“Brothers and sisters:
You once were alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds;
God has now reconciled you
in the fleshly Body of Christ through his death,
to present you holy, without blemish,
and irreproachable before him,
provided that you persevere in the faith,
firmly grounded, stable,
and not shifting from the hope of the Gospel that you heard,
which has been preached to every creature under heaven,
of which I, Paul, am a minister.”
The beginning of today’s Reading, “You were once alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds” does a miraculous job of summing up all the problems affecting each human program who disobeys The Operating Instructions.
It’s interesting that those who are “alienated” are also “hostile”. Their individual programs have been corrupted because they can’t access the Loving Programmer Who can erase the errors in their individual, human programs and restore them to belief and joy. Alienation and hostility are invariably the result of evil deeds caused by the various viruses that have corrupted their programs with desires that separate them from He Who lovingly programmed and downloaded them within The Creation Program.
It should not be a surprise that leftists, liberals, and all who behave as if there were no higher standard are universally, and automatically, unhappy.
Today’s Reading also has an oblique reference to Transubstantiation. “God has now reconciled you in the fleshly Body of Christ through His death.” There are at least two interpretations of the passage. One is that The Crucifixion was all that was necessary for our salvation. The other, that the Host is an ongoing sacrifice for those whom He has “gathered from East to West so that a Perfect Offering may be made” in the Catholic Mass.
The second interpretation requires that Transubstantiation takes place, transforming the wafer into the Body of Christ. When we add to this consideration the passage from John 6;53-54: “Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”
There is a caveat for our salvation. We cannot be uploaded into Programming HQ if we fail to “persevere in the faith,” and keep ourselves “firmly grounded, stable, and not shifting. . .”
