Tag: theleavenoflife

Quote/s of the Day – 26 July – “Month of the Most Precious Blood” – Readings: Exodus 32: 15-24, 30-34; Psalms 106: 19-20, 21-22, 23; Matthew 13: 31-3

The Leaven of Life

“Just as the Father who has life sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so the man who feeds on me
will have life because of me.”

John 6:57

“An inborn imperfection in our human dough
was removed, thanks to the leaven
that comes from His perfect body…
To complete what was missing,
in these human bodies of ours,
He gave something of Himself,
just as He gives Himself to be eaten …”

St Ephrem (306-373)
Father and Doctor of the Church

“Those who have been tricked into taking poison,
offset its harmful effect, by another drug.
The remedy, moreover,
just like the poison,
has to enter the system,
so that its remedial effect
may thereby spread through the whole body.
Similarly, having tasted the poison,
that is the fruit,
that dissolved our nature,
we were necessarily, in need of something, to reunite it.
Such a remedy had to enter into us,
so that it might, by its counteraction,
undo the harm the body had already encountered from the poison.
And what is this remedy?
Nothing else than the body
that proved itself superior to death
and became the source of our life.”

St Greogory of Nyssa (c 335– c 395)
Father of the Church

“The doctrine of Christ
is fittingly called leaven
because, the bread is Christ.”

St Anbrose (340-397)
Father and Doctor of the Church

“ … For He did not only give His Body but,
just as our flesh, drawn from the earth,
had lost its life and died through sin,
so He has introduced, so to speak,
another substance like a leaven,
this is His Body, the Body
sharing the same nature as ours but free from sin
and abounding in life.
And He has given it to all of us,
so that, fed with the banquet of this new food …
we might enter immortal life.”

St John Chrysostom (347-407)
Father ad Doctor of the Church

“Dust, so to speak,
had forcibly entered humanity’s eye;
earth had entered it,
had injured the eye
and it could not see the light.
… That physician made a salve for you.
And because He came, in such a way,
that by His flesh,
He might extinguish the faults of the flesh
and by His death He might kill death … ”

St Augustine (354-430)
Father and Doctor of the Church