The memory of the final victory. The “roasted fish” for man in the resurrection of Christ
Gabriele Giordano M. Scardocci
Of the Order of Preachers
Presbyter and Theologian
( Click on the name to read all its articles )
Of the Order of Preachers
Presbyter and Theologian
( Click on the name to read all its articles )
Latest posts by Father Gabriele (see all)
The difference between man (image of God) and the animal lies almost entirely in the different way of managing the common need to feed itself. What has always characterized man compared to animals is the convivial gesture, the ritual of sharing bread on the table set to support the body and nourish life. Sharing bread is a bit’ share your own life because with the sweat of your own brow you earned it; symmetrically, you cannot share your life with others without also sharing your bread with them. It is not just a similarity between bread and life, there is such an intrinsic connection of meaning that it creates an identity of concepts, like the one between the roof and the house. In Jesus this ideal identity even becomes an ontological identity: He becomes bread in essence to be our nourishment of life in essence. Bread thus becomes both a figure and a reality of his life (eternal) shared with us, not only and not so much because with the incarnation He wanted to pitch his tent among us, but why, in this way, He wanted us forever with Him in His Kingdom.
there, At that time, how simply sitting around the table of a family table has always been the prefiguration of the liturgical gesture of the Eucharistic sacrifice, in turn a figure of the heavenly banquet as Jesus himself showed his followers by first eating Easter with them and, then, from Risen, the roasted fish, suo potentissimo symbol.
Dear Father Gabriel,
this centrality of the act of eating has always struck me: from eating the apple, with which original sin is perfected, to the recurrence of banquets in the Gospels, until the Eucharist, of which, perhaps, this roasted fish is a lure. Eating seems to me to express our creatural dependence (we are not absolute and self-subsisting beings), the need to assimilate and nourish ourselves. Jesus makes it an occasion of authentic communion.
Feasting is to Jesus as dialogue is to Socrates.
Ma, about Socrates, don't forget about the Symposium too