Kitchen Chat and more…
Please feel free to join The Rudolf Steiner Bible Study, Thursdays, 6:30 CDT. This is a hybrid meeting held in-person and on Zoom. They will begin with The Three Years, by E.Bock. E. Bock. Click here for more information!
Healing the Blind Beggar (Lk.18:35-43)
When you think in terms of numbers, of visible and tangible results, you soon come to the conclusion that Jesus Christ did not accomplish much during His life on earth. For what do a mere twelve disciples add up to in a population of many thousands? And what is the importance of healing one blind man compared with the countless blind people who never had any help? In that way, the Gospel is full of riddles and things that don’t seem to make sense and that we can’t comprehend with our everyday intellect—things even that evoke ridicule and irritation in many of our contemporaries. Why just this one blind man? Was it only because he kept calling and praying, even when the bystanders wanted him to be quiet?
As long as we are only looking at outer reality we are facing riddles. But blindness is not only a disorder of the eyes, but also of the heart. And that disorder afflicts us all. The healing of the blind man shows us what we are all lacking, and what we can do to be healed.
Most people are living in the illusion that they can see. But our judgments, prejudices, our sympathies and antipathies make us blind for the reality in which we live. We are really confronted with that when we get into a conflict. Usually we think in such circumstances: I am right—the other is wrong. And if both parties stick to their positions it becomes an unbridgeable impasse. And when obdurate standpoints collide and bring about lifelong separations, the drama turns into a mystery drama that takes not years, but several lives before we are healed of our blindness.
The first step in this drama is the realization that we can at most see a little glimpse of reality. The blind man sitting by the roadside calls out to us: “Become aware of your blindness, become a beggar for the spirit, pray to the Savior as long as it takes for Him to take pity on you and open your eyes to the mysteries of destiny and fate, of guilt and forgiveness.
-Rev. Bastiaan Baan, August 21, 2022
Feeding the Five Thousand (Lk.9:12-17)
Three times during His life on earth Christ shares a meal with people around Him—at the feeding of the five thousand of the four thousand, and of the twelve. All three times He does the same: He takes the bread, He looks up to Heaven, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to the people. It is the same gesture we recognize when the bread is consecrated at the altar. In these acts He bestows imperishable life forces on the bread; it becomes “medicine of immortality.” That is what this meal was called in earliest Christianity, pharmakon athanasias. A meal that goes with us on the path of life, beyond death, into deathless life.
In the Act of Consecration of Man an expression is used for this which has fallen into disuse: “the bread for the way.” The German word used here, Wegzehrung, literally means “food for on the way.”
At the feeding of the five thousand, when this blessed bread is distributed, the evangelist adds: “And all ate and were satisfied…” We can’t say the same of our everyday bread. We have hardly eaten and are feeling hungry again.
But when we receive the meal of bread and wine at the altar something else happens. In that moment what is expressed as a promise in the Act of Consecration of Man becomes reality: “Christ in you.” From that moment He is in us, literally and figuratively. And if we make space for Him in us, He subsequently goes with us on our path of life, as bread for the way for our eternal being.
When we realize what we receive, Whom we receive, with the meal of bread and wine, that which happened at the miraculous feeding of the five thousand is fulfilled again: “And all ate and were satisfied…”
–Rev. Bastiaan Baan, August 14, 2022