Thursday, March 29, 2007
Lent Bible Reading Challenge Day 33
The Last Supper
Matthew 26:17-29

Is Jesus a cannibal? Someone shared with me the other day a question about communion....it sounds crazy..yet here it is. The last meal that Jesus shares with his friends is one in which he tells them to eat his body and drink his blood. ??!! I just had the image of the final scene of the movie "The Thief, the Cook, and the Lover" in which the body of a murdered person is hidden by preparing it and serving it at a sumptuous meal. YIKES! Is this what this sacramental and spiritual meal is all about? It's what the Romans accused the early Christians of, and is most likely one of the ways that they justified first persecuting and outlawing Chritianity and its followers in the Empire 2,000 years ago.

I think that Jesus was actually a great teacher, knowing that we are much better experiential learners - that we remember what we touch, smell, taste, feel, hear, and experience......much more than a simple and classic 3 point sermon. So Jesus sums it all up with this symbol, a sign - food and drink - the most common of things - that from now on will be infused with meaning made at this meal - eat and drink to remember, to remember who Jesus was and is, to remember what love looks like, costs, and demands, to remember what we are called to in life, what we are created for, and what consuming is actually all about. What a genius...in a sense every time that they (and we now...) eat - the disciples will remember. In their experiences they'll remember the meaning-making Maundy Thursday meal in the words they hear, the flakiness of the bread, the touch of the cup to their lips, the feel of a body up against theirs as they sit crowded around a table, the longing of hunger in their stomachs and thirst in the back of their throat. REMEMBER. How come it's so easy to forget that?