November 18, 2022
(St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, Virgin)
John, heard a voice from heaven speak. “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.” So I went up to the angel and told him to give me the small scroll. He said to me, “Take and swallow it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey.” Rv_10:8-11
How sweet to my taste is your promise! Ps_119
The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people, meanwhile, were seeking to put him to death, but they could find no way to accomplish their purpose because all the people were hanging on his words. Lk_19:45-48
I must have been hungry when I first read today’s Scriptures, because I couldn’t keep them from reminding me of Chinese food, especially as the Psalmist said, “How sweet to my taste is your promise.”
Doesn’t that just remind you of fortune cookies! . . .
The promise of great fortune, rolled up on a little scroll, inside a hard, sweet cookie.
I guess, if you didn’t realize that there was a little scroll of paper inside that sweet cookie, it really would be sweet to your mouth and sour to your stomach. But, as usual, the Scriptures always DO go a lot deeper than our first impressions.
If we go back to John’s revelation in our first reading, we might remember that the whole, cryptic and symbolic Book of Revelation was written as both, an apocalyptic warning of eternal doom to fallen away Christians, and as a prophetic message of the Beatific Vision of heaven for those who persevere in the faith. There we see, the suffering of the sinful rebels and the victory of the righteous faithful. The sour and the sweet; and no, not pork, but words.
You see, in reality, the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation is a compilation of the sour and the sweet in Words. From the fall of Adam and Eve to the victorious Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, God’s Word truly is enlivening. And Jesus had a way of mesmerizing the people with the Truth and the Love of it all. So much so, as a matter of fact, that Luke tells us, “the people were hanging on His words.”
Then, when we zip forward a couple thousand years, we can find the same sour and sweetness in our modern world. If we’re looking for the sour, all we have to do is turn on the television. And if we’re looking for the sweet, well, it’s right there in every Mass and Communion service we attend. . . . With our mental-spiritual nourishment in God’s liturgy of the Word, and our physical-spiritual nourishment in the Eucharist, the sweet and the sweeter, the love and the hope.
St. Paul gives the Church in Galatia and us, beloved, a beautiful word picture of this concept of sweetness and sourness, living within every one of us, in his differentiation of the Spirit and the flesh.
From Galatians 5:16-25 he says . . . “I say, then: live by the Spirit and you will certainly not gratify the desire of the flesh. For the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you may not do what you want. But if you are guided by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. In contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ [Jesus] have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires. If we live in the Spirit, let us also follow the Spirit.”
The sour and the sweet.
Guess it’ll really make us think the next time we go out for Chinese.
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Whispers to the Wind 