Communion

The Negative Way

“Do you not say, “There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest? Behold,

 I say to you, lift- up your eyes and look on the fields; they are white for harvest.”  

                                                                                                                  - John: 4:35

       The mystery of the last supper continues to shimmer in our Christian

        consciousness producing states of both adoration and heightened 

        awareness concerning the cryptic words spoken by Jesus to his friends

        seated with him at this fateful Passover meal.

        At this last supper, Jesus offered wheat kneaded into bread, and grapes

        pressed into wine to everyone who was seated at his table without 

        exception: tax collectors, fishermen, and possibly women. He told them

        to take and eat what had been harvested from the whited fields.  

        I suspect that his friends seated with him at his table understood his words

        more clearly than we do today, because they spoke the same language

        as Jesus, whereas we Christians must attempt to understand his words

        as translated through the morphology of contemporary languages. 

        He asked the tax collectors, the fishermen, and women seated with him:

        ‘to do this’ in memory of him as he shared the bread and wine. He invited his          

        Followers, as well as us, to become the bread of life and energizing wine of his 

        spiritual truth for the spiritually hungry who wait in fields for the harvest.   

        We should listen with care to the words of Holy Wisdom when she says

        that she burns her light in the darkness of our lives so we might see and  

        begin to look with compassion on the spiritually hungry of our generation 

        and recognize that the fields of our day are also white for the harvest.