On Sunday’s celebration of Corpus Christi, I was struck by a line in the Lauda Sion sequence recited at Mass: “Bad and good the feast are sharing.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how God seems to have a preference for imperfect people. Read a few pages of Scripture and you discover a murderer was the greatest prophet of the Old Testament (Moses), and one who was at least complicit in murder was the greatest missionary of the New Testament (Paul). King David was an adulterer but also a man after God’s own heart. Peter betrayed his best friend and his Lord but in the eyes of that same Lord, he was a Rock.
Bad and good this feast are sharing – this Eucharistic feast, this feast of life, feast of divine love that seeps in and around us. If we had to be “good” before we could come to the feast, what would be the point? It is this feast that heals the bad in all of us.
When it comes to human beings, God prefers transformation to perfection. This is what his friendship and his table are all about.
“Very bread, good shepherd, tend us,
Jesus, of your love befriend us,
You refresh us, you defend us,
Your eternal goodness send us
In the land of life to see.”
The Table by Julie Delton. Originally published on the cover of The Christian Century magazine and published here with permission. Click on the image for more of Julie's artwork (www.juliedelton.weebly.com).