The past year has presented churches with quite some challenges: learning how to hold online services (dare we call them gatherings?!); keeping kids interested; looking after the lonely and isolated while not able to visit; and the absence of baptisms and the communion table.
In my church, we took communion 'together' apart in our separate homes, while someone on screen talked us through the significance of the ceremony. Then we switched to a Zoom meeting after our Sunday broadcast where we could reflect together via screens and eat and drink.
The second version has definitely been better but none of it has been enough. There is no satisfactory way of celebrating the Lord's supper apart from others. Words like remote, separate, atomised, online, do not belong in a description of the communion table. Even the language jars.
Because we are one body, we share in one loaf.
Reflecting this week on the last supper, the Passover meal Jesus shared with his friends on that first Maundy Thursday, the idea of a Jew in AD30 eating Passover alone would have been completely at odds with the tradition and purpose.
The redemption of Israel in the Exodus was not a personal story but a corporate one, and Israel would rehearse and remember it in community, in families, as Jews still do today.
Jesus took the symbols of Passover, and re-assigned them. He ratifies the new covenant in his blood, just as the old covenant had been ratified at Sinai with the blood of bulls. And he proclaims it with friends, around a table.
I can't wait to celebrate the Lord's Supper again around a table of my sisters and brothers, the new covenant people of God.
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