Today is Good Friday. The Old Testament scholar Patrick Miller is our thirty-ninth person in these forty days of Eucharist.
... taste and see the bread and wine that mark the goodness of God, a goodness that stands over against all suffering and tragedy and evil and wickedness that mark and mar human existence. For that too is the meaning of the death of Jesus we remember on this occasion as we eat bread and drink the wine. That strange willingness on the part of one who is the transcendent ground of all that is to take into God's own self the pain and suffering of the human lot. That is indeed scandal and foolishness - except for those who have also experienced the pain and suffering. For Jesus represents and stands with all of them in his death even as he represents and stands with God in saying No to all that. 'This is my body which is broken for you' - and for all broken bodies and minds. 'Taste and see.'
Patrick Miller, Stewards of the Mysteries of God: Preaching the Old Testament - and the New (Cascade, 2013), p.130.
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