The Presbyterian Church USA practices an open eucharistic table. That is, most of the time, we will gladly serve the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to any who present themselves. The actual rule in the Book of Order is a little more complicated; we prefer that people coming to communion be baptized, for instance. But even that is not a hard-and-fast rule.
I generally support an open table. When I preside at the eucharist, I do make a point of saying that “all are welcome.” I have never refused anyone.
The early church, however, did not have an open table. They lived in an oppressive situation where outsiders, including government authorities, would have broken up the service, were they allowed to know about it and show up. Only baptized members known to the presiding elder as legitimate disciples of Jesus were permitted to commune in the Lord’s Body and Blood.
Marginalized and oppressed populations need separate, dedicated spaces and rituals, places outside the control of the rulers and owners. African-American slaves engineered secret worship, without the overseers and the Plantation owners knowing about them. In Ernesto Cardinale’s classic, The Gospel in Solentiname, representatives from the wealthy planters and their death-squads were not invited to the Bible Study meetings of the poor campesinos.
We don’t live in that kind of context. Our culture does not oppose Christian faith with violence. It tends to use other, more subtle and often more effective, tools. Like the trivialization of the spiritual/religious life, turning it into a private, personal hobby. Most American Protestants buy into a Zwinglian view of the Sacrament as a little commemorative snack which may or may not be added on to a worship service, depending on people’s preference. Under this ideology, participation in the Sacrament is optional, immaterial, and constitutive of nothing in particular. It is a matter of one’s personal spiritual taste. It should be available to all who want it, the way they want it.
The most potent argument against fencing the table is the fact that Judas shared in the Lord’s last supper, when the Sacrament was instituted. Jesus, who knows what is going to happen, does not wait until Judas leaves before offering the bread to him along with the other disciples. No. He deliberately includes his own betrayer in the holy meal. In doing so, the Lord explicitly dismisses any moral worthiness qualification for participation. Indeed, all of the disciples were clueless about what he was doing and what would happen in the next 16 hours. No one comes to the table personally deserving to share in this Sacrament.
So participation in the Sacrament is not a reward for the righteous or a privilege for religious insiders. That may be how it got twisted under Christendom. For instance, in the Presbyterian Church it used to be that children were not permitted to share in the Sacrament. The reason I was given was that children “do not understand” it. Yo, no one cognitively understands what is going on in the Sacrament! It’s not about how smart or informed or educated we are. It’s about how we are included in the love of God.
That being said, God’s love is not whatever we want it to be. In Judas’ case, he barely had time to swallow the bread and wine before he went out and ratted on Jesus to the police. It does not end well for Judas. Eventually he offed himself rather gruesomely out of overwhelming guilt and grief. We may reject God’s love and choose to exist in a web of self-serving mercenary treason. Then we experience God’s love as judgment and condemnation.
What does it mean for someone who has invested their energy into actively betraying and killing God, poor people, and God’s creation to receive the Body and Blood of the Lord? Are they not eating and drinking the blood/life of those whom they have murdered? Are they not therefore consuming their own judgment, punishment, and condemnation? Are they not expressing their own hatred for God and God’s creation, and spiraling into a profound alienation?
I wonder if this isn’t why the Sacrament has been so degraded in the Modern world. Maybe our historical reticence in participating in this meal was based on a subconscious awareness that to do so while systematically wrecking God’s creation in a nihilistic orgy of profiteering might earn us the fate of Judas. Maybe it has. I would not be the first to suggest that the engine of Modernity is ecocide and therefore suicide. If Modernity had a patron saint, perhaps it would be Judas.
The Apostle Paul says that “all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.” So it matters how we see what is going on in the Sacrament. We have to “discern the body.” This has nothing to do with having a particular theological opinion about the bread and what does or does not physically happen to it. That’s a distraction. Discerning “the body” means awakening to the universal oneness revealed in the Sacrament.
The earliest eucharistic liturgies talked about how the grain that had been scattered in the fields was gathered into one loaf. The loaf represented the disciples of Jesus, gathered together in that time and place, around that table, participating in that rite. The gathering in turn represents the oneness of all humans, as Christ reveals that in him there are no divisions among us. That awareness of oneness extends to all creation, breathed into being by the one Creator. Finally, there is the oneness we therefore share with and in Jesus Christ, the truly human One, who is the Word of God by whom all things were made, and who is God-with-us.
In this Sacrament the confession that “God became human so that humans might become God” begins to be realized. In and through the particular elements we begin to perceive — discern — the glorious oneness of an interconnected/interdependent universe in which, as Richard Rohr has said, everything belongs.
Discerning the body, the oneness, the unity, the integrity of creation, precludes and prevents the animosities and manipulations, the fear and the anger, the abstraction and analysis, that drives us to destroy the planet and each other in order to “save” it.
So, while we should not be denying the Sacrament to anyone who comes trusting in the Lord Jesus, no matter how faint that trust may be, we do at the same time need to impress upon people what they are in for. This is a radical participation in the eternal truth of God’s love for and in the world. It is a humble proclamation of our place as part of and dependent on the wider creation. It is the negation of all privilege and profit, exclusion and condemnation, domination and retribution. Indeed, the Sacrament is, in effect, chemotherapy against the ego.
But for those who trust in the Lord Jesus, the One who gives his life for the life of the world, the Sacrament is holy medicine. It awakens, feeds, and expresses the Presence of Christ-in-us, uniting us to every person, every life, and every thing God breathed into being. If we perceive in the Sacrament the infinite love God has for the world, and if we also discern that it is all in some sense God’s body in which we participate, then this, as the primary way Christ gives us to remember him, incorporates us into him, revealing how he is all in all.
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