The Taste of Communion
The other night we gathered with a group of our friends, as we often do, to connect, care for each other and pray. We decided that we would spend time together in communion around the table to start our time. One of our friends prepared the familiar elements of communion, bread and crackers and cups of juice. As a group we took time together to pause and pray, remember Jesus, and eat the bread and drink the cup.
In many ways this is what we are meant to do when we are together as followers of Jesus. We are meant to have the conversations remembering Jesus, breaking bread together and sharing the cup of fellowship. Somehow when we are doing life together and eating good food and partaking of beverages we are doing what Jesus asked us to do as people called by His name, but there is something far more beautiful and transformative that can happen when we pause intentionally in His presence, with HIs people, and we remember Jesus, His death and His resurrection, both in somber recognition and in hopeful declarative celebration. It is an odd thing to exist within the tensions of these emotions and thoughts. Our minds may have trouble, but our hearts, in right recognition of Christ’s sacrificial work on our behalf, somehow are able to engage and connect this most tragically wondrous of events…the death and resurrection of our beautiful saviour Jesus.
Nothing that Jesus did in His life could ever have earned Him the right to to be crucified on a Roman cross based on meritorious sin or offence. Nothing that He achieved or caused was deserving of the outcome that He encountered that Good Friday all those years ago.
Yet it was on that day that His body, after hours of abuse, mockery, and rejection by those He came to save, found itself hanging lifeless upon a hewn tree, that His very voice in creation history had spoken and made possible its existence.
It was His choice to embrace the will and way of His Father that led Him there.
It was His choice to stick with a plan, put in motion before the creation of the world.
It was His choice to love, and to love so fully that He yielded Himself to suffering, death and separation from the Father, so that we could know hope, receive life and not have to experience the consequential separation from God that our sin and sin natures had afforded us. His death satisfied the insatiable hunger of the law of sin and death. His resurrection guaranteed life and spoke loudly and clearly to all who would hear that there is hope for all who would come to Him and find their life as they recognize Him and embrace His death on their behalf.
When we take hold of the bread and cup and remember Jesus, we are not simply reminding ourselves of a historical figure that lived and died. Rather, we are reminding ourselves and those with us, of the incredible reality of the most important and pivotal moment in all of human history. We are remember Jesus, the God who became human, to die for humanity and redeem humanity, and then was resurrected conquering death and sin separation that humanity was facing so that we could experience new life in and through Him!
We eat the bread mindful of the cost of His broken body, a choice that He made and carried out for us. We drink the cup, aware of His blood that was poured out for the forgiveness of our sins. When we eat the bread that was broken we remember His broken body on the cross and also our brokenness without Him. When we drink the cup we remember the full cost of His life for us, and hear His words on the cross spoken over sin and death…”It is Finished.” We drink the cup leaving us with that final rich flavour of wine or juice and awareness not of sin or death as the last thought or word, but rather of the richness and fullness of the unmerited gift of life that we are offered and invited to participate in and with Christ.
As we enter into this Easter weekend. Wherever you find yourself and whomever you find yourself with, consider pausing around the table with bread and cup. Remember Jesus. Remember what He has done. Remind yourself of the wondrous gift you have been given. Speak out gratitude and thanksgiving to Him for what He has done and the difference that He has made in your life. Considering even sharing this with someone else who may not yet know Jesus.
And perhaps if you have not yet received that gift that Jesus offers, today, with gratitude, may you find this hope and the courage to receive for yourself the gift of new life in Jesus!
