Today’s reading: Job 36-37; 1 Corinthians 11
I’m pretty sure I’ve brought this up before, but when I read about the Lord’s supper, I can’t help but think we have something wrong when it comes to how we celebrate Communion today.
On the one hand, I’ve wondered before if Jesus, in using bread and wine, was not so much intending to institute a Christian ceremony as He was taking something mundane, a constant in everyone’s lives, eating and drinking, and saying, “Let these mundane things, as often as you do them, remind you of what I’ve done for you.” This would be a lot like how God took the regular appearance of a rainbow and added significance to it in His promise to Noah saying, “Now whenever you see a rainbow, remember that I will never again flood the whole earth to destroy all life on it.”
However, this is clearly not how Jesus’ earliest followers understood His words (or at least not solely), because we have passages, like our passage today in 1 Corinthians 11, where it is clear they had some kind of event or ceremony tied to it, and were not just thinking in terms of eating and drinking generally. I do have a category for this being a “both and” kind of situation, where they did take it as a regular sign to remember Jesus’ sacrifice for them every time they ate and drank, but then also had a communal celebration of the same, but, however else they took it, they clearly held to some sort of communal celebration of the Lord’s supper.
But what did that communal celebration look like? Was it once a month, or once a week, everyone getting a small half-bite of bread, and a half-sip of wine while they solemnly and quietly spent a minute or two in private prayer or singing a hymn? It sure doesn’t seem that way from the Bible…
Paul condemns the Corinthians for their practice in that one person goes hungry and another gets drunk. This clearly means people were drinking enough wine to be able to get drunk (definitely more than a sip from a communal cup), and that there was enough food that people shouldn’t have been going hungry. It really seems like the Lord’s supper was, for them, celebrated in the context of a larger shared meal. And it probably wasn’t just a quiet time of prayer and reflection. The fact that some were getting drunk while others were hungry likely has to do with when people showed up. The rich would have been able to get there earlier, but the poor, the laborers or slaves, would only be able to come after a longer day of work, but then there was nothing left of the meal when this group arrived. If the entire time was supposed to be spent quietly contemplating the crucifixion and resurrection, as many churches teach it today, then this would have meant likely and hour or more of people sitting in quiet reflection while waiting for others to arrive, and especially if some were getting drunk during that time, I have a hard time believing that was the point of the time.
But then Paul also talks about taking the bread and the cup in an unworthy manner, which would further point to there being something distinct about their communal celebration over against their daily eating, if indeed they did take Jesus’ words as giving them a mundane sign to remind them constantly of what He did for them.
So what should our celebration of the Lord’s supper look like? I don’t feel like I have a good answer to that, but I am pretty sure it doesn’t look like quietly filing up the aisles of a church to get a small piece of bread and a sip of wine or juice before quietly shuffling back to our seats and waiting for the next hymn to start…
There was one time that my friends and I accidentally celebrated what seems to me to much more closely reflect the Lord’s supper in the Bible. In that church, we very seldom celebrated any sort of communion, but when we did, it was generally in our small groups and we would have bread and wine and pray together. There were about a dozen of us there that night and we had a couple bottles of wine and a couple loaves of bread, intending to celebrate communion in our normal fashion. As we were getting the wine and bread out, and asking if there was anything specific we wanted to be praying about that day, one of the women started telling us about some really difficult things she had been going through lately. As she was talking, we all just started drinking the wine and eating the bread, and when she was done, we prayed for her, but then just started talking about our lives. People told us about their struggles, and we prayed for them, and people told us about their victories and we praised the Lord with them, and people told us about their embarrassing failures and we laughed with them. We spent a couple hours, sitting around that table, eating and drinking, and talking more openly and intimately about our lives with one another than I have ever seen a group like that do before. It was incredible, and the presence of God was there with us in an incredibly palpable way.
I don’t pretend or assume that there is some magic formula for recreating that time around the table, but it honestly seems so much closer to the Biblical picture of the Lord’s supper than anything else I have ever experienced in a church setting that I can’t help but wonder if that’s really the kind of experience Jesus intends for us. And I also can’t help but wonder what our church communities would look like if what we experienced that night was much more the normative Christian experience…
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