I have been using Buzzword for a few weeks now, and I have found a couple of things I don’t like.

1.) Transfer of documents. You would think they would make an option to upload documents.
2.) Organization. If you have hundreds of papers and can’t recall the name of the paper, you’re going to have problems.
3.) Footnotes. It converts all my footnotes to endnotes, which is just, blah.
4.) PDF creation. I think now that Adobe bought Buzzword, they will add that option…I hope.

I was writing a paper on Good Friday this afternoon, and two previous blogposts, which had been of interest to a few of you, were relevant. I connect them here, in a portion of one of my paragraphs:

Laurence Hull Stookey comments about Jesus’ last words:

“It is finished” is an anemic rendering of the Greek verb tetelestai, which implies the transmission of something from afar (the same tele as in telephone, telegraph, and television). “It is finished” does not mean “It’s all over now” but means “That which has been far off is now brought near; the goal is accomplished.” In other words, the eternal purpose of God is now achieved.

I think Stookey fails to expound on this thought like he should. I would like to take this a step farther, theologically. In the Hebrew, the word translated “offering” is corban. A more literal translation of corban would read “the thing brought near.” Jesus is the corban. He is the One brought near. Moreover, I would connect it to Stookey’s earlier description of anamnesis,

This rememberance by doing rather than cogitation falls under the Greek term anamnesis. Compare amnesia. Amnesia is the loss of memory. Anamnesis is literally “the drawing near of memory,” the entrance into our own experience of that which otherwise would be locked in the past.

Thus the liturgical observance of past events somehow brings them into our own time.

On this day where we do not receive the Eucharist in bread and wine, where Jesus is not brought near in the bread and wine, we give thanks for our Saviour who is “Christ our Passover, sacrificed for us,” and we remember His words that “That which has been far off is now brought near.”

For a long time now, as we approach the communion rail at church, I have been telling Kyrie that “the bread is Jesus’s body” and “the wine is Jesus’s blood” or “we’re going to eat Jesus’s body now.” As she started to show some comprehension and say these things to me before I even said them to her, I started adding, “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” For the last three weeks, when I’ve said this, she’s responded, with wonder, “Yeah, okay!” Last week she said, “Yeah, okay! Good!” I think that’s just plain cute. Now she knows the difference between regular bread and wine and bread and wine at church; I wonder how much she understands what I’m saying.