Signs of Life. Rick Fabian
accounts merely copy Paul’s first Corinthian letter, written years prior to the writing of the gospels. There Paul reports what Christians told him at Antioch when he visited, about what they were doing in Jesus’s memory.30
You are not eating the Lord’s Supper when you meet, because each eats his own meal, and one hungers while another gets drunk. Can’t you do that at home, instead of shaming those who have nothing, and the whole church besides? The Lord himself handed on to me what I taught you: on the night before his betrayal, the Lord Jesus took some bread, gave thanks, broke it to share and said, “This is my body, which is for all of you, do this to remember me.” And in the same way he shared the cup after supper, saying, “This is the new covenant sealed in my blood, remember me whenever you do this.” So eating and drinking shows forth the Lord’s death until he comes . . . And any who eat and drink without recognizing the body manifest here eat and drink judgment on themselves.31
Scholars have debated Gregory Dix’s question32 whether the Last Supper and our Eucharist derived from the Passover Seder or the chaburah friendship meal—both of which we now know only from later sources. Recent Jewish scholarship has stilled that debate. All four documented dinner ceremonies represent stages of one evolving ritual: the Hellenistic symposium banquet, which is not Jewish at all.33 With each successive stage, organized teaching moved earlier into the ritual. Thus today’s Passover Seder represents the final stage, with all symbols explained before anything is eaten or drunk.
By Paul’s report, Christians at Antioch were keeping that Hellenistic ritual at a stage halfway along the development line, with the bread explained symbolically at dinner’s start, and the cup and ethical teaching still given afterward. Thus the Antiochenes imported their memorial of Jesus into a Hellenistic banquet order they already knew. We learn nothing about what ritual Jesus himself followed at any supper, including his last: that might have been Hellenistic, but we have no reason to presume so. Paul is not concerned with ritual anyway. He adduces the Antiochenes’ Last Supper story to bolster his demand that Christians should share their food. You stupid Corinthians who will not share are failing to perceive Christ’s Body in this company present right here. You are blind to the sign right before you, and blindness will mean your ruin. Paul’s logic focuses on this company, this meal today; not Jesus’s last.
Open Table and Baptismal Font
Entering the doors at St. Gregory Nyssen, San Francisco, every newcomer sees Jesus’s table nearby awaiting all, and the baptismal font sunlit beyond it. During the liturgy most people accept our Communion invitation, some for the first time ever, and through thirty years and two successive rectorships, all the unbaptized who return regularly to Communion have asked for Baptism soon.
It is important that newcomers should experience welcome at Jesus’s table—yet more important, indeed essential, for Christians to do the welcoming that Jesus himself did. Early Apologists emphasize our forebears’ actions, quoting pagan observers: “See how these Christians love one another!” Jesus’s Open Table was his way of showing the world what divine chesed means. So, after welcoming newcomers to dine with us at St. Gregory’s, we invite them to recreate Jesus’s welcome for friends and neighbors like themselves. Upon embracing Baptism, they advance beyond being blessed recipients, and in Jesus’s name they join our mission of welcoming the whole humanity God has redeemed, by holding up Jesus’s sign—and a hundred more ministries in his Spirit—for a blind world to see, and change its plans. The Open Table serves first for their incorporation; Baptism serves next—and urgently—to enroll them in joyfully welcoming more.
Northern Hemisphere churches can no longer presume outsiders’ esteem such as the Apologists once claimed. Our contemporaries dismiss our sincerity, our competence, our relevance to everyday life. Their visit to a Sunday or Baptism or wedding or funeral liturgy is virtually the only time most outsiders will see for themselves what the church is up to, and what we believe God is up to. There above all we must uphold Jesus’s sign of God’s free welcome to a lost world that God has already forgiven and reconciled. Friedrich Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor’s son, put bluntly today’s evangelical charge for the faithful inside church and out:
“Christians should look more redeemed.”
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1. Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (London: SCM, 1975), 246.
2. See Luke 15:2. “Houtos hamartolous prosdekhetai kai synsethêei autois.” Houtos (this one) used alone is dismissive.
3. Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethic and Social Change (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 170.
4. H. Benedict Green, The Gospel According to Matthew, New Clarendon Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
5. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, F. Hopman trans. 1919 (New York: Doubleday, 1954, 2013), 1.
6. Luke 16:1–7.
7. Jeremiah 19.
8. Isaiah 25:6–8.
9. Hebrew mikshol/makshelah and Greek skándalon or próskomma—these occur interchangeably.
10. Leviticus 19:14.
11. Jeremiah 6:21.
12. See 1 Corinthians 1:23, 8:9. Romans 9:32-33, 11:9. Revelation 2:14. New Testament writers use the verb “lay a stumbling block” thirty times, twice as often as the noun, echoing the Levitical commandment and so declaring: those who take offense are tragically blind, and in danger.
13. Gordon Lathrop, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 64f. Cited also in Thomas O’Loughlin, “The Eucharist as ‘The Meal That Should Be,’” Worship 80, (no. 1, January 2006).
14. Philip Turner, “An Unworkable Theology,” First Things 154 (June/July 2005).
15. Luke 18:10–14. Dedikaiôménos, “fixed,” from the Hebrew tsedaqah, putting things right, as next paragraph explains; see also chapter 5, below.
16. See Exodus 34:6 and Numbers 14:18, where the older theology of God’s implacable and endless vengeance follows directly: the editors preserved that earlier material while stamping their revision literally on top.
17. At Acts 10:34, Peter congratulates a pagan centurion: Ep’ alêtheias katalambanomai hoti ouk estin prosôpolêmptês o theos. Popular cult believed riches and power were marks of a god’s favor: see similar reproofs at Colossians 3:25, Romans 2:11, Ephesians 6:9, James 2:1, 1 Peter 1:17.
18. Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008).
19. Luke 19:1-10. See full exegesis in chapter 3 on Baptism.
20. Matthew 6:12, kai afes . . . hôs kai hêmeis afêkamen tois ofeilétais hêmôn.
21. Ursula Hashem cites R. Williams, “Lecture delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Islamic University, Islamabad” ACNS 4081 (Lambeth 2005).
22. Matthew 11:6 // (and parallel at) Luke 7:23 in Greek: makarios estin hos ean mê skandalisthêi en emoi. The mathematical symbol // normally links parallel text citations like these.
23. Luke 11:5–8.
24. Luke 18:1–5.
25. Matthew 7:9.
26. Matthew 11:12.
27. Mark 10:46–52, Luke 18:35–43.
28. Mark 5:25–35.
29. Jeremiah 38:6.
30. My late friend Thomas Talley thus interpreted Acts 11:26. Nevertheless Talley opposed Open Communion today as endangering ecumenical consensus.
31. 1 Corinthians 11:20–29, NJB translation.
32. Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London and Glasgow: Dacre, 1945).
33.