Remembering the Meal: 1st Corinthians 11:23-26
Have you ever thought of
collective memory? The ways events can pile on top of each other and make
meaning out of history rhyming and echoes of the past upbuilding the future?
Well, if you haven’t, consider 1st Corinthians 11.
It is these words of institution we use on Sunday for Holy Communion.
We remember what Paul offers to the church in Corinth—that divided and strained
congregation in Greece that Paul seeks to unite around the common story and
common body of Christ Jesus our Lord.
Words he has received from the wider church—the words Jesus spoke on
the night he was handed over, words we find in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew,
Mark, and Luke). Words preparing his disciples for his death, and resurrection.
Words harkening back to other liberative words—another meal of salvation. The
meal they eat is, or at least is like, a Passover meal.
Passover, a meal remembering the frantic escape from Egypt. God raising
up Moses to liberate his people, bringing them out of slavery and into freedom,
aided by miracles and mud clogging chariot wheels. Passover a “perpetual
ordinance” a repeated meal, a memory that shapes community—re-membering the
Passover community every year.
Every Sunday we recite Paul’s recitation of the words passed on by the
Apostles about Jesus’ last meal, a Passover-like meal. Jesus’ Passover with his
disciples repeating that story of escape from slavery and death in Egypt. It is
a community recreated around a meal. A meal of death and life, a last supper
becoming the first supper of the New Creation, the great and promised feast.
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