Paul's warning against idolatry and Christ's image of the tree bearing fruit may seem unrelated, but read as descriptions of inner states, they converge on a single question: what are you actually feeding on? These reflections draw on the esoteric interpretive tradition represented by Maurice Nicoll's *The New Man*, but extend it into territory that is neither doctrinal nor devotional — it is psychological, concerned with what a person genuinely communes with in the silence of their own mind, and what kind of structure that communion builds.

First reading

From the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians — 1 Corinthians 10:14-22

And so, my beloved, turn and flee from idolatry.

I address you as people of understanding — weigh carefully what I say.

The cup of blessing over which we speak the blessing, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?

Because there is one loaf, we who are many form one body, for we all partake of that single loaf.

Look at Israel in its earthly worship: do not those who eat of the sacrifices enter into communion with the altar?

What then am I saying? That an idol has any real power, or that food offered to an idol carries any significance?

No — but what the nations sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God, and I would not have you enter into fellowship with demons.

You cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons. You cannot sit at the table of the Lord and at the table of demons.

Or shall we stir the Lord to jealousy? Are we mightier than he?

Gospel

From the Gospel of Luke — Luke 6:43-49

No healthy tree yields rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree yield good fruit.

Every tree is recognized by the fruit it bears. No one picks figs from thornbushes, and no one harvests grapes from a bramble.

A good person, drawing from the good store within the heart, brings forth what is good; and a wicked person, drawing from the wickedness stored within, brings forth what is evil — for whatever fills the heart will overflow from the mouth.

Why do you call me "Lord, Lord," yet refuse to do what I tell you?

Everyone who comes to me and listens to my words and acts on them — let me show you what such a person resembles.

That one is like someone building a house who dug down deep and set the foundation upon rock. When the floodwaters rose and the torrent crashed against that house, it could not be shaken, because it rested on solid rock.

But the one who hears and does not act is like someone who raised a house on bare ground with no foundation at all. When the torrent struck, the house collapsed at once, and terrible was its destruction.

— Interpretation —

Let us begin with what Paul says to the Corinthians, because it is startling once we hear it from the inner side. He says: “You cannot drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons. You cannot sit at the table of the Lord and at the table of demons” (1 Corinthians 10:21). Taken literally, this is a prohibition against participating in pagan sacrifice. But Paul himself signals that we should not stop at the literal level. He says, immediately before this: “What then am I saying? That an idol has any real power, or that food offered to an idol carries any significance? No —” (1 Corinthians 10:19-20). The idol is nothing. The food offered to it is nothing. And yet Paul insists that something real and dangerous is happening when a person sits at that other table. What can this mean?

It means that the danger lies not in the idol or in the food, but in the quality of inner communion — in what a person gives their inner attention to, what they take into themselves as nourishment. The “table of demons” is not a physical altar in a pagan temple. It is any state of inner worship in which a person feeds on what is mechanical, self-serving, and unconscious while believing themselves to be nourished. The person who feeds constantly on resentment, on self-pity, on the quiet intoxication of being right — that person sits at another table. And the terrible thing Paul perceives is that you cannot sit at both tables simultaneously. You cannot commune with what is higher and what is lower at the same moment, because they require different qualities of attention, different states of being.

Now notice the extraordinary phrase: “The cup of blessing over which we speak the blessing, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). Paul calls the bread and the cup a sharing, a communion. And then he adds: “Because there is one loaf, we who are many form one body, for we all partake of that single loaf” (1 Corinthians 10:17). This one loaf — this higher meaning, this Truth that nourishes without being exhausted — is what makes people one. Separation, fragmentation, inner contradiction: these are the marks of sitting at the other table, where each idol demands its own sacrifice and nothing is unified.

Turn now to the Gospel, and observe how Christ says the same thing in a different language. “A good person, drawing from the good store within the heart, brings forth what is good; and a wicked person, drawing from the wickedness stored within, brings forth what is evil — for whatever fills the heart will overflow from the mouth” (Luke 6:45). This is the image of the tree and its fruit, applied directly to what is stored within. The word “store” is crucial. It implies accumulation over time. One does not become a fig tree or a thornbush in an instant. One becomes what one feeds on, what one communes with inwardly, day after day, in the hidden privacy of one’s own thought and feeling.

And here the two readings converge with remarkable precision. Paul speaks of two tables. Christ speaks of two stores — the good store and the evil store within the heart. In both cases, the teaching is that a person is constituted by what they take in. Not by what they profess. Not by saying “Lord, Lord.” Christ is devastatingly clear about this: “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ yet refuse to do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46). The words of acknowledgment, the outward form of worship, the correct theological position — none of it matters if the inner table is set with something else entirely.

Then comes the image of the two houses. One is built on rock, one on bare ground. The person who hears and acts digs down deep. This digging is not comfortable. It means going beneath the surface personality, beneath the habitual reactions, beneath the pleasant fiction that one is already awake. It means reaching something solid in oneself — what we might call essence, or the ground of real being — and building from there. The person who merely hears but does not act builds on the topsoil of personality, on opinions, on borrowed convictions. And when the flood comes — when life presses hard, when suffering arrives, when the mechanical self is tested — the house falls, “and terrible was its destruction.”

The question is always the same, asked from two directions: At which table are you actually sitting? From which store are you actually drawing? The answer is not found in what we say. It is found in what we feed on when no one is watching — including ourselves.

Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash

Scripture: Unified English Version