[Magdalen] Eucharistic prayer

[James Handsfield]

Remembrance is translated from the Koine word (transliterated) afiémi that Paul used in I Corinthians 11:25-26.  Perhaps a better translation might be ‘recall’, but not recall to mind; rather like a supervisor recalling employees to a specific location.  In Greek, as in Koine, this is a word without tense.  It’s hard for English and other western languages to understand this because they are linear languages, while Greek is not.  Being tenseless without time or space, we can think of this as returning, in kairos, to be with Christ at the moment he made the proclamations about his body and blood.

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Education is its own reward, both for the individual and for society.

Jim Handsfield
jhandsfield at att.net

> On Oct 21, 2019, at 9:15 AM, Simon Kershaw <simon at kershaw.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> Picking up on this one point from Scott ...
> 
> I too have heard this ("re-membering") suggested from the pulpit and read it elsewhere.
> 
> Whilst it might be thought a nice sermon illustration, I think we should be careful about any suggestion that this is the meaning of "remembrance" and "remembering", because it simply isn't. The word derives not from "member" but from "memory", the intruded "b" being an artefact of the development of English pronunciation.
> 
> So literally it means a deliberate act of bringing something into the memory, a deliberate act of recall.
> 
> As for "member" -- did you know that the earliest recorded meaning in English in the OED, circa 1300, refers to the genitals? The earliest reference in English to it meaning other body parts (such as the tongue or the limbs) is 1384 in Wyclif's bible, where it is also used figuratively of us as members of the body of Christ. Having said that, the OED also suggests that all these meanings were already present in the Latin "membrum".
> 
> Anyway -- completely different words, even if useful as an aide-memoire.