“Communal Affairs” (World Communion Sunday)
Rick Olson, October 7, 2007
In the film Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a group of six fatuous, upper-middle-class French women and men try to have dinner. Really . . . that’s the entire plot of the film: they get together to eat over and over in the course of the movie, and fail each time . . . of course, this being a film by the surrealist director Luis Buñuel, the reasons they fail range from the banal to the absurd to the surrealistically farcical . . . but the basis of the movie is simple: six self-absorbed, nouveau-riche members of the ruling class trying—and failing—to eat together. The simple fact of sharing a meal manages to elude these people, and surely it’s part of Buñuel’s message: with all their money and pseudo-sophistication, they can’t even manage a sit-down dinner.
The film acknowledges something that we all know—mealtimes are somehow central to our world. They certainly are portrayed that way in New Testament times—they surely played the role of societal grease, of social lubricant that they do Buñuel’s film, but if anything, they were even more important as social barometers in biblical times. Eating was an important sign of hospitality, of course, but it also was a tool of social ordering as well—who you were determined who you ate with . . . Jews didn’t eat with Samaritans, Samaritans didn’t eat with Jews, and neither Jews nor Samaritans ate with the great, unwashed masses known as Gentiles. Therefore, meals were perhaps the most segregated events of the day.
The Gospels subvert that symbol, and the communal meal becomes is a powerful metaphor for unification and inclusiveness, one that Luke certainly understood. In his Gospel, table metaphors are particularly visible, from the king instructing his servants to scour the highways and hedges for the poor and crippled and lame to the vision of the messianic banquet, where “people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.” [1] In the
Our Gospel reading for today is Luke’s version of the institution of the Lord’s Supper . . . Communion was so important, so fundamental a symbol of Christ’s atoning sacrifice that there are no fewer than four versions of this scene . . . one over in 1st Corinthians, related by the Apostle Paul. Here in Luke, he takes the bread and he gives thanks to God and then he breaks the bread and gives it to his disciples . . . and you can discern a four-part ritual here . . . first, he takes the bread, second he gives thanks to God, third he breaks the bread and fourth he gives it to his disciples. These four fold actions are repeated—deliberately, and with outsized movements—every day by Christian communities all over the globe.
Each of the four movements has symbolic weight—the entire salvation story can be discerned in the sequence. First of all, Christ—or a pastor acting in her priestly role as stand-in for Christ—takes the bread and in that movement it is acknowledge that control is retained, that it is a willing sacrifice . . . Christ takes up the bread, takes up the cup himself, no one forces it upon him, no one gives it to him, he goes willingly to the cross . . . as Satan knew in the wilderness, he could have called down legions of angels to save him at any time, but he didn’t . . . he took his own body . . .
Then Christ—or, again, the pastor—gives thanks to God, and in that action is an acknowledgement that it is God that is doing this act of salvation, that it is neither the church nor the pastor nor Christ’s own self as Son of God that has given this salvific act, but that it is God in the end . . . And he gives thanks to God, recognizing that in the end—as are all things— it is in the control of God . . . it is God who gives up God’s own son so that we might be free . . . You know, the high-church name for the Lord’s supper is Eucharist, that’s Greek for thanksgiving, and it is in thanksgiving to God that we break the bread and drink the wine. And though it’s natural to thank someone who’s giving you a piece of bread or a cup to dip it in, it’s inappropriate, because it’s not from the pastor or from the elder who’s assisting her, it’s from God . . . there are a couple of more appropriate responses . . . when the pastor or the elder says “the body of Christ, broken for you” or “the blood of Christ, shed for you” it’s appropriate to respond “and also for you” or just with a simple “amen,” in the biblical sense of agreement . . .
Well. Now that I’ve got that off my chest, on to the third Eucharistic action . . . the breaking of the bread and the pouring of the cup symbolizes the actual killing, the instant of scapegoating of the Lamb of God. And we hold it up for all to see as we break the bread, and we like a good tearing motion that’s visible in the back, and when we pour the cup we try to make as much noise as possible, as much noise perhaps as pouring the waters of baptism, here at the end of Christ’s ministry . . . and we do all of this in remembrance of Christ, of an action that was performed once and for all, long and ago . . .
And finally we eat of the bread and drink from the cup, and we become in that instant a part of the story, co-conspirators, co-operators in salvation history . . . we eat the bread and drink the cup and as we do, we act out the ingestion of the Word of God, the Word that had become flesh and dwelt among us . . . because even though it sounds gross, that is what has somehow happened to us as part of Christ’s body, we have been assimilated into it just as Christ has been assimilated into us. And as we ingest that body and blood we remember that fact, we remember that we—like the prophets before us, like Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Isaiah—we have taken in the Word of God, and now it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us.
And so the entire salvation story is bound up in the four movements of the Eucharist, and though we are already members of that body, we remember with grateful praise and thanksgiving all that God has done for us, and we ask the Holy Spirit to lift us into the presence of the risen Christ, who sits at the right hand of God Almighty . . . it is through the offices of the Holy Spirit that the sharing of the bread and wine becomes the participation in the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and through the same Holy Spirit that we are united in communion with all the faithful in heaven and on earth, in any time and any place . . . As we enact being fed the body and blood, we assimilate Christ into us, and are assimilated into Christ, just as are our sisters and brothers around the world assimilated into Christ . . . and thus, we are united in the Eucharist with the whole Church in every place, and the whole Church is present there at the table of Jesus Christ.
There’s a recurring scene in the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where its six idiotic protagonists, symbols of all that’s bad in the world to the director Buñuel, are walking down a deserted country road, seemingly together . . . but as the scene is repeated throughout the film, our “heroes” become increasingly bedraggled on that deserted road, and it becomes clear that they’re not really together, that though they occupy the same general locality—and share occasional touches of intimacy—in fact they are each terribly alone, each locked in a bubble of self-regard . . . and because they repeatedly fail to break bread together, they are denied true intimacy and communion. But they are denied this intimacy, this fellowship, in part because of their isolation, their selfishness, their egocentricity. And in the end, the film presents a very nihilistic view of the world: we are forever prevented from truly connecting with one another, truly sitting down united in Eucharistic fellowship . . .
Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever felt that you are in our own little bubble, that although you may share the same space with a number of folks, although you may be surrounded by people who love you day and night, in the end you are alone? It seems that this is the existential problem of our times . . . as we become increasingly individualistic, as we are increasingly able to tailor our own little spaces to fit our own little selves, we become increasingly isolated, increasingly alienated one from another. As we become ever more our “own man” or our “own woman,” our relations with one another become strained and formal and broken, until we are at last alone, even when surrounded by friends and neighbors and loved ones.
But you know what? The Good News is that around the table of our Lord, we are truly one . . . because we are united with Christ, because we are in him and he in us, we can be truly together . . . unlike in the movie, where our “heroes” wander in a fog of self-regard, forever denied the simple fellowship of a good meal, we are invited to the table where we experience a remarkable communion one with another in Jesus Christ.
As is often the case, Paul said it best: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” As in a few minutes we gather around this table, to contemplate what that means, to ponder the remarkable claim of our faith: that in Jesus Christ we achieve true connection, true communion, true fellowship . . . that in Jesus Christ, all of us, from east to west, north to south, are one. Amen.
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