Materials
Eucharist #1
The Table of Joy
Eucharist
Luke 22:7-23
by R. Todd Bouldin
On the last day of July 1941, the Auschwitz sirens announced the escape of a prisoner. As a reprisal, ten of the escapee's fellow prisoners would die of a long, slow starvation, buried alive in a specially constructed, concrete bunker. So, all day, tortured by the sun, hunger, and fear, the prisoners waited as the German commandant and his Gestapo assistant walked between the ranks to select quite arbitrarily, the chosen ten. As the commandant pointed to one man named, Francis Dylewski, he cried out in despair, "My poor wife and children." At that moment, the unimpressive figure of a man with sunken eyes and round glasses in wire frames stepped out of line and took off his cap. "What does this polish pig want?" asked the commandant. "I am a Catholic priest; I want to die for that man. I am old, and he has a wife and children," said Father Maximilian Kolbe. "Accepted," retorted the commandant, as he moved on. That night ten men including the priest went to the starvation bunker. Normally prisoners in that bunker would tear each other apart like cannibals. Not this time. While they had strength, lying naked on the floor, the men prayed and sang hymns. After two weeks, three of the men and Father Kolbe were still alive. The bunker was required for others, so on August 14th the remaining four men were disposed of. At 12:50 PM after two weeks in the starvation bunker and still conscious, the Polish priest was finally given an injection of phenol and died at the age of 47.
Roughly 3200 years before the death of Father Kolbe and the atrocity of German concentration camps in WW II, the Israelites lived in a similar bondage in Egypt. The Hebrew people were slaves to the Egyptian Pharaoh. They spent their days under the scorching sun doing back braking labor for the Egyptian people. Their progress was overseen by taskmasters who would beat the people with rods if they were not doing satisfactory work. The Israelites were chattel and their lives were only valuable in terms of profit and production. They were subject to an evil empire. But, God who is love did not leave His beloved people to their dreadful plight. Instead, He entered time, space, and history to set his people free from their bondage.
As you recall, through Moses, God set ten plagues upon the people of Egypt because of the Pharaoh's refusal to release the Israelites from slavery. The tenth and final plague was the most frightening of all. God sent the angel of death to pass over Egypt killing the firstborn son of every family. However, God instructed Moses to tell the Israelites to mark their homes with blood from a lamb, which they had sacrificed. When the angel of death flew over Egypt the firstborn sons of all the Egyptians were killed, but the firstborn sons of all the Israelites were saved because the angel of death passed over all the homes marked by the blood of a lamb. As you remember, after this tenth and final plague, Pharaoh let the people of Israel go. They were freed from their bondage in Egypt and began their long 40-year journey to the Promised Land. The redemption of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt became a day that was and is celebrated in the life of the Jewish people around the world, and they call that celebration Passover because the angel of death passed over their homes on that violent night in Egypt.
For the delivered Hebrews, then, the meaning of Passover was twofold. First, the marks of blood on the outside of the home engendered in the people of God a sense of deliverance and safety from evil in the world that seeks to enslave. And, second, eating the food expectantly and hurriedly asserted that they were in a posture to leave the empire of bondage that surrounded them and move in to the Promised Land, which is life with God. Thus, the Passover meal always looked back to God’s deliverance of His people from the land of Bondage and looked forward to God’s communion with His people in the land of Freedom.
By the time of Jesus, the Passover meal was celebrated somewhat differently than it was in those years immediately following the Exodus. No longer was the meal eaten in a hurry, as God had originally instructed. Nor was there a sense of impending danger surrounding its celebration. The Passover had become a celebration of God’s deliverance, a joyful and long meal for the whole family steeped in many traditions. Though Passover was a time of remembrance, this was no “memorial”. Neither was it personal. The whole family and community reenacted the events of that Exodus evening, and in remembering they participated again in its drama, in its meaning and most importantly, in its joy.
According to Luke 22, the New Covenant meal that we call the Lord’s Supper was instituted by Jesus during the Passover supper. On the day that the Passover lamb was to be sacrificed, Jesus told Peter and John to prepare a place to eat the Passover (Luke 22:7-8). The disciples prepared the Passover meal (Luke 22:13) and Jesus said that He longed to eat Passover with them before He died (Luke 22:15). So, the Passover meal is clearly the context of the institution of what we have come to call the Lord’s Supper.
There are three aspects of the Passover meal that I would like to highlight as they apply to the Lord’s Supper:
First, the Lord’s Supper was a full meal. That means, as we have come to see in our celebrations of the Passover here, that the first Lord’s Supper had all the feel and food of a real dinner, of a great potluck, if you will. In Greco-Roman society, it was the evening meal. The Passover was not merely a solemn and token memorial where the point was to partake of the symbolic elements “to say you did” but where the disciples joined in community and joy together around a Table with a full spread.
Since the Middle Ages, the church has come to celebrate the Lord’s Supper like it is the Lord’s Snack. It reminds me of one of those tasting fairs for great restaurants at a community park. A great table and a scrumptious, filling meal awaits us at several fine restaurants in our community. Instead, we go to a tasting fair where, for the price of a ticket, we get a small bite of the gourmet cuisine of a great restaurant. It is nice to say you’ve had a sample of the delights that could await you there, but you’ve only had a sample. The real satisfaction is in the full meal. The fact that we have removed the Lord’s Supper from its celebration around a Table and in the context of a meal makes me wonder what we have missed, and what we communicate, when we place the meal in an auditorium with pews. It seems to me that the symbolism of this removal is to suggest that we are satisfied to only sample the body and blood of Christ, to settle for only a taste of communion with God, but not to indulge in the lavish delights of a full communion with Him and with each other. Pews, auditoriums and time constraints prevent us from this experience, but I’m not sure the church is better for it. I think we are missing something significant in our experience of the Supper.
Second, the Passover remembered by reenacting. Once the meal was served, the family would begin to rehearse the Haggadah. The Haggadah is the narrative of the Passover story. The host would rehearse the Passover story, and the children would join in as participants in questions, drama and songs. The Haggadah called the family to remember their salvation and to experience it again, over and over with each celebration, as if they were actually there – as if it was actually their deliverance that God had enacted. Thus to “remember” is not merely to reflect but to rehearse and reenact the deliverance of God. The Mishnaic Haggadah ends this way:
Therefore we are bound to give thanks, to praise, to glorify, to honor, to exalt, to extol, and to bless Him who wrought all these wonders for our fathers and for us. He brought us out from bondage to freedom, from sorrow to gladness, and from mourning to a Festival-day, and from darkness to a great light, and from servitude to redemption; so let us say before Him the 'Hallelujah.'
So next, Passover was characterized by joy and gratitude. That is the meaning of the word Christians came to call the Christian Passover, “Eucharist”: to give thanks. The Passover was a memorial, but a memorial meal characterized by praise and joyful thanksgiving for God’s deliverance. The point of Passover was not the bondage from which the people had been delivered, but that they had been delivered from the bondage. This was no dirge or funerary occasion. The event evoked praise and joy, not guilt, solemnity or silence.
This is a far cry from what we have come to experience in the Lord’s Supper. For most of us, this event is so formal and solemn that we honestly could not say that we “eagerly desire” to eat the Supper with each other because there really isn’t much to look forward to celebrating. Who eagerly desires to attend a funeral? Who eagerly desires to enter the confessional every week? The invitation to the Table is an invitation to grace, to a salvation already accomplished for you, for a forgiveness already offered you.
We have experienced the Table as a funeral more than a feast because we have made the Supper about the Altar and not about the Table. To make the Table an Altar is to suggest that the Supper is a time for reflection and sadness, remorse and guilt. The assumption is that we are to focus on the cross, the sufferings of Christ, and His death. But Jesus did not invite us to an altar. He invited us to a Table, the place where communion with God won by the cross is now enjoyed and celebrated until we finally join the heavenly feast.
The Altar of sacrifice, the place where our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed, is the cross. But the Table is not a reenactment of the cross, though it certainly remembers it. The point of the Table is not your sins that led Jesus to the cross … or the agony of the Cross . . . but the perfect deliverance you have received because of the cross. Just as the Passover celebrated an already won deliverance, the Table celebrates what has been accomplished for you already by the grace of God, and it invites you to a place of thanksgiving and joy.
As long as we think of the Lord’s Supper as a place of reflection on our sins, or on the sufferings of the cross, we will never experience the joy that God longs to give us in His feast. No feast or supper in Scripture is characterized by the sadness and solemnity that we have created for this meal. The Old Testament sacrificial meals, of which Passover is one, were filled with joy, hope and gratitude. Jesus offers us His broken body and His shed blood in the Supper, but He does not ask us to focus on the body and blood. Rather the Supper anticipates Christ’s work to forgive sin and the fulfillment of the Passover in The Kingdom to come. That perfect deliverance and expectation make the Lord’s Supper a meal of joy and hope. The practice of the Supper in Luke 24 and in Acts 2, 20 are joyful celebrations, not merely focusing on the death of Christ but also His resurrection. The Supper is an experience of the living presence of Christ, mysteriously present with us as we eat and drink, and not upon the gorish and cruel death of Christ alone.
So how do we celebrate the Eucharist with joy? It will take some effort to get us beyond the funeral mindset. But first let me suggest to you that if we are to celebrate the Supper we must first recognize that the chief characteristic of the Eucharist should be thanksgiving and not reflection. “To remember” Jesus in this event is to reenact and re-experience Jesus, not simply to reflect upon Him. It is to rehearse the salvation of God through the telling of stories and the sharing of testimony. Sometimes we can sing a joyful song. Perhaps our children could rehearse a drama for us during Communion. Perhaps we could turn in our pews to share a story of God’s deliverance in our lives. There are many other ways we can celebrate, but we first must return to Scripture and liberate the Eucharist from predictable solemnity and for joyful celebration.
Finally, the Table is a place of service. Ironically, no sooner than Jesus had celebrated this last supper with His disciples, an argument arose at the table concerning who was the greatest at the table. The disciples wanted to know who was on the top of the chart, where Jesus placed them on the hierarchy in His Kingdom. Jesus totally turns their question upon its head, and He says that the one they want to impress is actually their servant. The one who is greatest is actually the one serving them. Jesus says in Luke 22:27, “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.”
The Table that belongs to Jesus is not a place for the exercise of authority, titles or power. In the gospel of John, Jesus does not serve bread and wine on this occasion but washes feet (John 13). The word Luke uses is diakonon, or deacon or servant. It refers to those who wait on tables. Jesus is the Host of this Passover feast; we all are servants who partake together. Therefore, the Supper is not a place for clergy-laity distinctions, nor is it a place for gender prerogatives. Both of these have been perpetuated by an assumption that that those who serve do so as authorities rather than servants. As one author says, “We sit at the Table to serve each other, not to dominate each other.” The Table is a family affair, a meal characterized by inclusiveness and mutuality. Jesus was not only the Host, but the Waiter too. The Table reveals to us that servanthood is the heart of God, and the Table invites us to that same service and same humility.
More than anything, we come to this Table not because there is power of the bread and cup that we partake, but because it is Jesus who is our Host at this Passover feast. He is our sacrifice, our lamb, our deliverer. And now the one who has died for us, who was slain, and who won our freedom at the cross is alive and reigns with God forever. He meets the church mysteriously in this event where we discover over and over His presence and grace, where we come to know again and again His protection for us, and where we wait with hope for our final deliverance to the place where we will eat at Table with Him in the Kingdom of God.
On October 10, 1982 in St. Peter's square in Rome, Father Maximilian Kolbe's death was put into its proper perspective. Present in the crowd of 150,000 people was the man whose place Father Kolbe took in the starvation bunker, Francis Dylewski, and his wife, and his children, and his children's children. Indeed many had been saved by that one man. This was a victory won over all the systems of contempt and hate, over all the evils that threatened to defeat them.
Every Sunday and wherever we celebrate the Supper, we gather as delivered people, a people made victorious by our Passover Lamb. We who have experienced that victory come to this Table to give thanks. If you are worn down and weary with sin or guilt, if you feel evil crouching outside your door, if you long for the embrace of God . . . come to the Table . . . not to wallow in your sin, and not just to reflect, but to give thanks for the deliverance and protection that are already yours. The Table is a place of grace, a place of gratitude where thanksgiving can lead you again to real joy and a lasting hope. The Host is waiting to serve you. Come to the Table.
» Back to top |
Bulletin
Class Materials
Resources
Sermons
Spiritual Life
 |
