The Symbols of Holy Week: The Table

This is the meditation I gave at the Maundy Thursday service at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ on April 21, 2011.

The Symbols of Holy Week:  The Table

A Maundy Thursday Meditation

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

April 21, 2011

Scripture:  1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

We, many of us at least, are used to thinking about symbols in connection with Communion.  We know—at least in the Protestant tradition we know—that the bread and the wine of Communion aren’t really the body and blood of Christ even if the New Testament stories about the Last Supper have Jesus say “This is my body.  This is my blood.”  We know that the bread and the wine are symbols of the presence of Jesus Christ with his people as they gather to remember him and what he did, and does, for them.  So you might expect a meditation in a Maundy Thursday service on the meaning of the symbols of the bread and the wine of the Last Supper.  Tonight, however, I don’t want to talk about the bread and the wine.  I want to talk about another symbol from the Last Supper.  I want to talk about the table.

There was, after all, a table.  Jesus gathered his disciples for the feast of the Passover, a real, full meal.  There were, we assume, at least thirteen people present, Jesus and the twelve disciples.  I actually think that there were at least fourteen people there because I am pretty sure Mary Magdalene would have been there too.  They came for a meal, and they would have had a table on which the meal was served.  The table of the Last Supper was a real, physical object on which the food of the Last Supper was set.

The image most of us have of the Last Supper, and its table, probably comes from Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous depiction of the scene.  We even have a reproduction of it here in the fellowship hall, and I’ve copied the painting into your bulletin for this evening.  In that picture Jesus and the twelve disciples all sit or stand along one side of a long table.  None of the figures faces directly out toward the viewer, but they are all turned toward the artist enough that he can paint their faces.  It’s a great painting that captures the tension and the agitation of the moment when Jesus tells the disciples that one of them was going to betray him.  It’s a great painting, but I seriously doubt that  it accurately portrays the actual Last Supper.  An upper room in an ordinary house in first century Jerusalem probably wasn’t long enough to fit a table as long as the one Da Vinci depicts.  The room in his painting looks more like a room in a Renaissance Italian palace than a room in a first century Jerusalem house.  But even if the room were that long surely the people present would have gathered around it, not along just one side of it.  Their being all on one side is an artistic device that lets Da Vinci give them all faces.  A friend imagines Jesus having just said “Everybody who wants to be in the picture, on this side of the table!”  I’m sure a picture showing them around a table, not all on one side of it, would be truer to what actually happened.  People who gather for a meal normally gather around a table, not along one side of it.

If we see Jesus and the disciples gathered around a table we can, I think, more easily see the table as a symbol.  The table becomes central to the gathering of the people.  It is the table that draws the people together.  They come to partake of what will be placed on it and to have fellowship with those who will gather around it.  The table becomes the center of their time together.  They form a circle around it.  Gathered around it they face one another.  Across it they share food and drink and conversation.  Around it they become community.

Community is what the table of the Last Supper symbolizes for me, and in symbolizing community it draws our attention to something really important about Communion, something about Communion that we too often overlook or even forget.  There are of course different names for the sacrament we celebrate this evening.  Technically it is the Eucharist, a word we get from the Greek that means thanksgiving.  Sometimes we call it The Lord’s Supper.  Our most common name for it, however, is Communion.  Why Communion?  What does Communion mean?  Dictionary definitions of communion (with a small c) include things like “an act or instance of sharing” and “intimate fellowship.”  What strikes me about the word is that is so similar to the word community.  It clearly has the same root as the word community.  Communion and community aren’t quite synonymous, but they’re pretty close to it.

The symbol of the table as a symbol of community reminds us that Communion—with a capital C—and community are inseparable.  Communion, the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, to use it’s more technical name, is an act of the Christian community.  Yes, usually someone who is ordained presides at the sacrament, but Communion is never something that one person can properly do alone.  European kings used to have their private chapels where they could receive Communion without community, but that was an abuse and a misunderstanding of the sacrament.  Communion requires community.

More than that, however, Communion properly understood builds community.  In our kind of Protestant tradition that puts so much emphasis on words and on right belief we might define Christians as those who believe in Jesus Christ, but some other Christian traditions, on the Protestant side especially the Episcopalians, define Christians as those who gather around Christ’s table for the sacrament of Communion.  In that way of looking at things Christian identity and unity are established by Communion.  We could learn a lot from their way of looking at it. 

So let me suggest that when you partake of the bread and the wine—juice actually, but it doesn’t matter—this evening you think of the table around which those first disciples partook of bread and wine with Jesus just before his arrest and execution.  Open your hearts and your minds to the ways in which our coming to the common table forms us into community.  Be aware that we are partaking of the elements of which Jesus spoke around that ancient table together, as community.  Try seeing taking Communion not as something you do by or for yourself but as something that we do as and for community. 

In a few minutes I will invite you to come to this little table up front here to partake of Communion.  It’s a small table, not big enough for all of us to gather around at the same time; but we have been gathered at this larger table all evening.  We’ve been gathered around this larger table.  We have gathered as a group of Christ’s disciples much like those original disciples did on that fateful night so long ago.  The table, either this big one we’ve been seated at or this little one that holds the bread and wine of the sacrament, is a powerful symbol.  It is a symbol of community.  May our coming to the table—to both of these tables—this evening strengthen us as a community, a community of Christians with Christ as our head.  Amen.