Law Service: ‘Come to the Lord’s table to share a meal’

Archbishop Peter Jensen | 10 July 2002

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Law Service
St James King St
Matthew 26:17-30.

What are we doing here today? It is called a service of thanksgiving and dedication. But does it make any sense, or is it like an obsolete ritual reminiscent of boarding school chapel? I want to try to answer this question, beginning at a place in which we may all have a justifiable interest, namely food and drink. But not any old occasion for a party.

Depending on who is dead, a well-conducted wake is a secret pleasure, and one that matures with age. The young do not have the capacity for this enjoyment, and the death of the young is too tragic any sort of pleasure. The formalities of the funeral over, the mourners gather at some convenient location; food and drink appear – often quite copious food and drink – initial hesitations are put aside, and we plunge into renewing friendships and memories. I do not see the perfect wake as one where the dead are ignored; on the contrary, the deceased must take a final bow. The good wake must generate memory. Now is the time to bring out the anecdotes or judgements which would be out of place at the obsequies themselves. And then it is over, and we leave the dead to bury their own dead.

What if we wish to remember a distinguished public person? After all, we believe that history really matters, that the past shapes the present. Historical amnesia is culturally dangerous. We create memorials, holidays, books, lectures, events, street names. But the stories of only a handful of the very notable are handed on successfully by such means. Few citizens could quickly explain George, Pitt, Castlereagh or Elizabeth – memory is so tenuous. How many really know? How many care? One possibility is to have an annual wake, an annual dinner in honour of the deceased. An action - especially one with food and drink – is better than an object. To keep the memory alive we would have to invite those who knew the person. If we wish memory to persist, we have to spend some time inducting a new generation into the story, helping them to see why it matters that we remember this person.

Even so, if I may ask this question delicately, if you instructed your friends to conduct an annual remembrance wake for you, and provided money in perpetuity, just how long would the whole thing continue to be meaningful? If the money lasted, and judging by the poet Burns, I predict that it would turn into a very festive and unhistorical occasion indeed within fifty years. And it is that likelihood which gives rise to this remarkable contrast. In literally millions of places all around the world groups of people meet weekly – not annually - and share a meal in memory of a certain man. The meal element is usually quite attenuated; the circumstances are often ornate rather than simple; but the last dinner of Jesus has turned into the Lord’s Dinner of the churches. It is a sort of perpetual wake, and it has lasted for two thousand years so far. In initiating this meal Jesus has certainly given us one of the most important texts in all our literature. It has created a projectile launched from antiquity into our own time; it constantly turns up amongst us and says, ‘never forget this man’.

There are two things worth pondering here. First is the significance of the person thus commemorated. I suggested that we may keep a meal in your honour going with any integrity for fifty years. Can you imagine a thousand years, let alone two thousand? Here is a perpetual and effective reminder of the sheer stature of Jesus Christ, that the constant attempts of modern secular culture to block out his memory are wrong-headed and self-defeating. Or, to put the matter personally, the extraordinary tenacity of the memory of Jesus may suggest to you that a serious adult examination of the original sources for the life and teachings of Jesus Christ is worth undertaking. Any thoughtful person should at least have an answer to the question he put to his disciples: ‘who do you say that I am?’

Second, there is the anchorage of the Christian faith in history. In thinking of Jesus Christ we are not considering a fairy tale or a myth; his life and his death and his sayings and his actions are unassailably part of our common history, our common understanding of ourselves; they have been inserted into our history and are constantly remembered amongst us. This continuously repeated meal can be traced back through all those centuries to Jesus himself, to this famous night described right here; he gave it its shape and importance; when we run across, its continuing impetus comes from him; the meal puts us in touch with him; it is like handling some precious item which he once owned, to feel that we are in touch with the man whose name is not so much written as ploughed into history. To ignore him, to act as though he never lived and never spoke is to distort our own history, our own self understanding. It is like saving the television from the bushfire but neglecting the family photos. In the end, it is cultural suicide.

But we do not merely remember him; we remember the significance of him. If we examine the record of that last dinner, three elements help explain why Jesus Christ has such a tenacious grip on our historical memory and continues to shape and challenge the way we live today.

First, there is the meaning of the meal in itself.

Food and drink have a special significance for us. We could, and often do, eat in a solitary manner. But most of us enjoy the companionship of eating together; it is more than the mere acquisition of fuel for the body; it is the pleasure of community, of what you may call human fellowship. Because of this, there is an instinctive feeling shared by most of us that a shared meal speaks of peace, friendship, common purposes, and is marred by alienation and anger. That is why Christmas dinner is often so profoundly disappointing. We persist in bringing together people who ought to be at peace but who fell out with each other long ago, and demanding that they behave themselves. The fellowship hopes pinned to the meal make it all the worse.

The last dinner of Jesus was just that: the last in a whole series. In the gospel records we hear that he was accused by his enemies of being ‘a friend of tax collectors and sinners’ – and the evidence for this charge was that he ate with such outcasts and despised people. In other words he acted scandalously, inviting to his table the lost and alienated souls, in an act which conveyed and embodied reconciliation and forgiveness. It was as if you were to invite into your home the very ones who would have every reason to hate you, and cared for them. When the prodigal returns, the Father throws a banquet. To eat at the table of Jesus is to be welcomed and accepted by him, and thus reconciled to God.

All the more telling is it to recognise that at this table of the Lord as described in the gospel was one who had many times shared the meal, but who was now proposing to betray him. The name of Judas has become synonymous with treachery and baseness; he was there at the table, but he rejected the basic condition of acceptance; he rejected the leadership of Jesus. Indeed his willingness to eat with Jesus adds to the infamy of his deed: ‘The one who has dipped his hand into the bowl with me will betray me’ (verse23).

There is one other important matter to mention about the meal itself. It was of course a passover feast. Already, in other words, it was a commemorative meal, and one that takes us back another thousand years or more. For the Jewish people then as now specifically remembered at passover their own great constitutive moment as a nation, when God released them from slavery in Egypt and led them under Moses into a covenant at Mt Siniai. That is why when Jesus gave the bread and wine a symbolic significance, he was only doing what the feast demanded. It was the novelty of what he said which shocked; but there was continuity also – because he too was speaking of another great saving act of God.

Second, there is the meaning given to the bread and the wine.

‘While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said “Take, eat; this is my body.”’ (v 26). The blessing and the breaking are not significant: to bless bread is to bless God, or thank him, for the bread; to break it was necessary prelude to eating, as we may slice it today. What matters is the words about the bread: ‘Take, eat; this is my body’.

It is misleading to focus on the bread/body analogy as such; it is the act of eating the bread which is involved here. Nor is there any need to be too subtle; to eat is to participate in, to be united with, to become part of the loaf. Just as we eat bread, so are we to be united with Jesus. We are dealing with vivid metaphor, a vivid metaphor of faith-in-Jesus Christ. To trust in Jesus Christ, to have faith in him is to be united with him, to ‘eat’ him, if you will, so that he will nourish your soul. For we are not dealing here with a ‘wake’, an act of cheerful remembrance; we are involved in something which requires a self-commitment, an authentic relationship, which requires trust.

Why his body? The clue to this is in the second part of his symbolic speech: ‘Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”’ It is not his body as such; it is his body and his blood; it is not his body as he sat there – it is the action which body and blood were soon to be involved in; the action of others in putting him to death; the end result of the betrayal by Judas; the separation of his body and his blood; it is not his body as such, it was what is accomplished in his body. In asking them to eat and to drink, he in inviting them to enter a contract in which the cost to him would be his death, and the benefit for them would be forgiveness.

Note these two extraordinary phrases: first, ‘the blood of the covenant’. It was an Old Testament phrase for the moment of entry into a binding relationship with God involving sacrifice through animal death. I have used the word ‘contract’ instead of ‘covenant,’ but covenant is the better word. In the language of the Bible, a covenant or testament is a promise. Biblical religion is founded on the promises of God. According to the gospels, there was and old covenant, the promises of God to Israel, and now there is a new covenant, the promise of forgiveness through the death of Jesus.

You must hear a lot of promises in your professional capacity. Think about the characteristics of promises. Promises always look forward; they are always verbal; and the right thing to do with a promise, the way to receive its benefit, is to believe it, to trust it and to act on it. Eating and drinking at the table of Jesus is to say that we accept his promise, that we trust it, that we believe it and will act upon it. That is what you do with promises. The religion of the Bible is a religion of faith not because it is irrational, but because it has to do with entering a relationship with God by trusting his promises. It is only rational to trust the promises of God; it is irrational to doubt them.

The content of this promise is clear: forgiveness of sins. Not a forgiveness achieved by simple declaration as though God is a forgiveness-dispenser. Life is not that simple; reality is more complex than that. Forgiveness without justice and truth is cheap goods. True forgiveness involves justice at some level. It therefore comes through pain and suffering; forgiveness through the sacrifice of the offended party; in fact, according to the Bible, forgiveness for the many comes through the death of the judicial death of the one.

What do you make of this? Not much of a result; not much of a benefit, when all is said and done. We may despise what Christianity has to offer, if this is at the heart of it. We can say that we have many needs, but forgiveness is not one of them. Here is a contract, a covenant, which we do not feel the need to enter! Christianity, as one of its enemies famously and offensively said is a religion for slaves. Indeed that is why, I suppose, in his own day Jesus ate with tax-collectors and sinners. Only the failures felt the need of his company.

By this time you may well be asking why I have chosen to talk to you about all this at the Law service. In part it is because I know better than to speak to you about the law; that is your business. But to consider Jesus Christ must be very relevant. When we think of the reality of history and our need to take history seriously, when we talk about covenants and promises made to be trusted, when we talk about penalty and guilt, when we consider the link between justice and forgiveness, we are not so very far from your world after all. In fact I am bold enough to say that we are observing of the roots of your world, the roots you may not actually think about often in the necessary rush of business, but the roots which inform and sustain your whole endeavour. And I am saying that Jesus Christ and the Bible are places in which we encounter these basic elements. A third characteristic of the meal makes all this clearer.

Third, there is the vow of Jesus Christ to be steadfast to death.

‘I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom’. Jesus shrank from death; he was no crazed martyr. But at this moment he takes a vow - to fast until the issue brought on by the treachery of Judas was decided. But he saw beyond his own death to the effects of his death, the establishment of the covenant which brings forgiveness.

This is the testimony of Desmond Tutu. How was the new South Africa going to survive the anger, alienation, and suffering of the Apartheid era? The new nation was quite possibly going to become a blood-filled disaster. As you know, Tutu became the leading figure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He points to the key role played by Nelson Mandela, and especially Mandela’s suffering in achieving peace:

‘Nelson Mandela did not emerge from prison spewing words of hatred and revenge. He amazed us all by his heroic embodiment of reconciliation and forgiveness…No one could say that he knew nothing about suffering…It would be easy to say that those twenty-seven years were utter shameful waste…I don’t think so. Those twenty-seven years and all the suffering they entailed were the fires of the furnace that tempered his steel, that removed the dross. Perhaps without that suffering he would have been less able to be as compassionate and as magnanimous as he turned out to be.’ (pp39-40). These observations are from Tutu’s significantly named book, No Future Without Forgiveness.

Perhaps you have observed the power of forgiveness to transform situations, to reconcile warring parties, to redeem people, to achieve justice through suffering. Nelson Mandela helped to bring in the all too fallible new South Africa; it was a great achievement. But Jesus Christ transcends even that; through his suffering, he brings in the Kingdom of God, the restoration of God’s rule over human lives.

What are we doing here today? Are we merely going through some obsolete ritual reminiscent of chapel at a boarding school? Has it any meaning for the members of this profession to start the official term with an act of thanksgiving and dedication? I am saying that it surely makes sense, that in drawing us back to foundational matters, matters of history and of promises and of forgiveness we see again how the concerns of the Bible intersect our personal and our professional lives; and I am saying to you that the Jesus Christ who so long ago impressed his disciples with talk of the covenant in his blood for the forgiveness of sins, still confronts us out of history with promises and hopes which illumine, shape and bless our human lives. In short, I am saying that it is still worth answering the question posed for us by Jesus himself: ‘Who do you say that I am?’

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