Bible Stories
You Should Know: 4. The Last Supper
The Church of the Wayfarer
Norm Mowery, Pastor
April 6, 2014
Mark 14:22-25
Last Monday night Linda and I ate
dinner at the Cachagua General Store in Carmel Valley. It was a memorable
evening. The setting is quite rustic to say the least (some of the curtains are
made out of butcher paper) but the food is gourmet.
Have any of you been there?
Think about your most memorable meal
ever.
Has
anyone ever been invited to dinner at the White House?
Has
anyone had a meal with a famous person?
When we were at the President Reagan
Library recently we saw china that was used for state dinners with world
leaders.
That is the closest that I will ever
come eating at the White House!
Meals are important.
I have to confess that I enjoy
watching food programs like ‘Anthony Bordain—Parts Unknown’ and ‘Andrew
Zimmerin—Bizarre Foods’.
Many dinners have been depicted in
movies.
Remember the movie ‘Guess Who’s Coming
to Dinner?’ This is the 1967 comedy about an interracial couple’s efforts to
bring their families together for a meal.
The Sacrament of Holy Communion is a
serious occasion and should be approached with reverence each time it is
observed.
But it is also a feast that we are
invited to celebrate.
This is the fourth in a series of
messages I have titled, “Bible Stories You Should Know.”
The first one was the Great
Commandment—“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and spirit;
and your neighbor as yourself.”
The second Bible story you should know
is the parable of the ‘Least of These’—Jesus said that when you have done it
for the least of these you have done it unto me.
Last week I talked about the Great
Commission—“go into all the world and share the gospel with every creature.”
Today we look at the Last Supper—this
is a Bible Story you should know.
Throughout his life, Jesus attended
parties.
Wherever he went, curiosity and
excitement followed and often Jesus was invited to join others for food and fellowship.
It is hard to imagine that these
occasions were a bore; otherwise Jesus and his disciples would have been
dropped from the guest list!
I like to think that Jesus had a
contagious laugh!
With these parties in mind, it's
appropriate that Jesus left us with a feast to remember him by. It’s the Last
Supper.
To understand the situation, we need
to know that when the Lord’s Supper was celebrated in the first-century church,
it was done differently from how we usually do it today.
In the early church, the Lord’s Supper
was observed as part of an actual meal that believers ate together.
They ate to satisfy normal hunger;
they shared some bread and wine,
to
make the symbolic connection to Jesus’ last meal.
I surmise that the meal was something like a
Methodist potluck dinner.
I like to eat.
According to the Gospels, so did
Jesus.
One of the criticisms leveled against
Him by His adversaries was that He was always eating and drinking with
"the wrong kinds of people."
The dinner table is an intimate, holy,
transforming, mysterious place—you've got to be careful whom you eat with
because when you eat with someone you are likely to set aside differences.
Oscar
Wilde said, “After a good dinner, one could forgive anybody, even one's relatives."
In the Bible, eating has special
significance.
The Biblical story begins with the
eating of the forbidden fruit in the garden, and ends with sitting down at
banquet in heaven.
In the Bible, eating and drinking have
meaning far beyond what appears on the surface—which is to say, these
experiences are "sacramental" that is, they point beyond themselves
to something greater.
When you were a child did you have a
favorite grace that you said?
Perhaps it was, "God is great, God
is good, let us thank Him for this food."
In the twenty-third psalm, the
psalmist joyfully sings, 'Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of
my enemies.'
The
psalmist sings of this act of hospitality as an act of great friendship. The person
who invites you to dinner is the person who will stick beside you through thick
and thin.
Jesus often used the imagery of a
banquet to describe the Kingdom of God!
When the so-called "prodigal
son" returned home, the father celebrated by killing the fatted calf and
throwing a party.
So we can see what a wealth of
tradition Jesus was drawing upon when He gathered His students together in that
Upper Room for The Last Supper.
The meal had many meanings and
memories:
deliverance from slavery to
freedom,
a feast of joyful celebration
and commemoration,
an offering of thanksgiving,
a sign of divine hospitality
and friendship.
.
When Christ invited his disciples to
the table he,
blessed the food,
broke the bread,
and shared the bread and the
cup,
the meal became a visible sign of God
saying to them:
"I am your God. You are my people."
The Christian experience was never
meant to be a solitary one with each person content to work on his or her own
spiritual relationship apart from others.
A tourist tells of something he saw
when traveling in India that helped him understand better the idea of the true
church.
He was visiting a Christian community
where people were suffering from leprosy.
When it came time for lunch, he headed
for the central dining room.
On the way, he heard the sound of
laughter behind him.
Turning around, he saw two young men,
one riding on the other’s back. Pretending
to be horse and rider, they were thoroughly enjoying themselves. Then the tourist noticed that the man who
was carrying his friend was blind, and the man he was carrying was lame.
The man without eyes used his feet;
the man without feet used his eyes. Together
they fetched their food and shared it.
That’s the idea of the church. We all serve each other.
That’s the idea of the church. We all serve each other.
Years ago, there was a penal colony in
Port Arthur, Tasmania, the island off the southeast tip of Australia. Tasmania
is where Linden Brown was raised and where his 100 year old mother still lives.
The prison closed long ago, but the
prison chapel still stands. Inside, it consists of many little cubicles in
which convicts were secured singly during worship services.
The separate cubicles prevented
inmates from seeing or communicating with one another. The chaplain who
conducted the services there would have seen not a congregation but 50 or more
individual faces peering at him from the cubicles. Perhaps this was a useful
way of controlling violent offenders, but in the biblical sense, this was no
church at all, for there was no possibility of community.
The church isn’t solitary Christians
in our own cubicles; it’s a fellowship of followers of Jesus Christ.
This is an interior
picture of the prison chapel.
Writer Nancy Mairs tells about what communion came to mean to her when she came to her present church during a serious illness. She was not a Christian.
“The model I experienced at that church was one of inclusion rather than exclusion.
Instead of being denied communion
unless I converted, I was given communion until I felt strong enough to
convert.
The nourishing quality of the Eucharist,
freely offered, has always been a central metaphor for me.
I don’t partake because I’m a good
Christian.
I partake because I am a bad Christian
riddled by doubt, anxiety and anger: fainting from severe hypoglycemia of the
soul.
I need food.”
Notice how she talks about the nourishing quality of receiving communion as part of a community. “I was given communion until I felt strong enough to convert.”
Notice how she talks about the nourishing quality of receiving communion as part of a community. “I was given communion until I felt strong enough to convert.”
It’s always important for us to feed
our spiritual lives at home, through private prayers and Bible reading. That’s
eating at home.
But when it comes to the life of
faith, we also need to dine out, in company with other Christians. As we eat together we all get involved.
"Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may not remember.
Involve me, and I will understand." -- Native American proverb
In Arlington cemetery there is a
monument which we call "The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier." It was
erected not in honor of one person, but in honor of all those unknown persons
who sacrificed.
Viewing the tomb, a small girl once
said to her father: "It's not right, is it?"
"What's
not right, my dear?" said her father.
"The
name they give to this place.
It's not right. That soldier is not
unknown.
Look at what it says on the tomb:
'KNOWN ONLY TO GOD.'
The soldier is not unknown. He is
known to God."
And so he is.
And so are you.
As you come forward to the Lord’s
Table today, know you are welcomed by a Loving God.
Come if you have sinned.
Come if you have lapsed in your faith.
Come if you have had difficulties in marriage.
Come if you have had difficulties in marriage.
Come if you feel good about yourself
or yucky about yourself.
Come!
Taste
and see.
