Communion – Haydon Spenceley

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

If you are in the practice of celebrating Communion with any kind of regularity, the words Jesus says in today’s passage will be pretty familiar to you. I’ve often wondered what the friends of Jesus, gathered round a meal, having heard him pretty darkly and cryptically talk about the future over the preceding days, would have made of what he said here. After all, anyone holding bread and wine, saying ‘this is my body’, ‘this is my blood’ might well be thought of as, what, strange? Frightening? Confusing? For us, for whom Communion is a part of life and culture, whether we’re regular churchgoers or not, we know what we’ve decided it means, or might mean. But what of those people who knew nothing really of what was to come? What about those people who are uncertain? It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? To say that bread is your body and wine is your blood?

I’m not going to spend ages here writing about what I think happens in Communion. What is spectacular for me though is that Jesus invites his friends, and us who follow after them to make him part of us as we eat and drink in remembrance of him. We’re invited in to union with him, fellowship, family, intimacy even, through this simple yet life-altering meal. If Jesus says ‘this is my body’ and I eat the bread, then somehow Jesus’s body becomes part of me. You could spend a lifetime trying to work that out no doubt, but as a starter for thinking things through it’s pretty potent.

And not just that, Jesus looks with confidence into the future. ‘after I am raised up’ he says. This isn’t something that has really jumped out at me until today’s reading of this story. The eye naturally goes to the prediction of Peter’s three-time denial of Jesus, but Jesus says here, as he does elsewhere, that he is sure of what is going to happen to him. He knows the outcome, even if the actual human circumstances of his death eventually seem to overwhelm him. We as Christians follow a God who suffered, but did so with such certainty as to the end of the story. He would be raised. It’s very matter-of-fact in the telling here. I’m prone to saying ‘this might work’ or even ‘this prayer might be answered’, but Jesus sets the tone for our confidence in faith. He was in step with God. So we can be too. Just how much trust are willing to place in God today?

August 2nd 2014: Luke 22:14-23

Read Luke 22:14-23 here

As the story of Jesus’ betrayal and suffering draws on inexorably. we are faced with the odd scene of the Passover meal among friends, after which Jesus knows He will be handed over to His death, and the mysteriously, powerfully symbolic with hindsight utterances commanding the disciples, and us, to eat and drink in remembrance of Him. As seems to have been the case with Jesus more often than we like to admit, what He says during this meal, and how He says it must have been quite perverse to those who heard/ Why didn’t Jesus just say “it’s Judas, he’s going to betray me”? Why didn’t He say “When I say it’s my body and blood, I mean that it actually is/spiritually is/is meant to signify the sacrifice I’m about to make and all that it means”? It would certainly have been a lot easier for us who followed after Him. I wonder though if that isn’t something of the point. Here, in the midst of the fear of oncoming death, in the middle of the most real, crucial event and undertaking in the whole of human history, Jesus doesn’t lay it all out in easy, bitesize chunks. Rather, He does what needs to be done, and doesn’t feel the need to elaborate or explain further.

So often, we want to break faith down in to easy, approachable elements. We want to make it seem attractive. We want to minimise the sacrifice we feel called to undertake in order to be faithful. We want to understand everything, to live it all day by day, and still to enjoy our comfortable, “successful” lives. I’m sure Jesus, in a sense, wouldn’t have minded doing that either. You only have to watch The Last Temptation of Christ to be able to see what a strong drive their might have been to follow that path rather than the crushing one set before Him.

The thing is, He took it anyway. I wonder sometimes if He truly knew what He was getting in to, the gravity and severity of the pain, the separation, and how it would feel to die an undeserved death on behalf of others who would reject Him continually. I have very little doubt that He knew it was needed and that the benefits to Him and to all would ultimately be enormous, but still, I wonder, how in control of things was Jesus at that point? And yet, He did it anyway.

Often, for me at least, unless the risks are minimised, the way is clear, the steps are logical and sensible, I’m not willing to move on in my faith and life. My trust in God only extends to the limits of my intellect. In which case it is no trust at all. I’m trusting myself and calling it trusting God instead. How can we live in such a way that we might be so obedient that, whatever the consequences to us, we follow God, His ways, and live, love and hope for the coming of the kingdom, today?