5.3
A treasure in earthen vessels (2 Corinthians 4:7)
In the beginning, God breathed into dust and created Adam and Eve. He formed them in His image to rule over the earth and be fruitful in it (Genesis 1:26-7). God personally engaged His creation by filling insignificant dust with His life breath and impressing it with His image. Dust and divine, senseless and knowing, common and precious, perishing and eternal, God holds these opposites together in us as one, by His grace. Dust serves as a kind of foil that best highlights HIs glory and best expresses His kindness and mercy. God gave us His image in dust to forever bind His continual giving with our continual need of Him
God raises us from dust and returns us to dust. He also creates us in His divine image. How can dust reflect God? How can the worthless contain the glory of God? Holy communion explains God’s reconciling of our conflicted nature by revealing the truth of our relation to Him. Our need for God to raise us from dust and fill us with His life is so profound that only eating His flesh and drinking His blood can satisfy it. What is barbaric in any other context is God’s greatest kindness towards us, in communion. God wants us to eat and drink Him, to receive Him entirely. He made us to be empty dust without Him. We live before God as dust made alive by His life, earthen vessels perfectly fashioned to contain an eternal treasure
This is our human condition: we share with billions of humans the same 99.9% DNA, each one as common as a dust particle that is blown by the wind and disappears into space. We each also possess a unique .1% DNA that is irreplaceable, known by name, whose mother will never confuse for another, whose life God keeps, treasured beyond measure and worth dying for. God’s gift of life, however, becomes our great burden when we try to hold together our dual nature by our own strength and devices. We cannot find the inherent peace that is alone able to wholly embody our two-sided nature. When God shows us the essential rift in our being, we confess we can never reconcile or surmount it. Whether or not God makes us aware of our basic faultline, we all must contrive ways to hold together our grounding if we are to live and function
The fear of going insane motivates us to reconcile our divided nature. We find creative ways to merge both sides, interchange them and confabulate them so as to calm the tensions within and between them. These are a few common examples. The dust side is given voice to explain life’s great unknowns, even though this right belongs by nature to the divine. Mysteries such as life’s origin, purpose and value are explained by the sensible presence of our dust nature. Dust helps to ease and dilute the crushing burden of the divine in us that aspires to such values as justice, kindness and love. Our divinely derived conscience is eased by compromises and justifications formulated in dust. We use the divine to inspire motivation and meaning in dust's mundane and transient. The divine can help justify why insignificant offenses so greatly inflame our egos. We continually traverse our deep internal divide in ways that confuse more than unite. Confabulating the two sides of our nature cannot alter or reconcile them. Dust will always be dust. God’s image can never be devalued. God made us irreconcilable in our selves, and we must choose to hold ourselves together with creative delusions or go mad. But God, who gives all that we are, is able to hold us together by His grace
It is tempting to blame God for so much confusion in the human condition. Why did He make us in His image when we are incapable of living up to it? Why use dust as His medium when it tempts us to treat life as cheap and worthless because it all ends up crushed beneath our feet? How is it possible to make sense of our value when we are so ephemeral? God created us with a complete inability to make sense of our divided nature as His opportunity to hold us together. To live with the explosive tension within us without going crazy requires that God be all over us
Holy communion culminates God’s revelation of Himself in relation to us, His will to be known by us and to be one with us. His is no message of a half hearted will to be with us, a holding back until conditions are more favorable, a looking around for a better deal. God’s single offer is a complete giving over of Himself, sacrificing His whole life so that He can have us completely. The great divide of God’s holiness in relation to us reveals that the Giver must also be the given and the source of life is ultimately a sacrificed life. No holds barred. The sacrificial system God gave Israel was according to the heavenly pattern, according to God Himself. God gives not merely what He has but who He is
The revelation of holy communion is God’s way of transforming our fractured life of shame and pride - dust in God’s image - by His Spirit that reconciles in humility and trust. The dizzying vacillation between the extremes of humiliating inadequacy and puffed up self confidence is quieted and rested in the humility of God the Son and the faithfulness of God the Father who are One in God’s gracious Spirit. God’s communion transforms our divided nature into one, holding us together by His grace