Posted 411 days ago

Reflection: Feasting at God's Communion Table

by Christine Sine, Mustard Seed Associates

Several months ago, our good friends Melody and Gil George cooked a wonderful Ethiopian meal for us. The hot, spicy sauces were delicious, spooned onto platters spread with layers of injera, the traditional Ethiopian flatbread. More mounds of injera dotted the table waiting for us to tear off pieces with our fingers so that we could scoop up the wonderful berbere-flavoured wots. By the end of the meal, all that remained on the platter were broken pieces of injera soaked with the remains of the sauces.

As we gathered the empty platters, I was struck by how much this meal must have resembled meals Jesus ate with his disciples and those other friends of his—the tax collectors and prostitutes. Bread was far more than an adjunct to their meals; it was the very heart of their shared life together. The bread was broken so that people could share together the nourishment they needed to sustain life. And as the bread was broken, implicit in the act was a sharing of hospitality, togetherness, and community. Anybody who ate from their table—friend or stranger, rich or poor, young or old—would enter into this shared community. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that in eating in this way together we had shared in the communion of Christ’s body. “To the Middle Eastern mind-set, bread is not just a source of nourishment,” says Ravi Zacharias. “It is the bearer of much more… It is the means of friendship, celebration and pleasure.” ¹

Contrast this with the Eucharistic practice of a church I was in recently: the elements were passed around in prepackaged sterile containers filled with a wafer and a sip of grape juice. The only experience we shared together were the sounds we made ripping the covers off. And even those were muted by our embarrassment at disturbing the quiet atmosphere of the moment. No wonder the congregation hurried away afterwards with barely a thought for those with whom they had shared the pews.

How much do we limit the celebration of our faith by partaking of the bread and the wine of communion in a sterile environment? For most of us, the celebration of the Eucharist no longer draws us into the wonder of communion with Christ and the intimacy of enjoying his presence in all of life’s celebrations and struggles. In fact, it often disconnects us.

I love Sara Miles’ recent book Take This Bread in which she too grapples with the meaning of communion in the midst of everyday life. “It wasn’t a private meal,” she reflects. “The bread on that Table had to be shared with everyone in order for me to really taste it. And sharing it meant I was going to be touching Christ’s body at St Gregory’s… looking into Christ’s eyes outside the church through the cheery yuppie with the sports car and the veiled Muslim clerk at Walgreens. Listening to Christ’s voice in other churches… I was going to get communion, whether I wanted it or not, with people I didn’t necessarily like.” ²

For the early church, communion was about celebrating the great feast of life together—with each other and with God, who gave this gift of life to all who shared in the meal. Hospitality was central to faith because it was a reminder that in the sharing of food, Christ was present in our midst. More than that, as all sat down together, the barriers between rich and poor, slave and free, and male and female were dissolved. The sharing of a meal opened a doorway to the wonders of God’s eternal world in which we will one day all feast together at the great banquet celebration of God.

I think it is time we rediscovered the true hope and celebration of communion as it was understood by early followers of Christ. What a wonderful hope we look forward to every time we share a meal and recognize that Christ sits down at the table with us. And as we pass round the food, it is his life that we are sharing. His life nourishes our bodies and our spirits, drawing us together into a community of love and mutual care in which all barriers are broken down and we share together the abundance and shalom of God’s kingdom.

Notes
1. Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods (W Publishing, 2002), p. 87.
2. Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (Ballantine, 2008), p. 97.

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