What do you think of when you think about communion? What picture comes to mind?
The last supper of Jesus with the disciples being told to remember as the cross rapidly approaches? The altar rail here at Grace? The table of fellowship? What comes to mind?
Comfort, hope, strength, love, sacrifice?
For the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke that is what comes to mind. We remember the sacrifice of Christ and we ingest his life offered up.
John’s Gospel has a different picture of communion. For John the picture is of crowds of hungry people jostling for a few fragments of bread and fish, and then the sudden surprise of Jesus turning the desperate fragments into an outrageous overabundance, with twelve baskets left over, Jesus then walks on water and then says that we must eat of his flesh and drink of his blood to live.
Rather than a sacrifice that gives hope and strength and love, communion in John’s Gospel is an outrageous provocation where people respond with complaint, disbelief, rejection, betrayal, up and leaving and for others the response is belief and the confessing of faith.
Rather than the last supper, for John communion is the whole outrageous life of Jesus that provokes a response, a response that is usually negative. For John’s Gospel communion is God’s judgment on the world, do we respond with belief and faith or with offense and complaint.
In Matthew, Mark and Luke communion reinterprets the Passover, it is the tragedy of human sin killing Jesus which is then turned around and transformed by the miracle of Resurrection.
For John’s Gospel Communion is a crises that brings God’s judgment, an outrageous provocation that cannot be avoided. The miracle of the loaves and the fishes leads us either to the miracle of belief and the fullness of life or the miracle of God’s judgment where life is absent.
The witness of faith requires us to live with both pictures, both images of God’s presence in the world. One is the grace that transforms human failure and the other is the grace that overwhelms and demands a response, demanding that we become fully alive, not settling with death or half life, only the fullness of life will do.
I won’t try to make these two expressions of Grace agree or complement each other. We simply live with both images of God’s presence in the world, in dancing tension with one another.
Communion, what image comes to mind?
Life itself, what image comes to mind?
Are we settling for something less than outrageous abundance?