Friday, July 7
A Thought
The astonishing and translucent, even economical, rightness of our Christian theology, and the God it seeks to describe, never ceases to amaze me. It's possible to get bogged down in the frustrating struggle of the day-to-day, or to feel sour and dour at the moral failings of our fellow-man, but then the piercing lucidity and beauty of the inner life of God overcomes this like a great blast of sunlight.
This popped into my head today while sitting on the couch, paging through a book of early Flemish painters, and coming across a little fairy-tale image of the Presentation in the Temple, a little round-headed baby Christ sitting on the altar clasped in Simeon's hands, Christ's little body foreshadowing itself in the Body of Christ, the Eucharist. Christ was presented to His Father in the Temple, as was the custom (God submitted Himself to custom as well as the whip), and thus the only fitting offering to God was God Himself. God knows nothing we do will ever approach what is rightly His, and so He takes pity on us, takes up our meager little scrapings of bread and wine, and transforms them into Himself. The only fitting sacrifice, the only fitting gift, the only true propitiation, to give to God is the only fitting thing there is at all--God Himself.
This popped into my head today while sitting on the couch, paging through a book of early Flemish painters, and coming across a little fairy-tale image of the Presentation in the Temple, a little round-headed baby Christ sitting on the altar clasped in Simeon's hands, Christ's little body foreshadowing itself in the Body of Christ, the Eucharist. Christ was presented to His Father in the Temple, as was the custom (God submitted Himself to custom as well as the whip), and thus the only fitting offering to God was God Himself. God knows nothing we do will ever approach what is rightly His, and so He takes pity on us, takes up our meager little scrapings of bread and wine, and transforms them into Himself. The only fitting sacrifice, the only fitting gift, the only true propitiation, to give to God is the only fitting thing there is at all--God Himself.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
