Rooted and Grounded in Love

Holy Communion for the Whole Creation

Timothy Reinhold Eberhart

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781498209618
  9781498209632
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498209625
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

God's invitation to join in the love feast of Holy Communion resounds at the very heart of the Christian faith and life. But how are Christians faithfully to gather together in relational bonds of love--in particular, through our daily bread and common cup--amidst a global market economy sustained by social and ecological violence? Drawing on the holiness-communitarian and agrarian-ecological traditions, Rooted and Grounded in Love provides a systematic theological affirmation of holiness as divine wholeness in examining our present industrial agro-economy while also promoting a practical vision for how Christians might participate in the emergence of a more ecologically sustaining, economically charitable, and politically just food system.  

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Jesus Christ Invites All

God in Jesus Christ invites all people to the feast of life. As the divine Host, Jesus Christ welcomes everyone, for the “Holy One of God” (John 6:69) excludes no one from sharing in the life that is abundant. God’s holiness is God’s perfect love, and in the fullness of divine love, all things are made whole. In Jesus Christ, the divine holiness in which the creation comes alive is revealed as gracious love, which is “given for you and for many” as the way that leads to peaceable life. Faithful acceptance of God’s call to participate in Holy Communion, then, includes faithfully following the Host’s lead in actively welcoming all people to the festal banquet of life. “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Holy Communion, in the way of Jesus, is wholly inclusive life together.

But how are Jesus’ followers to participate in the gracious love of God in the midst of an economy founded on self-oriented love? Cut off from the wholeness of God’s love, self-love is inherently exclusionary, for it fixates on private gain at the expense of others. Modern economic life together is thus marked by a distorted social dynamic in which the financial flourishing of some is dependent upon the exclusion of others from the most basic means of life. Within the modern food economy in particular, the primacy given to self-gain as the determining factor in economic matters has resulted in the ongoing exclusion of more and more people from access to the land. In this context, following the gracious love of Jesus Christ in economic life—and thus participating more fully in the divine holiness—will entail striving to ensure that all people have access to the necessary means for life, including especially the land, which God has made available for the common flourishing of all.

The Wholly Gracious Love of God in Jesus Christ

To profess that God is revealed to us in Jesus Christ is to affirm that God does not exclude God’s holiness from us. Rather, in Jesus Christ, we are given gratuitous access to the holy Life that is the source of all life. In our search for God, we are not aimless wanderers, as Bonhoeffer says, because with God we seek “what has already been found.”129 The perfect love of God is shown to us in just this way (1 John 4:9)—“the eternal life that was with the Father . . . was revealed to us” in the Son, who “we have heard” and “seen with our eyes” and even “touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1–2). We are not excluded from the divine holiness, then, as if it were a sequestered property guarded from others. For God made himself completely available through his holy life lived among us (John 1:14). Jesus Christ is God become wholly accessible, the “Holy One of God” who has graciously opened to us the sacred “holy of holies.”

God’s holiness is made accessible in Jesus Christ, moreover, for us. As the father of German Pietism Johann Arndt affirms, God did not reveal Godself in Jesus Christ “for his own sake but for ours.”130 We who are the beneficiaries of God’s disclosure do not gain access to the divine holiness through any kind of merit or tenure fee we might offer in return. There is no compulsory need driving God’s self-disclosure, as if God has become available in order to extract tribute from others. God’s revelation in Christ is oriented entirely by God’s gracious love for others—“for God so loved the world . . . ” (John 3:16). “Christ is Christ,” Bonhoeffer writes, “not for himself, but in relation to me. His being Christ is his being for me, pro me.”131 In Jesus Christ, the perfect nature of divine love is shown in God becoming graciously accessible for our sake.

But just how is the divine holiness made charitably available in Jesus Christ? Does Jesus bestow true knowledge of God to us? Are we presented in Jesus with a repeatable set of proper religious practices? Does Jesus display for us the perfect consciousness of or desire for God? One of the prominent images the New Testament writers draw upon in describing Jesus’ availability to us is “the Way.” Throughout the Scriptures, the symbol of the way, or the path, denotes an entire way of life lived in relation to God, others, and the whole of creation—the “way,” which the Lord provides the people of Israel through the Mosaic Torah (Exod 18:20-23); the Psalmist’s entreaty to the Lord to “teach me thy paths” (Ps 25:4); Wisdom’s embodiment as the “path of life” (5:6), which stands in contrast to “the ways of those who gain by violence” (1:19). All such references encompass an interconnected complex of social, political, economic, and even ecological aspects of existence that is either consonant with or opposed to the divine life. To avow that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) is to affirm that Jesus’ whole way of life is itself the holy Way of God that truly leads to abundant life. Christ’s “life is our Way,” as Thomas à Kempis says, for he has revealed to all people “the true and holy way” of God with us.132 We have access to the holiness of God, then, not primarily through a concept, practice, or feeling deposited by Jesus for our sake, but through the more encompassing way of Jesus’ holy life made manifest among us.

In accord with the gracious nature of God’s self-disclosure, Jesus’ holy way of life can be characterized as the incarnation of God’s gracious love for all. The way of God that Christ embodies throughout the whole of his life is neither factional nor partisan, for God’s perfect love is universally gracious to all. As the fourteenth-century mystic John Ruusbroec so strikingly affirms:

Christ went out to all in common in his love, his teaching, and his admonitions; in the way he tenderly consoled and generously gave; and in the way he kindly and mercifully forgave. His soul and body, and his service to others were and are common to all . . . Christ never took any nourishment or anything else to satisfy the needs of his body without intending it to be for the common benefit of everyone . . . Christ possessed nothing properly his own, but had it all in common: his body and soul, his mother and disciples, his cloak and tunic. He ate and drank for our sake . . . He gave himself completely to all in common, does so still, and will do so for all eternity, [for] he was sent to earth for the common benefit of all.133

Not only can we speak of Jesus as “the man for others” (Bonhoeffer), but even more remarkably, he is “the man for all.” Throughout the full story of his life with us, Jesus reveals a God who “shows no partiality” (Rom 2:11). Whether he heals the leprous outcast, unbinds the possessed soul, reproves the self-righteous, teaches the crowds, or sends the rich away saddened, Jesus’ orientation toward all people is for their ultimate good in concert with the well-being of others. To gaze upon his holy life, as the brothers and sisters of the Modern Devotion enjoined, is to see enfleshed “the common love that God has for all humankind without distinction.”134 For what is freely given to us in Jesus Christ is the perfection of God’s love as a holy way of gracious living for the common gain of all.

Not only in life, but also through his death, Jesus reveals to us the holy way of God’s charitable grace available for all. At the heart of the New Testament witness about Christ is the affirmation that he died for “all people” (John 12:32), “for everyone” (Heb 2:9), “for all” (2 Cor 5:14–15, 1 Tim 2:6). For Paul in particular, this is the central truth of the Gospel, that “we have obtained access to God’s grace” through the justifying death of “our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1–2) apart from any prior merit, status, or achievement of our own. Precisely because, as Paul declares, Christ died for us “while we were yet sinners,” that manifestly proves God’s perfect love “for us” (5:8); and because “all have sinned” (3:23), we are provided assurance that the loving grace of God, which Christ displays to us on the cross, is given “for all” (5:18). To say that we are “justified” by God through the death of Jesus Christ, moreover, is to affirm that there is nothing in the whole of created existence, including distinctions of ethnicity, gender, or social estate (Gal 3:28), that can “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus” (8:39). Our justification is founded in the perfection of God’s gracious love that is manifest in Jesus’ holy life and death for all.

The holy way of divine love for all people is precisely the way that leads to peace. Justified by divine grace, as Paul says, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1). The biblical vision of peace or “shalom” encompasses a rich variety of meanings, including the negative absence of agitation or discord but also the more affirmative promise of wholeness, completeness, welfare, safety, soundness, tranquility, ful...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Jesus Christ Invites All
• Chapter 2: The Holy Spirit Joins Everyone Together
• Chapter 3: The Father/Mother Nourishes Every Body
• Chapter 4: The Triune God Arranges Guests as Companions
• Chapter 5: The Lord God Grants Permission to Begin
• Conclusion
• Bibliography