occupations to follow him and to share his life, his purse, and his table. The words of Jesus must have had one or the other of these meanings, or they may have combined them. The one thing that is clear is that they cannot be understood, first of all, as pointing ahead to the institution of an unprecedented ceremonial practice in the church.
As we move beyond the crucifixion into the early days of the life of the church, it becomes clear that the disciples’ circle carried on the practice of the common meal. In fact, the risen Lord most often appeared to the disciples assembled to eat together—in the same upper room in Jerusalem, in the hotel at Emmaus, and on the beach at Galilee. The common meal had been the center of their life with him; it became the place where his presence with them was renewed. Therefore, the daily table fellowship of the believers’ circle rather than the annual Passover celebration seems to have been continued as the center of the common life in those early days.
As this pattern of life was propagated by the missionary vitality of the young church in pagan society, Christians found themselves in dangerous juxtaposition with pagan practices that included religious banquets. Thus, it came about that new Christians in Corinth, bringing their habits of table fellowship into the church with them, threatened to change the nature of this communal experience by forgetting that it is a fellowship of the entire group and by concentrating inordinately on an exaggerated convivial joy. It was this distortion that the apostle Paul needed to right when he wrote to Corinth: when they met together it was not to celebrate the supper of the Lord but each was eating his own meal instead.5
What is important for our present search is that this Corinthian deformation could not have taken place if the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper had been anything like what we make it today, whether in Protestant or Catholic circles, whether in evangelical or liturgical circles. If it had been a specifically ecclesiastical celebration, carried on according to the instituted forms for the specific reason that Christ had commanded that it be done with its meaning residing in what the bread and wine symbolically point to, then the disorders in Corinth would never have come to pass. (The abnormal is a comment on the norm.) Therefore, the presence of this distorted practice is the abundant demonstration that the normal observance was an ordinary meal taken together at every normal gathering of the young Christian fellowship.
Therefore, it is part of the definition of the Christian church that Christians are people who eat together. We profoundly misunderstand the development of what is referred to as Christian communism in the early days in Jerusalem when we try to see it as the outworking of a moral condemnation of private property or of a vision of an ideal social order. In the early days, the common purse at Jerusalem was not the outworking of the deliberation about whether it is good for disciples to have possessions of their own, and certainly it involved no speculation as to whether it is wholesome for society to be governed by a regime of private property. Sharing together was much more immediate and unpremeditated; they shared their wealth because they ate together and because food for the morrow is about all the wealth a common person can ever hope to possess in any simple society.
It is quite correct that, in order to avoid the Corinthian misunderstanding of the common meal as an overly joyful banquet, the apostle reminded them that the most dramatic Lord’s Supper had been a Passover meal and that according to the instructions of Jesus it should be a time to remember not only his resurrection and promised return but also his death. Thus, it is appropriate that we should take the meaning of the annual Passover celebration in its Christian transformation into our understanding of the supper. Yet, for the early church, this did not necessitate any weakening of concentration upon the primary character of this celebration as a fellowship meal.
It is an irony of history that this reminder of the Passover sacrifice—when the apostle Paul sought to warn his readers against distortion of the simplicity of the supper by pagan admixtures drawn from the ceremony of the temple—could have had the effect, over the years, of permitting just what he wished to prevent. The idea of sacrifice contributed to the development of a quasi-magical understanding of the mass as an assuredly efficacious transaction whenever the proper words are spoken by a properly qualified officiant. Thus, what was initially a community experience by its very nature became a ceremony for its own sake in Catholicism, a ceremony that could be and often was carried out by the priest alone.
The Reformation was not sufficiently radical to restore the character of the fellowship meal despite some efforts in that direction, especially in the early thought of Zwingli. Preoccupied with the rejection of certain aspects of the Catholic practice, the Reformers were willing to agree with the assumption that the mass was a ritual distinct from the rest of life and debated only what it means and what it achieves, only what its substance is and of what it is a sign. They warded off the dangers of superstition but did not restore the reality of communion. The Protestant practice of the Lord’s Supper remained a ceremony within the church with no direct connection to what bread and drink commonly mean. Upon unfolding the meaning of that common meal as explained in Protestant practice, it would occur to no one to sell a piece of land and contribute it to the church so that everyone would have enough.
The New Community
The point of this historical review cannot be to argue that it is possible or necessary to reconstitute the simple sharing of the band of wandering disciples or of that first Jerusalem congregation as a formal rule for all times and places. We do not need to argue that it is obligatory to modify in some prescribed way the practice of the Lord’s Supper in gatherings for worship—although that would be an appropriate topic for study in its own right. But, between these two extreme applications, what we do need (and what evangelical churches in the modern world especially need) is a restored sense of the imperative that the church of Jesus Christ must be, as in the first congregational experience at Jerusalem, a community in which “there was not a needy person among them.”6
When Jesus warned his disciples of the sacrifice they would need to expect, that warning was linked with a promise:
Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers, sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.7
Such a promise is a most striking occurrence in the midst of a text that (some scholars would tell us) should have eyes only for the end of the age. Jesus promises, to those who forsake all to follow him, a community in which the necessities of life are shared already in this age, in the midst of persecution. The apostolic writers could not have preserved this record in this form if it had not already been fulfilled in their experience; this was a promise regarding their present and not their future.
In recent decades, preachers and prophets have begun to see the Magnificat of the Virgin Mary as a charter for social revolution: “He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”8 But what some are tempted to forget is that this promise was fulfilled not in the mode of the expectation of John the Baptist—with a violent reversal of the social order from the outside through the tools of catastrophe, but rather after the pattern of Jesus—in the creation of a genuinely new social phenomenon, a brotherhood in which the rich give and the poor receive, not under the compulsion of the sword but under the beckoning of the cross. We need not ask why Christian civilization has failed to humanize the social order and has left the forces of social change to seek their vitality from pagan ideology. It is because the people of faith soon ceased to be—and even to promise to become—a community sharing the needs of the common life at a common table that radical social change in our day is the preserve of the pagan.
One Lord, One Table
All
