5. The Eucharist and Eternal Life (2)   (Modified in Feb. 2020)

Referring to Genesis as we did in the previous issue, I would like to continue my discussion focusing on the human creation and the mystery of Incarnation and then on the Eucharist and the mystery of priesthood connecting the description of Genesis and that of the New Testament so that we can grasp the course of God’s plan and make it clear that the Eucharist is eternal life.

Jesus’ words and deeds in the Gospel show that God has a mind. Therefore, we can say that the breath of life which God breathed into the nostrils of the man for the first time was the free mind. It is not a creature because it was from God and of God. We can understand that each persona of God, who calls Himself “we” (cf. Genesis 1:26, 3:22, 11:7, Isaiah 6:8), shares knowledge within the Trinity. Moreover, while they are as if neighbours one another, they are perfectly united with each other spontaneously, and God calls this united self also “I”. God is the only God who exists as the Trinity based on this spontaneity (cf. Deuteronomy 6:4), and each persona of God needs not to know the decisions made by the minds of each other because they are perfectly united with each other of their own accord. Therefore, God has also no need to know the decisions made by human free minds, which come from God’s mind. In this way, God seems from the human point of view as if He partially gave up His omnipotence in the creation of human beings. Thus, God planned to make man generate his self out of his free mind so that he may communicate with Him expressing his “I” like God.

One’s mind generates his/her self through knowledge, and the self reveals the “I” by being supposed and determined through his/her neighbours. God intended to give knowledge to humans so that their free minds may generate their selves, because, as I discussed in the last issue, unless their free minds generate their selves, the minds of the three persons, namely, the Holy Spirit, the man and the neighbour, will never fully wish the state in which these three persons are united as one body like God, and as a result, it will never be realized. Therefore, God tried to give knowledge to the first man as food so that he, whose self was not yet generated, might take it naturally.

God planted a garden in Eden in the east and put the man there and made the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil glow in the middle of the garden. He made every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food glow out of the ground so that the man may be led to the centre of the garden naturally. (cf. Genesis 2:8-9) His free mind, which God breathed into him, was supposed to be drawn to the fruit of the tree of life, which could make him become one who lives forever, as God’s mind is. (cf. Genesis 3:22) Nevertheless, the man was not drawn to the fruit of the tree of life.

In the end, God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden.” (Genesis 2:16) Then He cautioned, “[B]ut of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Genesis 2:17) We cannot say that God did not intend to give humans the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil based on this caution, because people have eventually eaten it, and there is no reason ever for God to glow a tree from which people are forbidden to eat. The problem is that the man did not take and eat the fruit of the tree of life despite God’s appeal. God eventually decided to divide the man into two expecting them to become drawn to the fruits of the tree of life and to take and eat them with two free minds thanks to the synergistic effect.

The Bible reads, “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.” (Genesis 3:7) after they ate the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We can confer that both two were still under the age of the secondary sexual characteristic at that time because the man and the woman made themselves aprons covering only their loins to hide their bodily differences. Adam and Eve were children. If so, we will be able to understand God’s effort to let them eat knowledge and the reason that God “made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21) when He drove them out from the Garden of Eden, that is, He could not bear to let such young and poor ones go naked. Then He decided to make child Adam continue the task of tilling the ground, which he had learned in the garden instructed by God, also outside the garden. (cf. Genesis 3;23)

The creation of human beings in Genesis has three steps. In the first step, God formed the man (Adam) out of the dust of the ground (adamah). Then He made a woman out of the rib which He had taken from the man and made the rest of the man a man, closing up the place from which He had taken the rib with flesh. (cf. Genesis 2:21) Finally, the one flesh which was born of these two persons becomes the first one who is the fulfilment of the word, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis1:28), as Genesis reads, “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24) The word of God, “Be fruitful and multiply,” means that God has bestowed the reproductive function upon living things. (cf. Genesis 1:22) It was after Adam and Eve have sexually matured following their deportation from the Garden of Eden that the human reproductive function was used for the first time, and that the person of one flesh was created. The first person who was born here was a man, and he did a deed which God called “sin” for the first time. (cf. Genesis 4:7)

God created the body of the Son, who was the helper of the Father (cf. The Estuary of Theology issue 4) as the second person, out of a woman with the intervention of the Holy Spirit. The reason why Jesus’ body was created without the cooperation of a man was because Jesus, though he had to be born as a boy according to the prophecy, was to inherit motherhood from his mother and to give his body to “my church” (Matthew 16:18) shedding blood and water and enveloping it like a womb after his death on the cross. The fact that Jesus’ body put in the tomb has vanished tells us this is true. He, on the cross, connected his mother and the Apostle by adoption and gave the Apostles, who were men to become the helpers of the Holy Spirit, motherhood because they were to create the Eucharist with the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Jesus, who had given his body to the Church, on the other hand, descended to the Hell as God and went to the free minds of those who died in the past and drew all of them and took them to the pasture of the Lord.

The Word, the knowledge of God left on the earth, becomes the living Word with the will of the Holy Spirit who descended to the earth. Jesus shared the institution of the Eucharist with the Apostles at the last supper in order for the living word, as Jesus’ spirit, to live among people with a body so that God’s presence, which people had experienced thanks to the mystery of the Incarnation, might be maintained among them until the Second Coming, and that God might freely continue his formation and the act of redemption. When a Christian eats the Eucharist, it dies. Then, God’s presence getting out of the Eucharist will go to dead people’s free minds which are wandering around the earth and tasting the purgatory-like sufferings and will take each of them back to the pasture of the Lord. Free minds, which were originally the breath of life breathed by God, know the knowledge of God, the good shepherd. In this way, Christians who receive the Eucharist in this world and the dead who are waiting for the Second Coming in the pasture of the Lord will become one flock being led by one shepherd.

“I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, as the Father knows me and I know the Father. I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd.” (John 10:14-16)

To be continued.

Nov. 2019 in Hiroshima

Maria K