Remember the way the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you, to test you, and to know your heart: whether you would keep his commandments or not.
FEAST OF CORPUS CHRISTI
DEUTERONOMY 8:2-3 and 14-16
Moses spoke to the people and said:
– Remember the way the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you, to test you, and to know your heart: whether you would keep his commandments or not.
He humbled you by letting you hunger and then fed you with manna, which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Beware lest you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions, and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know.
The entire epic of Israel’s exodus toward the promised land is a rich symbol of human life. Human life is a wilderness. It is abandonment, absence of God, thirst, hunger, danger.
This is the first content of Revelation, and the first temptation. Life is not a pleasant situation that we would like to make permanent: it is an unpleasant situation, but temporary, toward something that can be better.
And here God enters. With Him, the wilderness remains a wilderness, life remains the same: God does not solve our problems, faith does not give us certainty, prayer does not get us what we ask for… Life remains a wilderness.
God is “bread and water” to walk through the wilderness. This is the second content of Revelation. This is the God we must accept, not the one who gives certainties and solves problems. Nor the Judge who waits at the end to punish transgressions. From the beginning, the purest and deepest revelation of the God of Israel is this: bread and water to walk through the wilderness.
1 CORINTHIANS 10:16-17
The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.
Jesus the traveler: the body and blood are humanity. The Spirit of God is fully in that man. In Him we see what the bread and water that is God is like, and we see how He walks, strengthened by that bread and that water. No problem is solved for Him, no difficulty is spared: His desperate prayer in Gethsemane is not answered.
But, filled with the Spirit He has received from the Father, He walks through that wilderness and is liberated and liberating.
We commune with Him. Communion with His Body and with His Blood, with His human condition filled with the Spirit. And total Communion: of God and men united in the same enterprise: humanity walking toward the homeland. That is the feast of the Eucharist, the celebration of the Unity of God and men, realized and shown in the man Jesus filled with the Spirit, which we share.
José Enrique Galarreta, S.J.