Bread and Wine
Communion is one of the few traditions in the Church that I have never had many problems with. It's a good reminder. I suppose it actually works because Jesus himself did it, and told everyone else to do it, and said that it would be a good reminder... and we are told it was he that said it every week when some version of that same passage is read. This morning, though, watching the emblems get passed around (I go to the typical Non-Denominational church where we've got the little square crackers and plastic cups with grape juice in them) I thought it'd be really cool to have communion the same way they did, at some point. It'd be really cool if it weren't so ...contrived, for lack of a better word. Just read this knowing that for once I'm not criticizing anything, I'm just... well, musing, I suppose.
I thought, wouldn't it be neat if churches were no more than groups of friends getting together to hang out and talk and nerd out about God together, just to share life with other people that are interested in and love him? And normal food items could be used for communion, like Jesus himself used normal food items? Like, pretzels, or chips, or cookies, or ...uh, baguettes (it seems like sandwiches have too many condiments to do the epic analogy much justice, sadly) or some other modern-day equivalent of the bread they ate, and cool-aid or Gatorade or that artificial punch stuff or some type of not-so-artificial bloody-looking juice as the wine equivalent.
It's a pretty disgusting metaphor, if you think about it. The only way we can be sustained is by continually (which is the point of doing it every time we meet), devouring Christ's guts, his sacrifice. We cannot live unless we're willing to take his body, crunch it down under our filthy teeth and then wash it down with his blood. It's absolutely nasty. Honestly, it kind of nauseates me. But that's what we are, nasty, nauseating, and that's the entire point of "The Lord's Supper," to get us to realize the extent of our filthiness and his goodness, the depth of our debt to him. It seems like it would have been an especially effective metaphor first time round, before centuries- millenia- of tradition had made it difficult to avoid apathy. I find it pretty epic that Jesus would randomly just start talking about how they're eating him in the middle of a casual, regular dinnertime conversation.
I thought, wouldn't it be neat if churches were no more than groups of friends getting together to hang out and talk and nerd out about God together, just to share life with other people that are interested in and love him? And normal food items could be used for communion, like Jesus himself used normal food items? Like, pretzels, or chips, or cookies, or ...uh, baguettes (it seems like sandwiches have too many condiments to do the epic analogy much justice, sadly) or some other modern-day equivalent of the bread they ate, and cool-aid or Gatorade or that artificial punch stuff or some type of not-so-artificial bloody-looking juice as the wine equivalent.
It's a pretty disgusting metaphor, if you think about it. The only way we can be sustained is by continually (which is the point of doing it every time we meet), devouring Christ's guts, his sacrifice. We cannot live unless we're willing to take his body, crunch it down under our filthy teeth and then wash it down with his blood. It's absolutely nasty. Honestly, it kind of nauseates me. But that's what we are, nasty, nauseating, and that's the entire point of "The Lord's Supper," to get us to realize the extent of our filthiness and his goodness, the depth of our debt to him. It seems like it would have been an especially effective metaphor first time round, before centuries- millenia- of tradition had made it difficult to avoid apathy. I find it pretty epic that Jesus would randomly just start talking about how they're eating him in the middle of a casual, regular dinnertime conversation.
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