Salavation History, Part 2

I lied. This is actually going to be more about Christ's life than post Cross.

The life of Christ is the central event in human history. Gregorian monks rightly reckoned all of history to be judged whether it be Before Christ or Anno Domini (in the year of Our Lord). The common era stuff is for those who wish to deny Christ in history.

First of all, we must tackle the issue of God the Son becoming Man. God could have waved a magic wand and said, "Poof! It's all good!" Jesus' life, death and resurrection is the ultimate revelation of who God is and who Man is. It is the ultimate death-blow to those who would reject the physical world and those who would reject the spiritual world.

God made man in His Image. God then made Himself in man's image in the person of Jesus Christ. His desire for unity was so great that He became united to his Creation.

Jesus was never solely concerned with the spiritual, and never solely concerned with the physical. The two were always bound together. "Your sins are forgiven...Pick up your mat and walk." Jesus taught the crowds, and fed them. He turned water into wine at a wedding. That wine would have been enough to keep my wedding reception guests, all 250 of them, liquored up for a week straight. Literally.

Jesus makes some strange proclamations along the way, though. "You must pick up your cross and follow me." "Can you drink from the cup that I will drink?" "Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no life within you." He holds up bread and says, "This is my body." And likewise, the cup of wine, "This is my blood." The very next day, He is crucified. We claim, then, that this physical crucifixion has spiritual consequences. This spilling of blood of the spotless Lamb of God is the sacrifice which reconciles Man to God.

How does this sacrifice unite us to God? How are we incorporated into this shedding of blood? Those two events, the Last Supper and His death on the Cross are intimately linked. In the Jewish understanding of a day, "night came and morning followed...", these two events were at the beginning and the end of the SAME DAY. They are, in fact, the same event, mystically united. They are literally united by the Word of God. The Last Supper began with a washing. It ended with this proclamation that "This is My Body" and "This is My Blood" and he shared those with his disciples.

The blood that dropped from His side is the same blood that He gave his disciples to drink. The body that hung from the cross is the same body that He gave his disciples to eat. The Word spoke and it was (read Genesis 1 and John 1).

"Do this in memory of me."