What do you think of when you think about communion? What picture comes to mind? How is communion with God experienced?
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 how God is experienced in the world. We remember the sacrifice of Christ and we ingest his life offered up, a solemn festive feast.
John’s Gospel has a different experience of communion.
For John the experience is of crowds of hungry people, thousands of people, jostling for a few fragments of bread and fish.
Then that sudden surprise of Jesus turning a few desperate fragments into an outrageous overabundance, with twelve baskets left over, Jesus then comes to the disciples in the storm, walking 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, the over and over again experience of -way too much abundance- that provokes a response, a response that is usually negative. John’s Gospel highlights the irony of God’s overwhelming gift of life being rejected over and over.
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 crisis that brings God’s judgment, an outrageous provocation that cannot be avoided, an overwhelming interruption, an affliction of miraculous overabundance in a world of stingy scarcity and resentment.
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.
Communion is a crisis.
The witness of faith requires us to live with both pictures, both experiences 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 for anything less than the way-to-much-ness God.
No settling for a life of bitter resentment and stinginess, no settling for the way of death or any half life, only the fullness of life will do.
And Jesus is that fullness that overwhelms a world that has settled for less than life.
Belief is like being buried in too many baskets of bread and fish.
Life itself. It is so much more than we ever thought or imagined. Do we dare to become fully alive? Do we dare to believe?
Do we dare settle for something less than outrageous abundance? It turns out the cup is neither half full nor half empty. It runneth over.