A Twilight Musing

We are often made to feel that we lack real contact with God because Christ, the only abridge between God and man, no longer walks the earth.  We envy His disciples who heard His words and knew Him personally.  We may think, “Nearly two thousand years separate us from the man who was supposed to be God’s Son.”  We may even cry, “How can we truly see him as a mediator, one who knows our ills and to whom we can speak?”   

But we must in justice note that not all who saw Him and walked with Him truly felt His presence.  Most of the Jews, missing His spiritual meaning, were disgusted at His suggestion that they would find His flesh food indeed, and most of the multitudes were more concerned with filling their bellies than strengthening their souls.  Those who were most benefited by being with Him were often puzzled rather than uplifted by His physical actions.  His power lay in that part of Him which is not bounded by space and time, and that manifestation of Jesus is as much with us now as it was with the disciples of the first century. 

Thus, when we partake together of the bread and the wine of the Lord’s Supper, we are recognizing by a physical action the spiritual truth that Christ is accessible to people of all times, and that we benefit from His having taken the form of a man just as surely and effectively as did those who saw Him in the flesh.  We must remember that, just as they had to see past His physical lowliness to the Truth He represented, we must see beyond the commonness of bread and wine to the timeless Christ Who has supped, and still sups, with all His brothers and sisters.

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.