The Church is the exercise of the generosity of God: it feeds people the whole message of God, intercedes for them, puts the words of
God into their mouth and teach them to intercede for themselves. The powerful consume the poor. The Church has to gather, feed and protect the poor, and to pass on to the powerful the news that they are accumulating a cup of wrath.
1. The Church is the exercise of the generosity of God: it feeds people the whole message of God, intercedes for them, puts the words of God into their mouth and teach them to intercede for themselves.
2. The powerful consume the poor. The Church has to gather, feed and protect the poor, and to pass on to the powerful the news that they are accumulating a cup of wrath.
3. The (pagan) world eats indiscriminately from every table, enjoys the hospitality of the powers, shares the cup of idols. We are fed impoverishing self-images and we feed them to others.
4. The (pagan) world is presented with a faultless exemplar (offering), the illustration of what we are to be, and indicates that we are acceptable to the degree that we conform to and participate in this figure of perfection.
5. This display of this flawless good life creates a dependence in us. As we internalise the figures set before us, we are consumed by those who set them up before us.
6. The modern Church does not feed the poor, or give them the name of the Lord who feeds and protects. It fails to reject any (pagan) teaching as inedible and has made itself ill. It has not waited and fasted for the poor; it has feasted too early.
7. The modern Church does not confess the mind of Christ, its mind is no longer clear, it does not know what is happening to it; it cannot tell itself apart from the world, so has nothing to tell the world.
8. We have eaten and internalised food unpaid for, made by workers unnamed and unacknowledged. Modernity is ill as a result of the cup that it first doled out and which it is now drinking must down itself.
9. God has seized us and will not let go of us: he has made us drink down what we have poured out to others.
10. The cup is the bitterness of our own defeat by God. For the Church it is the functioning immune system which identifies invaders and fights them off.
11. We are the sacrifice and harvest of Christ. He makes us holy and then presents us to the Father for his approval. We will be that loaf that presently Christ is alone.
12. The Spirit delivers and installs in us the faculties and abilities of the Son. He supplies reality to us in doses, so we receive in instalments the world within which, in the Son, we can develop the character and practice the action of the Son.
13. The food God feeds us causes us to call on him to feed us more: it gives us an appetite, and takes away our appetite for any other bread
14. It is for the Church to say what the actual ontology of the world is. It may say that the world is a matter of taking and being taken, that human beings use one another up.
15. The Church confesses the people of this people consume one another and are consumed, and that the world is made up of bundles of (pagan) sacraments. The conceptuality of sacrament is a sophisticated anthropology, ontology and epistemology.
16. Jesus is for us by his fourfold action of taking, giving thanks, breaking and passing on. He draws us into this action, so what is his is ours.
17. Discussion of the eucharist in terms of the presence or location of Jesus misses the point. It is our presence, not that of Jesus, that is in question. We are being brought into being by this feeding.