A Twilight Musing

Every observance of the Eucharist is a recapitulation of the Incarnation.  That is, it reaffirms the wonder of God’s infusion of physical things with spiritual purposes.  The original manifestation of this divine work was, of course, the creation of the universe (see Gen. chapter 1).  God reached out from His absolute, non-contingent Being to bring the material world into existence.  In doing so, He proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with an undifferentiated mass, “without form and void,” over which the Spirit of God hovered.  He then proceeded to give every segment of His creation its own identity and spiritually determined function, distinguishing each stage from what went before by a process of separation.  He began by separating “the light from the darkness” and “the waters from the waters.” The next few days, He brought dry land out of the waters and generated vegetation “according to their own kinds.”  The sun and moon and stars were to “separate the day from the night.”  Animal life, like plant life, was each “according to their kinds.”    This perfect merger of the physical and the spiritual was culminated in humankind, who, though made of “dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7) received the “breath of life” (i.e., the Spirit) from God.  Humans (the First Adam) were made distinct from all other creatures by being created in the image of God and being given authority over and responsibility for all the rest of creation (Gen 1:26-27).

But the First Adam fell from the perfectly blended state in which he was created and was plunged into a creature of disordered material that had to be reinfused with God’s Spirit in order to live.  God then implemented a long, tortuous process of what might be called “re-creation.” Once again God proceeded from the general state of chaos brought about by sin to bring fallen humankind a renewed awareness of what they had known intuitively in the Garden of Eden, which was the perfect merger between physical and spiritual realities.  In order for that Eden to be restored, God’s process would establish the necessity of physical redemptive sacrifice (going through a death to achieve renewed life), with the ultimate sacrifice being made by the Second Adam, the very Son of God, through Whose death all of God’s original purposes for the world would be realized.

Thus it is appropriate, as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, to contemplate how God over the ages worked a second time to extend an emanation of His absolute, non-contingent Self into the material world in order finally to present the New Adam, God Himself residing in physical human form.  In doing so, He once again proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with the chaos of fallen humanity and revealing more and more of His remedial commands, from the discipling of the Patriarchs, to the Mosaic Law, to the painful process of refining His people in the fires of captivity, and culminating in the merger of heaven and earth in the person of Jesus Christ.  Our ingesting symbolically the substance of our perfect Lord Jesus reaffirms that with Him we stand restored to that perfect balance of material and Spirit that God originally intended for the capstone of His creation.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.