Sunday/Fugitive God

               Sunday/Fugitive God

The Fifth Sunday of Lent, hard to appreciate fully in this time of the Virus. But it is a crucial part of the history of Christ as He seems to waver, then recovers.

Greeks, through Philip--a Greek name--, seek Christ out. Christ weighs His familiar elements, the material and the spiritual, as He predicts His death: 

"unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,"

Then a riveting reflective moment:

“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.

A voice--or thunder--is heard from the sky and Christ seems to get His footing:

'“This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself.”
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.'


"now the ruler of this world will be driven out." Imagine.

           This bread I break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Dylan Thomas