Sacraments

A Divine Sense of Humor:

You can’t understand the sacraments without it. You have it if you can “see through” things or look beyond a thing’s basic meaning or appearance. Jesus brought this to us and the only thing he took seriously was the soul because it was the only thing he didn’t teach through parables. Jesus revealed that the universe was sacramental. A sacrament combines the visible and the invisible. Handshakes and kisses are a kind of sacrament. Men live in a world that is too serious with no divine sense of humor. Without it the world lacks beauty in its structures and there is no meaning behind anything. Courtesies, amenities, urbanities, and gentility are also gone. Life is a vertical dimension expressed in the soaring spire. Two errors can hinder our understanding of the natural world: taking out God or blending God in with His creations. Sin turns the poetry of the world to prose.

The Bible is a Sacramental:

It is a sacramental because it has a foreground and a background. The foreground is the natural and the background is the supernatural like God’s presence. One example of this relationship is when God used a brazen serpent to heal everyone that was bit by one. God used that as a symbol of trust or faith in Him. Jesus, like the serpent, “would be lifted up on the crotch of a tree, a Cross.” He would heal the poison of our sins and the poison of the serpent, Satan. The word “sacrament” in Greek means “mystery” and Jesus has been called “the mystery hidden from the ages.” He is both Man and God. Because of Jesus’ union with divinity he was able to our savior. Jesus was the sensible sign of God and the sacraments are the sensible signs of grace. Man works best when he can see the material as the revealer of the spiritual. It’s not the thing that matters but what it represents. Man both has a spiritual destiny and a physical body.

What the Sacraments Bring to Man:

The sacraments bring divine life or grace. Jesus came to bring the divine life back to man. This life is called grace because it is “gratis or a free gift of God.” Those who don’t go obtain the divine life ignore the beauty if it. Men live at three levels: the sensate, the intellectual, and the divine. The sensate are only interested in the material world and the pleasures in life. The intellectual are men that “brought to a peak all of the powers of human reason and human will.” The divine are illuminated by truths that you can prove, strengthened by something beyond the physical, and entranced with love that never fails. The Church shows Jesus’ divine life just as it was when he walked the earth Jesus had two types of contact with humanity: visible and invisible, touching and from a distance. The second foreshadowed how Christ now has contact with us from heaven through the sacraments.

Seven Conditions of Life:

The physical life requires seven conditions, five refer to the individual, and the other two as a member of society. You must be born, nourish yourself, mature, have his wounds healed, diseases must be driven out, must live under government and justice in human relationships, and must propagate the human species. There are also seven conditions for living a Christ-life. You must be baptized, participate in the Eucharist, grow spiritual maturity, heal the wounds of sin, participate in the Anointing of the Sick, participate in Holy Orders, and get married. Every sacrament has a visible sign. Three things are required: instituted by Jesus, be an outward sign, and bring grace.

The Power and the Efficacy of the Sacraments:

They derive this from the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. Life is in blood and sin so blood needs to be shed to erase sin. Blood is also the best symbol of sacrifice because it is the life of a man. The blood of Jesus has infinite value since he is divine. Jesus’ blood sanctifies our mind, will, and conscience.

The Application to the Sacraments:

Calvary is like a reservoir of divine life or grace and releases the sacraments because they are in contact with Jesus. The blood of Christ has different results when applied at different times in life.

The divine sense of humor is seeing through all of the things that God is in like Jesus.