Tuesday, June 17, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Eucharist
Every time you break this bread and take this cup …
This cup is a new covenant. The promises (covenants) I make with others are one thing. As a conditional being, cordoned off from all others by my specific physicality, I can promise nothing unconditionally. Besides that, my mind is changeable and my emotions can become overwrought. Intentions pave a road with unpredictable turns and occasional very large pot holes only visible once you’re in them.
The covenant God makes with me is something else altogether. Jesus’ humanity does not cut him off from us, in fact the opposite. We can know him as a brother while relying on him as a Savior. His various wisdoms are not limited by a single life’s experience, or by love that is here one day and gone the next.
I am grateful for God’s generosity, because he provides me daily eucharistic reminders of his promises – to forgive my sins, to never leave me, to light darkness with his words, to speak truth without prejudice … the list goes on and on.
Each time I eat this bread and drink from this cup.
Jesus never sets the bar too low. Expectations he has for his followers, his disciples, those of us … range from giving away something as simple as an overcoat to something as difficult as giving up our lives for our friends.
I say to you, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
He doesn’t say so, but I think Jesus allows me to swallow hard and shut my mouth a minute before this “love” becomes words and actions. Then after I’ve had a short “editing” moment, my only job is to love this one like Jesus loves me. This person’s actions are no more a betrayal of God’s trust than are mine. Jesus does not look away when he speaks, but he looks straight into my eyes. No excuses.
Be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.
I never want to lose track of the memories I have of Dad’s willingness to take occasional financial losses rather than crucify a deceitful neighbor on his own cross. Even then I didn’t know the details, because Dad didn’t really talk about it. I just knew he decided not to pursue reasonable justice and instead let it go. I am sure he knew these verses from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and that they mattered to him. That his decisions were measured by these words and not the words of his friends or even family.
If you love those who love you … if you greet your brothers only …
No there is much more here to do than that.
Because the rain falls on the just and on the unjust, the bad and the good.
I never noticed that Dad felt better or especially righteous about his action, what I would call his sacrifice. Dad’s more likely response would have been sadness and pain, thinking of the other person’s sense of guilt or even shame as he began to realize that this man was not going to call him out, or sue him, or in some other way fuel the fire of hatred rather than the flames of love.
Just two days after Fathers’ Day I feel bowled over by this memory, and how it must have allowed all of us kids to grow up a little faster and a lot straighter, learning by example how to refuse the easy ways of retribution in favor of forgiveness, whether or not the one forgiven even admits to us that he’s done wrong. In the end it’s a simple fact that brightens everything.
The sun rises on the bad and the good, on the just and the unjust.
Therefore … love one another as I have loved you.
 (2 Corinthians 8, Psalm 146, John 13, Matthew 5)
(posted at davesandel.net)
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