At a last meal with his followers, before Jesus let himself get killed, he gave some final instructions: Love each other, serve each other, pray together, abide in Him, and eat and drink together in remembrance of him. You could argue that the first four instructions don’t need any organized religion, but the last one kind of does. We need to be organized enough, at least, to do this eating and drinking ritual.
So, the eighth reason to go to church in this series of ten, is that we need to get together to eat bread and drink wine (or something close) to remember Jesus.
Rituals drive truth deep into our beings, so Jesus gave us a ritual to repeat till his return, to ground us in the transforming truth that he died for us. He said the bread was his body, the wine his blood (Matthew 26:26-28.) He was taking all our brokenness and evil upon himself and dying to show that God not only hates what is wrong, he also takes the rap for it. (1 Peter 2:24.)
When we take in that truth (eat it and drink it) we let God save us.
That’s why we have those little chunks of bread (or wafers) in church. We’re buying in to the death and resurrection of Jesus. We’re staking our lives on the reality that these things really happened.
It must be something God takes pretty seriously because Paul pointed out in 1 Corinthians that the reason they were experiencing illness and early death was that they were abusing the ritual. They were using the time to pig out and be socially exclusive. Our culture doesn’t do that with communion, but some of us do gut the power of it by just going through the motions. Maybe we’re looking at what people are wearing as they file past us, or planning our pizza toppings for lunch. I’ve done that.
1 Corinthians 11:27-30 makes it clear that this doesn’t fly. So people who don’t yet believe in Jesus should not feel any pressure to eat or drink during communion. Just relax and observe. Those of us who do believe – let’s show up, focus and really enter in to what those little bits of bread and juice stand for. It’s the last thing he asked us to do before he died.
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