Eucharistic meditation, Third Sunday of Lent

Eucharistic meditation, Third Sunday of Lent March 11, 2007

Genesis 2:21: So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place.

We saw in the sermon this morning that every marriage involves a break with the past. A man leaves his father and mother, the home of his youth, and cleaves to his wife, forming a new home and a new family. Every family is made by this process of division and union.

That pattern is already at work in the creation of Eve.


Adam was created alone, a single man, and he found that none of the creatures of the ground were suitable for him as a helper. He had to have a companion that was not taken from the ground, but was taken from himself. And so God put Adam into deep sleep, took a rib from his side, and built a woman from the rib. Once she was created, she was taken to Adam, and Adam and Eve became one flesh. Union, division, reunion – this is the process of the creation of Eve as well as the creation of a new family.

And this is in fact the process of creation as such. Much of what God did in the creation week, particularly in the first several days, was a process of division and reunion. He created light, separated light and darkness, and then reunited them in a sequence of night and day. He created a world flooded with water, but then divided between the waters above and below, and inserted the firmament in between. On the third day, he divided the waters below so that dry land appeared. One sign that man is a microcosm is the fact that his creation follows the same sequence as the creation of the whole cosmos.

This is also the pattern of our redemption. Jesus is divided on the cross, pierced like Adam in the side, so that He might bring forth a unified people, united to Him in faith, water, and blood.

At this table, we reenact all of this. The bread is broken, torn apart, distributed, yet through this torn bread, we are united, for we who eat of this one loaf are one body. This table offers the clue to all creativity, all human existence, all creation.

This table points us to the death and resurrection of Jesus as the source of abundant living in God’s creation. We can be renewed, we can be recreated, only through division and reunion, only through this Eucharistic process of division and reunion, the Eucharistic rite of creation.


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