The living one of the Apocalypse walks among the congregation, and begins by addressing the message to the angel of the church of Ephesus, chapter 2. The divine knows what is going on in the church, and praises its faithfulness and endurance in the midst of suffering. To this angel the divine says, you have fallen! Fallen from the love you had at first, fallen from the commandment to love one another and to abide in love, fallen from what Paul had called “a more excellent way.” Now, the living one calls upon the fallen to repent and do what one did at first. The call to metanoia is a call to return to first things, to the beginning, to alter the course of life radically, to be torn away from the present sense of self, to surrender what one has become, that is, to surrender the fallenness to the living one, to reunite with the living one and so to rise again as “at first” and be a new beginning. Metanoia is resurrection into a new creation. Metanoia demands resolute affirmation of self under new definitions, the demand to be whole again, integrated into the Unity of the Origin. Metanoia, repentance, is originary, it sets something toward the future, the end. The Spirit is speaking to the church. Let the one who has ears hear what the Spirit is saying! The Spirit is saying “Repent” for the end is Now! The future is here, now, full of hope as it is full of suffering and distress. The Spirit meets metanoia with forgiveness, absolution, the promise of life, “to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” Metanoia, the pointing to the future, is a call to the past, the tree of life in the garden. Only now, the tree is not a tree. It is the Body of the Living One, the Blood of the Living One. Now, the eating is Eucharist. That is why the end is the beginning which presents itself as other than it is. The end (the Body) is the otherness of the beginning (the Tree), it is the beginning that is hidden, waiting to be revealed by the living one. The living one speaks through the Spirit to the church today. What was prohibited is now permitted. Listen, take and eat, and live!
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