Have you ever been with someone who shared something so personal, so tender, so precious that you were almost embarrassed for them? As though they had accidentally disrobed in front of all of you, and you wanted to turn away while backing in with a cloak, as Noah’s sons did?
This is the God we worship, whose deepest heart for His children was put on display in that upper room so many years ago, whose act of unimaginable love we recall over and over again at the Table.
We have shouted our praises, we have declared ourselves His followers in battle as He reclaims His own. We have cried out at the vision of His holiness, and now we find ourselves gazing on His exposed heart. I keep thinking of those cheesy statues of Jesus with the open, bleeding heart, and I realize now that, as poorly done as they are, they speak a truth that my words will never capture, though I write ten thousand of them. Perhaps in the past I have been embarrassed by the statues not because of the quality as much as by the naked truth I was unprepared to see. I’m not sure.
What is true is that we are now at the place where Jesus holds up His own flesh and offers it to us, though it might appear to be bread. Then He holds up the cup, and speaks of the Blood He will shed for the love of you and me, and asks us to drink of it.
Once, as I was celebrating, I had a sort of a vision. As I said those “words of institution” I found myself looking out through His eyes at the gathered congregation, the disciples, both at once. My heart was shattered by the love He felt for them as he looked ahead to the breaking of His own flesh, the pouring out of His own Blood, and the sweetness of the pain that He anticipated. To write it is to risk sounding strange and masochistic, but I knew in that moment the depth of the love that made the pain that was to come a sweetness to Him, at least in that moment. So inflamed was His heart for you and for me as he lifted the bread and the cup that a strange joy permeated all his expectations of the suffering to come.
This is the moment of intimacy for which the Father longs, to reveal the depth of His love to us in this way, and to have us receive it for all that it is.
For a long time, I didn’t understand this. For a long time, it was the community gathered around the Table that made this moment holy to me. This was like the Thanksgiving table we all long for, and a few of us grew up with, a holy place, yes, but not a place of intimacy.
Then there was the way that this recollection of the Last Supper flowed out of what has been called “salvation history.” Our different liturgical prayers set the meal in this context in different ways, but they all understand the meal as the culmination of something. For a good while, that was enough for me.
But now, this moment no longer brings anything to a close, but sets itself at the very beginning and the very end of Salvation. In Jesus’ self-giving at that Table, I hear the roaring of the chaos over which the Spirit moved and the roaring of the heavenly host as they sing praises in Revelation. There is no “salvation history,” there is just “Salvation” and it flows from the heart of the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world and seated on the throne in the final vision of the Bible.
And as much as God has used the community to break through to me, it is not some substitute for family that makes the gathering around that Table holy. I was taught at some time or other, perhaps in liturgy classes, that the Eucharist cannot be celebrated by one person, alone. (Nor even by two, for some strange reason.) While I appreciate the desire to avoid abuse, and the private misappropriation of the Sacrament, the reality is that there is no celebration of the Eucharist that happens alone. Even a priest, standing alone at the altar, is so surrounded by saints and angels who cry out the responses that it becomes impossible to be alone. The community is born of the holiness of the moment, not the other way ’round.
Here is the climax of our worship, the moment when heaven and earth are truly joined.
And in between the remembrance of Him that makes holy the moment and the reception of Him that makes holy His people, we have the Lord’s prayer, the only prayer we’ll ever really need.
But I’ll get to that next week….
In Him,
Jeff
