer is that this happens through the work of the Spirit. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, the Last Adam, Jesus, has become life-giving Spirit. This doesn?t mean that the Son is dissolved into the Spirit, but it does mean that the Son, the incarnate Son who was born of Mary, is present to us and with us through the Spirit.

The Spirit is the divine bond, the Person through which the Father and Son are united to one another, the Person by which the divine and human are united in the one Person of Jesus, and the gift by which we are united to Jesus Christ and thereby to the Father. The Spirit is also, as Calvin taught, the bond that holds together what is separated by an infinite space. The Spirit of Jesus unites us to Jesus, and through the Spirit the Father gives His Son as our food and drink.

Here at this table then we celebrate and experience the conclusion and goal of the incarnation: The Son came to give abundant life to the world. He came as the bread from heaven so that those who eat His flesh and drink His blood may have eternal life. Or, we might say, the Father sent the Son to become man through the Spirit, so that the Father could give the Son as food through the same Spirit.


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