Tag Archives: Eucharist

Can These Bones Live?

Posted on by
Reply
From left to right: three figures represent Ezekiel being set down by God`s hand among the Dry Bones, hearing God and witnessing the beginning of the resurrection. Over a split mountain, littered with destroyed buildings and body parts, are two additional hands of God.
(Dura Europas Synagogue fresco in the National Museum of Syria, Damascus)

“Son of man, can these bones live?” (Ezekiel 37)

Ezekiel heard the dry bones rattle, saw them come together to form skeletons, saw the sinews and tendons grow and stretch. He saw the flesh that spread to cover them. And then he prophesied to the wind and called it to come, to fill the lungs of the dead. He saw the dead raised, the People of God restored, reconstituted, made whole. More than simple resuscitation—which only delayed death—he saw the dead resurrected. If they were resurrected, never to die again, that meant that Death itself was dead.

St. Ambrose of Milan—and most contemporary Biblical scholars as well, but my money is always with St. Ambrose—understood Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones (which occurred around 600 BC, just after the People of Israel had been taken to Babylon in exile) to mean two things: one, that Israel would be restored to their homeland. All the people who felt lost, hopeless would be revived and brought home, to where they belonged. It was a promise to the People as a whole, that although they were as good as dead in Babylon, God would eventually –on his own timetable—bring them home and give them life again in the Promised Land.

Secondly, the resurrection of the dry bones, says St. Ambrose, is also about the Resurrection of us all—each and every one of us—that will occur at the End of Days. (Many Jewish teachers had also come to understand the dry bones in this way, about 100 years before Christ.) Israel restored and the human race raised. Not resuscitated. Resurrected.

And we do not have to wait for the End of Days to experience resurrection and come home. Because Death is already dead and is already losing its power. The dead are being raised every day. “But Death is not dead yet and the dead are not being raised every day,” reasonable people pointed out to St. Ambrose. But death is dead. Just as a farmer catches a chicken and cuts off its head, only to have the corpse get up and run around the farmyard, spouting blood and making a mess and scaring the kids before it finally collapses, Christ cut the head off Death when he who is Life itself died. Death—like that chicken—can still run around and make a mess and scare people but it is already dead and it will finally collapse altogether—just like that already dead chicken—when Christ comes again in glory.

How do we experience Resurrection in advance? The dead are raised and come home every time someone is baptized. The dead are raised and come home every time we approach the altar to receive the Body of Christ—bread as dead and dry as those bones Ezekiel saw but which becomes the living and life-giving Body of Christ. The dead are raised and come home every time we actively disconnect from the things and behaviors which we use to hide from God and ourselves and our neighbors, the things and behaviors that tie us down to the fallen aspect of the world.

To live in Babylon is to live in the cemetery which is the fallen world and Jesus famously healed the possessed and destitute who lived in the cemeteries. But using Ezekiel’s voice, God promises Israel that he would deliver them from Babylon and bring them into the Promised Land; in Psalm 116, we sing, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.” We understand the land of the living is the Promised Land. The living. Those raised from the dead. In a famous Byzantine church mosaic, we see Christ Himself identified as “the land of the living.” Because the land of the living is Christ himself, we see the land of the living anywhere Christ is—Heaven. The Church.

Angels and Deacons

Posted on by
Reply
On the left, we see angels-deacons in the Apocalypse blowing trumpets and emptying thuribles of coals and incense before the heavenly altar as St. john watches (illumination from the Bamberg Apocalypse). On the right, we see smoking thuribles in the hands of deacons during the celebration of the Eucharist on earth.

Then I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals?” (Apocalypse 5:2)

We encounter many figures in the Apocalypse who are mysterious at best and confusing at worst or commonly misunderstood. Angels might seem to be one of the more easily understood figures of the Apocalypse but we should not jump to such conclusions so quickly.

When reading early Christian texts like the Apocalypse, it is a rule of thumb that the animals and monsters we meet are there to stand in for people that the original readers might recognize–for instance, Roman emperors like Nero. Human figures are to be understood as angelic beings–like the “young men in white” who announce that Christ is risen to the women who meet them at Christ’s tomb. But figures who are introduced as angels–who are they?

The angels in the Apocalypse are understood to be the deacons who serve at the eternal celebration of the Eucharist before the Throne of God, just as earthly deacons at the celebrations of the Eucharist were commonly understood to be angels, the “messengers” who announce the Gospel and the prayer intentions of the community and who make other liturgical announcements (such as “Let us bend our knees” or “Arise! Stand upright!” or “Bow your heads unto the Lord”) and who swing the censers-thuribles of smoking frankincense. The angels in the Apocalypse make similar announcements, such as calling forth the one worthy to open the scroll, and offering the incense that fills the air around the heavenly altar and the Throne of God. The angels-deacons of the Apocalypse tell the visionary author what to write and when to stand up or step forward.

The angel-deacons in the Apocalypse are also wearing vestments similar to those that earthly deacons wear during the celebration of the Eucharist: splendid tunics and sashes/stoles. (The stoles that earthly deacons wear are sometimes compared by early Christian liturgical commentaries with the wings of the angels, especially when the stoles are tied to one side to make the distribution of Holy Communion easier.)

Burning incense is one of the most important things angels-deacons do. The smell of incense is more than aroma therapy; it is profoundly theological.  The sense of smell is an affirmation that we have bodies.  Christ in his Incarnation came to save our entire being – body, soul, mind, and spirit, not just our intellects.  The classical approach to Christian worship provides an embodied approach to worship.

Angelic figures in the Apocalypse are also sometimes compared to the eunuchs who function as imperial officials that keep the imperial system running. When the Apocalypse was written, eunuchs and angels were both thought to be asexual, beardless adults who served the imperial-heavenly court in a variety of ways–messengers, announcers, stenographers, record-keepers. Typically, eunuchs could not be ordained deacons but they could become monks.

Deacons! Angels! They coordinate the actions of the Eucharist on earth and in heaven, standing before the Throne and altar. They tell us what to do and when to do it. They burn the fragrant incense that nourishes the righteous and drives the devils away. They assist with the distribution of Holy Communion that also nourishes the faithful. They are one of the ways we unite what happens on earth with what happens eternally.

Blessed is the one who reads

Posted on by
2
St. John receives the heavenly message from an angel and then dictates it to his disciple-secretary so that others can read it —or hear it read aloud—and experience what he has seen.

“Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.” (Apocalypse 1:3)

St. John tells us that whoever reads the words of the Apocalypse is “blessed.” This is the first of seven times a person or a group is pronounced “blessed” in the Apocalypse. These seven beatitudes (Rev. 1:3, 14:13, 16:15, 19:9, 20:6, 22:7, 14) are similar to the Beatitudes announced in the gospels during the Sermon on the Mount.

The term rendered as “blessed” in English is a Greek word that can mean both “happy” and “blessed by God;” it has become common to find English translations of the gospels that render the Beatitudes as “Happy are those who mourn… Happy are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness… Happy are the merciful… Happy are the poor in spirit….” This translation is true on one level: those who live in such a way do find happiness but that idea of “happiness” is probably better thought of as “joy.” “Happy” can sound flip and lighthearted, a fleeting emotion that has no roots or stability. To be “blessed by God” certainly contains the idea of joy but also has an austere edge to it: this way of life is difficult but worthwhile and demands self-sacrifice from those who practice it.

Church Slavonic also uses the word “blessed” as a way to describe those the world deems “foolish, crazy, or insane.” The fools-for-Christ (ex. 1 Cor. 4:10) are called “blessed.” The merciful, the poor in spirit, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are all crazy. Foolish. Insane. Because living like that will always arouse the animosity of “the world,” the fallen order that opposes God.

In the beginning of the Apocalypse, the “blessed” are those who read aloud the words that St. John has written. Reading aloud is a liturgical act. The text that St. John sends to the churches is to be read aloud during the celebration of the Eucharist just as the letters of the Apostle Paul were read aloud during the celebration of the Eucharist. This introduction of the Apocalypse establishes the liturgical context of the whole book. This “reading aloud”–just as the phrase, “I was in the spirit on the Lord’s Day,” i.e. was attending the celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday–make clear that the Apocalypse is best understood as a pastoral letter and a commentary on the Eucharist itself.

The epistle to the Hebrews is the other “liturgical commentary” in the New Testament; it is interesting to note that the two texts that were most problematic in the establishment of the New Testament canon–the epistle to the Hebrews and the Apocalypse–are the two commentaries on the liturgical practice of the early Church.