Scripture Reading: Luke 22:1-71, John 6:48-51
More often than I like to admit, I eat on the run. Just yesterday, rushing to catch a plane back home, I ambled through a hotel lobby eating a biscuit and sipping on a cup of coffee. That was “breakfast”: eaten alone, not even taking the time to sit down. It’s a symptom of the busyness of modern life that we see meals in a utilitarian way—as a necessity to keep us going rather than an opportunity to linger over lovingly prepared food and to connect with others.
How different this is from the way Jesus treated meals! Throughout His earthly ministry, He lingered over meals. He exercised compassion in His choice of who He ate with. In His presence at meals, He enacted the arrival of God’s reign and displayed a foretaste of the great messianic banquet for all to see.
This attitude toward meals persisted right up until the night before His death. Knowing Judas would betray Him, Jesus chose to spend His time arranging for and eating one last meal with His disciples.
It was Passover, a holy day on which Jews remembered how God had delivered their ancestors from slavery in Egypt. On this night, though, Jesus made changes to the standard liturgy of the ceremonial meal. He took bread and told His disciples it was His body. He took the cup and told His disciples it was the new covenant in His blood. And He told them, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).
Since that night, followers of Jesus have followed His command to “do this” by taking what has come to be known as the Lord’s Supper, also known as Communion or the Eucharist (from the Greek word for “thanksgiving”). Today the Lord’s Supper takes a variety of forms: Some use a common loaf of bread and some use crackers or wafers. Some drink wine out of a common cup, and some drink grape juice out of individual cups.
Regardless of our specific practices, I think it’s essential to remember that the Lord’s Supper is, at root, a meal. It is a time when we commune together with our Lord, who took the time to share food with His disciples at a moment when He could have been trying to “optimize” His final hours. It is a time when we eat with one another—not rushing, not thinking only of ourselves and our agendas, but slowing down and being present with the church, the body of Christ.
Gordon Smith writes in his book A Holy Meal, “Nothing so effectively mitigates against the propensity toward individual autonomy within our culture and within Western Christianity as the Lord’s Supper.” Making time to share in this meal is a deeply countercultural act. It is a way of proclaiming to the world and to our fellow Christians that Jesus makes time to attend to us, and so we make time to attend to Him and to those He loves.
Written by Elliot Ritzema
