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Genesis Chapter 4:1-7
And the man knew his wife Eve. And she conceived and bore Cain, and said, I have gotten a man with the help of Jehovah. (2) And she continued to bear his brother, Abel. And Abel became a shepherd of flocks. And Cain became a tiller of the ground. (3) And in the end of days, it happened that Cain brought an offering to Jehovah from the fruit of the ground. (4) And Abel brought, he also, from the firstlings of his flocks, even from their fat. And Jehovah looked to Abel and to his offering. (5) And He did not look to Cain and to his offering. And Cain glowed greatly with anger, and his face fell. (6) And Jehovah said to Cain, Why have you angrily glowed, and why has your face fallen? (7) If you do well, is there not exaltation? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is toward you; but you should rule over it.
John Chapter 4:31-38
But in the meantime the disciples asked Him, saying, Rabbi, eat? (32) But He said to them, I have food to eat which you do not know. (33) Then the disciples said to one another, No one brought Him food to eat? (34) Jesus said to them, My food is that I should do the will of Him who sent Me, and that I may finish His work. (35) Do you not say, It is yet four months and the harvest comes? Behold, I say to you, Lift up your eyes and behold the fields, for they are already white to harvest. (36) And the one reaping receives reward, and gathers fruit to everlasting life, so that both the one sowing and the one reaping may rejoice together. (37) For in this the word is true, that another is the one sowing, and another the one reaping. (38) I sent you to reap what you have not labored over. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.
Arcana Coelestia 5293 by Emanuel Swedenborg
In the internal sense ‘food’ means, strictly speaking, those things which nourish a person’s soul, that is, which nourish him when his bodily life is ended. For when this is ended his soul or spirit is living, and he no longer needs material food as he did in the world; but he does need spiritual food, which consists in everything that has a useful purpose and everything leading to this. That which leads to what has a useful purpose is knowing what goodness and truth are; and that which has such a purpose is the desire to realize these in actions. These are the things with which angels are nourished and which are therefore called spiritual and celestial foods. A person’s mind – the place within him where his will and understanding, that is, his intentions or ends in view, reside – is nourished by no other kind of food, even while he lives in the body. Material food does not extend as far as that; it extends only to his bodily parts, which are sustained by that material food to the end that the mind may be sustained by food for the mind while the body is sustained by food for the body, that is, to the end that there may be a healthy mind in a healthy body.
[2] The reason ‘food’ in the spiritual sense means everything that has a useful purpose is that a person’s entire knowledge, his entire understanding and wisdom, and so his entire will must have a useful purpose as its end in view. Consequently as is the nature of the purpose he has in view, so is the nature of his life. The truth that ‘food’ in the spiritual sense means everything with a useful purpose is evident from the following words spoken by the Lord,
Jesus said to the disciples, I have food to eat of which you do not know. The disciples said to one another, Has anyone brought Him anything to eat? Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work. John 4:32-34.
And elsewhere,
Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On Him the Father – God – has set His seal. John 6:27.
We have explored a number of principles that relate to the spiritual life in our look at these events around Jacob’s well or fountain, and today we consider the Lord’s teaching in regard to kinds of food and consider this question in terms of the disciples and woman’s responses to the Lord. We saw last time that the disciples represented our tendency to rest in an intellectual approach to the Word and spiritual things where as the woman in this instance represents those affectional responses to our understanding of truth that look to obedience. It’s important that we see that the two are not unrelated for the Lord provides us with an intellect so that we can understand truths and a will so that we can act from them. When our relationship to truths is more from the head then we have a tendency to rest on what we know and place our confidence in spiritual matters in this knowledge.
If anything, the woman’s response to the Lord, teaches us all that real change and transformation involves hearing the Word with a view to acting from it. The will and the intellect must work together if we are to to come into a life in which we can love wisely. Knowing without doing cannot bring the changes necessary in the structure of our minds that render it into a heavenly form. All spiritual knowledge is given to bring about a transformation in our love and affections so that we go from being naturally minded to becoming spiritually minded.
Let’s stick with this idea of transformation in regard to food. The disciples return from Sychar with food and say to the Lord, “Rabbi eat?” To understand what’s happening here spiritually we need to leave behind any notion of the transfer of material food between persons. If we can do this we can then enter into our mental world and see this story in the context of its psychological and spiritual meaning. This is in itself a form of transformation, for as the natural ideas in which the Word is clothed like a husk are left behind, we find that within the text is a finer food, or spiritual meaning, that transcends our natural perceptive faculties and is only perceptible by our spiritual senses through which it is able to nourish the deeper or higher things pertaining to the life of our spirit.
The disciples represent our own fixed ideas in spiritual matters, which have something of self reliance in them. This attitude is reflected in the fact that they presumed that they had something they possessed that they could offer the Lord to eat. What they failed to see is that what they had to offer was from the Lord in the first place. Yes it was they who had gone into the city, yes they had sought out a merchant or trader, yes they had bought from this person using money they had in their possession, and yes they had then journeyed back to the well with the food they had procured and now they offered it to the Lord. From all appearances it was all done from themselves and from this appearance comes the belief that what they have is theirs to offer. So from their perspective what they were now offering to the Lord was something they felt they had ownership over.
But this offering to the Lord, “something to eat” illustrates wrong thinking in spiritual matters that is typical of us all when we fail to see that it is the Lord who is the source of everything we have. It is an appearance that we are able to do of ourselves. The principle is “as if of ourselves but believing, as is the truth, that this ability it is from the Lord”. When we look at life from appearances and believe them to be how things really are we become enmeshed in false perspectives. We end up believing that our life is something intrinsic to us, that our ability to understand truths is from us, and that the good we do is from ourselves. This is the danger that exists when we approach spiritual matters from ourselves and not from the Lord or what He teaches from the Word in the light of the Heavenly Doctrines. Without revelation from the Lord we have no way of seeing beyond the appearances of sensual life. To live from the Lord is to live from His truths despite what our senses try to convince us is real. The Lord is reality itself and His Word understood in the light of genuine truths is the only thing able to prevent us falling pray to the fallacies of our senses.
The Lord hungers for one thing, our salvation, but if we live from ourselves and fail to acknowledge, as a matter of life, that all that we have is from the Lord then we live in a state of taking credit for the good we do. This is what it is to procure food in the city like the disciples, and to offer it to the Lord, is to ask Him to accept our false perspectives and the evils that flow from these into heaven. Not only is this impossible but if He were to accept this state it would be destructive of our spiritual well being. All in heaven acknowledge the Lord as the source of everything good and true. In this life the good we acquire by our own effort is only good if we live from an acknowledgement that the ability to do anything is from the Lord alone. If this is not done then this good is “natural good” and not spiritual good because self love is in it and so in fact it’s a kind of pseudo-good we use to cover over our evils and hide them from ourselves.
The proprium is always looking for ways of trading off the requirement to examine the life of our affections, thoughts and behaviour in the light of the truths we have from the Word and the Heavenly Doctrines. This attitude comes to the fore when having knowledge of the truths of religion and don’t use them to examine our life. The light that truths bring into the mind reveals our states of life so that we are then able to look to the Lord to have the necessary changes made. If truths are not used in this way then our sense of self will remain bound up in evils and falsities and any good done is simply something external with what is corrupt remaining within it. This kind of good cannot save us, it can’t serve to bring us into heavenly states of mind because its a good that is used to preserve what is hellish in our life. The only way the spiritual good that saves can be active in us is when truths are used for the purpose for which they are given. The actual act of working with truths to have our evils removed is how genuine spiritual good comes to the fore in our life.
The Lord doesn’t receive intellectual acknowledgement of truths when these beliefs are separated from life. Or to put it another way the Lord can’t be received into a life that is not in the practise of truths. The Lord doesn’t actually reject anyone, but the order of spiritual life is such that He can only join Himself to a person who is willing to receive Him through living from His Word. This is clearly seen in the story of Cain and Abel’s offerings to the Lord. Cain brought the fruit of the ground whereas Abel brought an offering of the firstborn of the flock. The Lord we read accepted Abel’s offering but not Cain’s. Now don’t bring natural sympathy to this story, the Lord doesn’t play favourites, the story is about what the Lord can and can’t be received into in a person’s life. Vegetation corresponds to those things that have to do with the intellect in us whereas animals have to do with the affections of the will. Cain is knowing without doing, Abel is doing from knowing which is what we call charity.
And Abel became a shepherd of flocks. And Cain became a tiller of the ground. (3) And in the end of days, it happened that Cain brought an offering to Jehovah from the fruit of the ground. (4) And Abel brought, he also, from the firstlings of his flocks, even from their fat. And Jehovah looked to Abel and to his offering. (5) And He did not look to Cain and to his offering. And Cain glowed greatly with anger, and his face fell.
When Cain is active in us we are in a state of knowing what we should do but are unwilling to act. For example we may know that our behaviour in a particular situation was not what it should have been, and that the ongoing fall out from it, perhaps of coldness or uncharitable thoughts towards someone, can actually be addressed if we would only bring the spiritual principles we know to the forefront of our consciousness to confront our attitude and then act on them. If we know we are in the wrong and don’t do something we fall into justifying ourselves. We dig around looking for ways to rationalise away the pangs of conscience. We till the ground of our own thoughts and what we come up with is the fruit of the ground as a means of avoiding doing what we know we should do.
This fruit of our intellectual efforts can’t take away the need to respond to truth, and it can’t serve as a substitute for doing the inner work necessary for inner transformation, but what it can do is lessen the influence the Lord can have on our life by deadening our sensitivity to His prompting through our conscience. The tragic outcome of knowing without doing is the death of Abel, Cain, we read, murders him. To rationalise away the need to respond from the will in spiritual matters to avoid the pain of facing the evils and falsities of our proprium is to reject charity and to reject charity is to reject the Lord and what His Word teaches.
What really nourishes the Lord’s desire for our salvation, what constitutes His food, is that which we have yet to perceive. It is the food of doing, of responding to His Word. This is the great lesson here. “My food” the Lord said “is to do the will of Him who sent me and to mature or finish His work”. The food the disciples offered to the Lord cannot nourish the spirit of a human being. To be fed and to feed the Lord is to act in obedience to the truths He offers us. One of the things about being in a state of knowing and not doing in regard to truths is a tendency to think that there is plenty of time to do what needs to be done. This is a mistake. Motivation in the spiritual life is built through our affirmative responses to truths. It is our responses that actually strengthens our love for them and so makes us more sensitive to being led by the Lord in His Word.
This is why the Lord says…
(35) Do you not say, It is yet four months and the harvest comes? Behold, I say to you, Lift up your eyes and behold the fields, for they are already white to harvest.
A faith limited to the understanding doesn’t motivate a person to do what they need to do; it leaves them in a state of waiting “until the time is right.” A faith in the will however sees that the time to work is now, while we have light and it is day. We are to lift up our eyes and not put things off in regard to the spiritual life for another day. To lift our eyes is to elevate our understanding through a focus on charity or love expressed in useful actions as our spiritual practise. The harvest is perpetually ready because each moment is filled with possibilities, with opportunities to live from the truths that have been sown into our minds. The Lord is the one who sows and He sows into the genuine affection for truth, for this affection alone is disposed to respond, it is the good ground that can receive the seed. It is represented here by the Samaritan woman, into whom the Lord sowed truths so that she went and told all and many believed because of her testimony.
(36) And the one reaping receives reward, and gathers fruit to everlasting life, so that both the one sowing and the one reaping may rejoice together. (37) For in this the word is true, that another is the one sowing, and another the one reaping. (38) I sent you to reap what you have not labored over. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.
The Lord has given us His Word and asks us to act from it now, and not to put this off. “Lift up your eyes for the fields are already white to harvest.” By means of the Word He sows life into us and if we would compel ourselves and respond from our will we are destined to reap the fruits of everlasting life, for it is our willingness to response that determines what can be received and from what is received into a willing heart comes a harvest of heavenly delight that can only be found in the joy that living from the wisdom of love brings.
Amen.
