https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HbDTSRIe4Mc
I’m not Moses and I’m not St. Gregory and I have definitely not entered into the Divine Darkness. But I think like most people, like most of us here, I mean we have these intimations, we have these moments, these glimpses of some of the smaller aspects or some of the smaller patterns which embed themselves to the larger one which constitutes this infinite tabernacle. So hopefully what I can do with you today is maybe provoke some intimation or give a little glimpse. And I think the only fruitful way to do this in our context is to do it the way the Fathers did it and it’s the way St. Gregory did it and it’s to show how everything, how this whole pattern, how all the patterns of meanings point to Christ. And I think that that is the surest way for any of us to encounter God in stories. And so we come back to a familiar territory because for Christians, you know, the traditional vision of the Old Testament is that all the stories point to Christ. All the Old Testament stories contain prototypes of Christ. St. Irenaeus tells us that quote, if anyone therefore reads the scriptures with attention, he will find in them an account of Christ. For Christ is the treasure which was hidden in the field. The treasure hidden in scriptures is Christ since he was pointed out by means of types and parables. And so from a theological and even an epistemological point of view that makes total sense, right, all the instances of meaning extend from and point to the origin of meaning, the origin of everything which is the Divine Logos, that pattern not made with hands, who entered through his incarnation into the cosmic story. So to become not only the origin of the story but its very center. And in practice, anybody who reads the narrative parts of the Old Testament simply as stories, rather than attempting to decompose them into competing mini narratives of religious and political struggle like a lot of the scholars want to do, I mean if you pay attention to those stories, you can’t help but notice that each story is like an extreme facet of something. You know these stories in the Old Testament are like these sharp slivers that come together into a smooth whole and brought together in Christ. So as an example I want to give you the story of, I’m going to use one of the major stories, I chose one that I think everybody knows, it’s the story of Cain and Abel. So I want to see how, one of the ways that we can see this pattern appear in the story of Cain and Abel. So Cain is an agriculturalist, Cain grows his food. And Cain is also the founder of the first city, in the Bible he is the founder of the first city and his descendants actually, all the aspects of culture, all the aspects of sedentary culture come from the descendants of Cain in the genealogy of Genesis. And his brother Abel on the other hand, he’s a shepherd, so he’s a nomad. So when they sacrifice, what does Cain offer? Cain offers to God the product of agriculture. So when they sacrifice, Cain offers the product of agriculture and Abel offers from his flock. The two sacrifices are unequal, right? Cain’s sacrifice is rejected by God and Cain kills his brother out of resentment. So we all know that story very well. Now if we look at that story, I mean the first, if we look at that story, if we try to look at that story in light of Christ, the first thing that would tend to come out is that we would say, okay well Christ is of course Abel, the good shepherd. Christ is the innocent who dies at the hands of the jealous establishment. Makes sense? That’s what Christ’s story is like. But as we look a little bit deeper, we actually realize that Christ is also Cain. Because Christ is the sower and the reaper. Christ is called the son of an artisan. He is the firstborn. You could say that he is truly his brother’s keeper. So Christ unites and reconciles in his very person that first and primordial conflict of humanity. Then if we push that point even further, we realize that Christ takes the sacrifice of Cain, the product of the earth, like bread and wine, and he unites it to the sacrifice of Abel, flesh and blood. And he makes them one. So this takes us to the Eucharist. It takes us into communion. But if we start to ponder on communion, we know that it can’t stop there because if If it was just the story of Cain and Abel that gave us the key to communion, I mean, it might be enough to blow our mind already, but it’s more. It’s always so much more. Christ’s offering also takes the showbread, which in the tabernacle was offered in the hidden holy place, and he unites it with the animal sacrifice which was offered in the outer court. And communion is not just about sacrifice, right? It takes the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life hanging from the ultimate tree which is the cross. It is the hospitality of Abraham uniting us to the angels, the offering of Melchizedek, the strange dream Joseph interprets in prison. It contains bread, which is a staple food, with wine, which is a euphoric drink. It unites meat, which in the Old Testament was offered up to God and eaten by those sacrificing, and blood, which in the Old Testament was never consumed. But it was placed on the frame of the door, sprinkled on the outside of the altar, the outside of the mercy seed, and poured out on the ground. it is now part of the totality which the Divine mysteries make available to us. And on that last example, that blows my mind. And I could spend all day pointing at intimations of the Divine mysteries based on Old Testament examples and I would always find one more example of what the mystery contains and what it also transforms and transcends and strangely establishes at the same time. So just like in the example I just gave you of Cain and Abel, the stories in the Old Testament and other important stories they never attain to Christ. That is if you look at Christ and his own story they always exceed those stories. But because of that fact, Christ also becomes that place where all the stories come together. And we can get intimation of logos from all types of stories. I believe when we approach them with humility and the patterns which reveal themselves to us in those stories can be like mini epiphanies. And we can experience them on a very existential level. I have been brought many times to tears by the beauty and the power of this sudden connection. You know you’re meditating on a story that you’ve known your whole life, that your parents told you when you were a child. And all of a sudden it’s like a bolt of lightning becomes transparent and you see that hidden pearl that it contains.