1 Cor 11.23-26, John 13.1-35
As many of you will know, our Lent Course at Seal this year explored this service that we are taking part in today, the service of Holy Communion – or the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass. Depending on your church tradition you might call it any of these things, but, as we discovered, each one casts a different light on this ancient service. Eucharist comes from the Greek word for “thanks” – we can only share bread and wine because God first gave it to us, so this service should be a reminder to live thankfully. Calling the service Holy Communion emphasizes the closenesss with God and one another that is at its heart, with all the complexities that can bring. People can be anxious about coming close to God, not sure if they belong or will be accepted, and how we feel about being close to others depends a lot on how we feel about the others! “Mass” is more usually a name you’d hear for this service in Roman Catholic or High Anglican Churches. It comes from the words that close the service in the old Latin liturgy, “Ite, missa est” – roughly translated as “Go, it is finished or sent” – the equivalent in our service is that dismissal “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord”. It’s thought that people who didn’t understand Latin simply recognised the word “missa” , and applied it to the whole service, hence “Mass”, but I like the way it emphasizes that the point of the service isn’t simply to spend an hour in a holy bubble, but to carry something back out into the world. It’s often said that “what happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas”, but “what happens in the Mass” certainly shouldn’t stay in the Mass. It should be food for the journey, something which equips and strengthens us to live and love as the people of God, bringing good news to those around us.
But the fourth of the common titles for this service, the Lord’s Supper, is perhaps the one which comes to the fore today, because tonight we are very consciously recalling the story of Jesus’ Last Supper with his friends. He took bread and wine, shared them and told his friends that every time they did this, they should do it “in remembrance of him". In some sense, the bread and wine would be his body and blood, his presence with them. Whatever else this service is, it is the Lord’s Supper, something he did with his followers on the night before he died, something he told us to do as well. Something about this business of eating and drinking together mattered to him. He could have said “read the Bible in remembrance of me” or “work for justice in remembrance of me“or “love one another in remembrance of me”, but he didn’t. He said, “Do this! Eat and drink together in remembrance of me”. Maybe that seems odd, because those other things sound more important than eating and drinking, but perhaps Jesus knew that in order to do those things, we first needed to do this thing, to eat and drink together in his company.
Jesus’ commandment is puzzling, and theologians and church leaders have puzzled much over it. They have argued. They have even fought and killed one another as they try to define what is happening as we share bread and wine. Does it literally become the body and blood of Jesus, even if it still tastes like bread and wine – an idea which became popular during the Middle Ages, but was firmly rejected by Protestant reformers? Or was Jesus present spiritually in some special way in the elements of communion? Or maybe these were simply symbols, reminders of an ancient story, but nothing special in themselves? Most Anglicans tend to sit on a spectrum between the second and third of those options today.
But in a way, trying to understand communion isn’t the point, and a lot of needless suffering has been caused because we have tried to. To me, it’s the very wordlessness of Communion that is the most important thing about it, the incomprehensibility of it. After all, we don’t need to understand food in order to be nourished by it. If that were the case, newborn babies would soon starve to death. They don’t know why they need their mother’s milk. They are just born with an instinct to seek it out. We don’t need to understand the chemistry that makes sugar, butter, eggs and flour into a cake in order to enjoy it – or what makes a tomato taste so delicious, if you want a healthier option – we just have to eat it.
Sharing food – eating together – seems almost instinctual too. It feels very inhospitable not to offer food and drink when someone comes to visit, and special occasions feel flat without some sort of bun fight afterwards. The widespread fury over the Downing Street “Partygate” gatherings is rooted in the fact that the rest of us would have longed to share food and drink with family, friends and colleagues, but couldn’t and didn’t, even after funerals, when it would have brought such comfort to do so. Knowing that those who’d made the rules hadn’t kept them just rubbed salt in the wound. What was so significant about a shared cup of tea after a funeral? Would the tea taste any different if people drank it on their own at home? No, but it emphasized their loneliness to have to do so.
I asked at the beginning of the Lent course, whether, if there was a pill we could take to supply all our nutritional needs, people would take it. Despite all the preparation and washing up it would save – an appealing thought for some – people generally answered no, especially not for those special times together, Christmas and Easter, Birthdays and Anniversaries, or meals out with friends. Sharing food, lingering over it together, makes memories, and also unlocks memories; of past celebrations and the people we shared them with – remembering them brings them back into our lives – of things we’ve done and things that have happened to us. There may be arguments, tensions, subjects we try to avoid – we’ve all had uncomfortable family dinners, I’m sure – but the fact that we are eating together says that in some sense we recognise that we belong together, that we aren’t strangers to one another, but part of one body.
The Last Supper that Jesus shared was no different, in that sense. “Love one another, as I have loved you,” he said to his disciples. You are one family, grafted into one vine, whether you like it or not. And if that feels like a challenge – as it almost certainly will at some point - then we should remember who was at that table with him then, Judas who betrayed him, Peter who denied knowing him, and all the rest who ran away. Despite that, or maybe because of that, they needed this memory of shared bread and wine, shared love, to heal and restore them to one another and God. However we understand communion, the message is that it matters. It draws us to each other and to God, reminding us that we are indestructibly linked together by his love, and held together in his hands, no matter what has happened, or what we’ve done..
Among us and before us Lord, you stand,” says the hymn we shall sing later,”with arms outstretched and bread and wine at hand. Confronting those unworthy of a crumb, you ask that to your table we should come.”
May we, in the words of the song, say “Yes” to God’s invitation, not just to the physical sharing of bread and wine, but to the sharing of our lives with one another and with him, meeting him in this meal, where he still nourishes, heals and blesses.
Amen
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