Readings: 1 Corinthians 11.17-34; Isaiah 25: 1-10; Luke 14:
12-14
My favourite sermon on this passage, we heard just now from
1 Corinthians was just seven words long.
It was delivered by Alan Garrow – a former member of St Matthew’s – and
it was this:
“This Holy Communion is not a rehearsal.”
After which the Alan just sat down. I am tempted, at this point, to do the same
and let you reflect on those seven words: “This Holy Communion is not a
rehearsal”. But I suspect you may think
you need a few more words if you are to feel you have got your money’s worth
today.
So today I would like to talk about why this Holy Communion
is not a rehearsal by discussing the past, present and future dimensions of
Holy Communion but in particular by thinking of Holy Communion as a future feast
that mysteriously breaks though into the present. I also want to think about that feast and how
and why it’s a feast to which everyone is invited. And in doing this I want to expand upon the
idea that the Holy Communion is central to the Church: even that the Holy
Communion and Church are one and the same.
First the past, future and present dimensions of Holy
Communion.
You may have noticed that I have already referred to the
past by mentioning our reading from St Paul’s letter to the church at Corinth
written in around 53 AD. And I have also
alluded to the history of this church of St Matthew’s by referring to a former
member of our congregation who left about 15 years ago. And any sermon on the Holy Communion, or the
Lord’s Supper as it’s called in our reading, has surely to look back and in
particularly to recall Jesus’ institution of Holy Communion on the Thursday
before the Friday on which he was crucified.
In today’s reading St Paul gives a mini-sermon on how the
Corinthian church ought to be celebrating Holy Communion and in doing so he reminds
his readers that, ‘The Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf
of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body
that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took
the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me”’ (11: 23). So
Jesus is saying here that the reason for sharing and consuming the bread and
wine at Holy Communion is to remember him.
And in remembering him we are surely to remember what he has
done for us through his life, death and resurrection. Today I will focus on his life and in
particular touch upon the meals he took part in – but that is of course, not to
say, that his death and resurrection were unimportant: but perhaps not more so
than his life.
There are, you’ll remember, many descriptions of meals in
the Gospels besides the Last Supper. Jesus’
ministry, as described in John’s gospel, begins with a wedding feast at Cana
which had great wine, and ends with a celebratory breakfast of freshly cooked
fish and bread on the beach of the Sea of Galilee, after his resurrection. Along the way we have stories of many other
meals which Jesus attends. All of these
meals are much more than occasions for the consumption of foods and drink. In particular they involve peopled coming
together to talk – to commune in other words – both with Jesus and with
others. Not that the food and drink is
unimportant here: because without food and drink to share there cannot be a
meal.
And at these meals things happen. Things are done to Jesus: e.g. a women pours
ointment over Jesus’s feet at a meal in Bethany. And Jesus does things: e.g. Jesus heals a
person of dropsy at a meal in the house of a Pharisee. Jesus is recognised for who he is in the
breaking of bread at a meal with two of his disciples in Emmaus. The meals are extraordinary meals. And the guests are often a strange bunch,
prostitutes, tax collectors, friends yes but also enemies. The meals that Jesus attends are radically
inclusive.
Jesus also brings meals into his teaching about the Kingdom
of God. In particular, in one of his
parables, Jesus’ takes up Isaiah’s prophecy of a heavenly banquet (that we
heard as our first reading today, of which more in a moment) and tells the
story of a great feast, in one version to celebrate a marriage. The feast is organised by a king, or some
other important person, and many are invited.
But the guests who are invited first give their excuses so that the
poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind end up coming instead.
Some of Jesus’ other preaching was about meals. In today’s reading from Luke’s gospel, Jesus
seems to be giving some practical, if challenging, advice about hosting dinner
parties. He tells the host of a banquet he is attending “When you give a
luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your
relatives or rich neighbours, in case they may invite you in return, and you
would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled,
the lame, and the blind.” This advice is surely not just directed at his
host for the meal that day but to us all.
And surely it applies to all meals including the Holy Communion.
There is, I think, a danger on focusing on the Holy
Communion as merely remembering past events.
History can often come to seem irrelevant to the present or indeed future.
And note that at the Last Supper, on
the Thursday night before his crucifixion, Jesus had yet to suffer and die and
indeed to rise again – that was to be three days later.
So already, Jesus, in this first Holy Communion, is pointing
forward to the future. Remembrance is
nothing if it doesn’t have an impact on the present and the future. The whole point of remembering the Holocaust
last Monday was to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. The whole point of remembering Jesus is to have
an impact on our lives today and tomorrow and for all time.
So the Holy Communion, as well as looking back, is for now and
also points forward. And in particular it
points forward to a future heavenly feast mentioned by the prophets, in
particular by Isaiah, by Jesus in his parables and sayings, and by St John in
his Revelation. This feast is sometimes
called ‘The Messianic Banquet’
It’s called ‘Messianic’ because it is associated with the
promise of a future Messiah in the Old Testament and we, of course, now know
that Jesus was that promised Messiah.
And it’s a banquet because this is no ordinary meal.
In our first reading today, Isaiah describes the food and
drink that will be served at the banquet.
In the words of the translation just read to us, this description ran, “On
this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food,
a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines
strained clear” which really doesn’t sound very appealing. Here is a better, if looser, translation: “On
this mountain the Lord of hosts, will hold a feast for all people with cake and
all sorts of delicious rich foods and excellent vintage wines.”
But a feast for what purpose? Isiah tells us that it is to celebrate the
end of death: ‘And he [the Lord of Hosts] will destroy on this mountain the
shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all
nations; he will swallow up death forever (25: 7).’ And this was accomplished by Jesus
It is also important to note from Isaiah’s description of
the banquet that, besides delicious food to eat and good wine to drink,
everyone is invited to celebrate the end of death. It’s a feast for ‘all peoples’ and not just
the people of Israel. And also note that
the mountain on which this banquet is to be held will be ‘a refuge to the poor,
a refuge to the needy in their distress’.
So this party is to be radically
inclusive.
But if Holy Communion points forward to a future heavenly
banquet then isn’t it just a rehearsal for the real thing? With Alan Garrow I do not accept that. As I have just said the celebratory purpose
of the Messianic Banquet has already been accomplished and so the Holy
Communion, provides a foretaste of that heavenly feast. But I am also of the view that given that
time is meaningless to God, eternity is now. The past is already redeemed; the future
is already realised. This means that our
present practice of Holy Communion can and should also anticipate the future and
that we can expect our experience of Holy Communion to be heavenly.
So yes the Holy Communion is remembrance, a commemoration of
things past but it’s also the breaking in of the future now.
So turning to the idea that the celebration of Holy
Communion is central to what it means to be Church. I would even maintain that the Church is the
celebration of Holy Communion: they don’t simply stand side-by-side, they are
one and the same.
In our reading from I Corinthians today St Paul talks about
the Body of Christ in two senses: as the bread eaten in the communion meal and
as the Church. So when Jesus, as Paul records in 1 Corinthians 11: 24, takes a
loaf of bread, breaks it and says ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in
remembrance of me, Jesus and Paul clearly mean that the bread is Jesus’ body. But when, 21 verses later, Paul says, in 1
Corinthians 12: 12, ‘For just as the body is one and has many members, and all
the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ’ he is
evidently thinking of the Church as Jesus’ body.
And at one point Paul seems to muddle the two. So when he warns the Corinthians against
taking part in the Holy Communion in ways that are unworthy and says: ‘For all
who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against
themselves (11: 29)’ is he saying that his readers are not discerning that the
bread is really or symbolically the flesh of Jesus or are they are not seeing
that the others around them who are sharing the bread are their fellow members
of that mystical body that is the Church?
Or perhaps both?
And when as we distribute the bread and, say as we will
later: ‘The body of Christ’ are we pointing to the bread or to the Church or to
both?
There is an old communion prayer – from the Didache -
written about 100 AD, which asks ‘As this broken bread, once dispersed over the
hills, was brought together and became one loaf, so may thy Church be brought
together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom.’ Here the mystery of the church being gathered
from all nations into God’s kingdom is explicitly linked to the formation of
the bread for Holy Communion where that mystery has its focal point.
Paul’s mini-sermon on the Lord’s Supper in his letter to the
Corinthians is in response to things he has heard about ‘the divisions among
them’. He writes, ‘For, to begin with,
when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you (11:
18)’. These divisions are manifest in the way they
are conducting their Sunday Communion service.
It seems that the Holy Communion is no longer a coming together of the
whole church community. Instead: ‘When
the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one
goes hungry and another becomes drunk (11:21)’.
And those who ‘have nothing’ are humiliated (11: 22). It seems people who shouldn’t be are being
excluded.
This message that all should be invited to the meal that we
call Holy Communion is found in all of our readings today. All should be invited, are already invited
by God, regardless of wealth, income, age, gender, sexuality, physical and
mental abilities, even beliefs. All are
invited, it’s up to them whether they come.
If they come they might experience something of heaven.
It seems pertinent, at this point, to mention the
controversy about inclusion in the Church of England today and not withstanding
recent events it is worth pointing out, that in October 2018, as a contribution
to the continuing debate within the Church of England about gender and sexuality
the bishops of the Oxford Diocese: +Steven, +Andrew, +Alan and +Colin wrote a
joint letter to everyone in the diocese setting out their expectations of
inclusion and respect towards LGBTI+ people. That letter is still worth reading. In particular the letter notes that the
Archbishops of Canterbury and York had recently called for “a radical new
Christian inclusion in the Church founded in scripture, in reason, in
tradition, in theology and the Christian faith as the Church of England has
received it”[i].
When we are told by scripture and reason to invite everyone to Holy Communion
everyone means everyone.`
To end here is an account of a meal – a party really – by a
Methodist Minister called Donald Eadie:
I was busy when he stopped me on a wind-swept corner off a
street in the Golborne. I recognised the
face of a young Moroccan. ‘There is a party at four this afternoon under the
motorway. Come and bring a bottle and
food. And pass the word around!’ A spontaneous party? For whom? For Cecile.
Sister Cecile was from the Sisters of the Assumption whose convent was
situated in Notting Hill near to the motorway that passes over the North
Kensington landscape.
Cecile was a community nurse shortly to return to the mother
house in Paris and from there she was to be directed on to a health clinic in
Tunisia. She was the old nun reputed in
anger and pity to have tucked up her habit, mounted her bike and gone off to
the Imam in the magnificent new mosque at Regents Park. She had made the journey in order to demand
local provision for the seven thousand Moroccan’s, Muslims. She asked for a
mosque for the people, a place to pray.
And people came to the party carrying with them bottles and
biscuits, crisps and cakes, fruits and presents. And they sat, their carved faces watching,
Portuguese and Moroccan, Spanish and Afro-Caribbean, social workers, community
workers, and a policeman, people who trade in the Portobello Market and people
who wander in the backstreets. In the middle of them all Sister Cecile sat, pale
and drawn, tired and stooping, looking even older, her eyes full of love and of
tears!
It was a party with all the marks of a Gospel feast. A eucharist under a motorway.
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