Maundy Thursday and the Lord's Supper

Holy Thursday is a high holy day on the Christian calendar. Maundy Thursday traditionally acknowledges and celebrates the institution of the Lord's Supper by Jesus at the Last Supper, just prior to his trial and crucifixion. Therefore, it is appropriate at this time of year to reflect on the significance of the Lord's Supper in our lives today.

The following is adapted from Lesson 6 of my recently completed Hospitality course:

First and most obviously, the Lord's Supper is the LORD's supper. It is a meal that is given by Christ the Host to us as his guests. In the Lord's Supper, Christ, in an act of extraordinary hospitality, is hosting a meal in which he as the host invites us to his table to spiritually feed on him. By partaking in this meal, we are participating in God's hospitality to us. Because to partake in the Lord's Supper requires the proclamation that God is Lord of our lives and that we belong to him through his death (1C 11.26), partaking in God's meal makes us willing participants in God's redemptive work in us individually and corporately. God gathers us together, and feeds us together as the Body of Christ. The Lord's Supper is a manifestation of God's present-day hospitality to us.

Second, The Lord's Supper is thoroughly subversive. In the early church, the concept of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of some religious leader was easily misconstrued and distorted, and became cause for outside persecution. The Lord's Supper was often cited as a practice of depraved cultish immorality, and became one reason behind the Roman persecution of the church. Times have changed, but not as much as we might think. Today, the Lord's Supper directly attacks the notion of individual autonomy and adequacy that is a mainstay of our political and consumerist society. In the Lord's Supper, we are being asked to give up trying to earn our way into God's favor through our own individual efforts, including making up our own spiritual rules as if we were the Host and the Lord's Table was really our table. To partake in the Lord's Supper is to find rest in the opposite – that it is through Christ's work that we have found favor with God. Participating in God's hospitality through regular observance of the Lord's Supper is to joyfully and tearfully acknowledge that we are his ever-needy guests in need of the grace and eternal life that we are entirely unable to manufacture on our own. I would suggest there are precious few confessions that are more subversive in our culture (and in the church) than this.

Third, the Lord's Supper raises very difficult questions about the intersection between hospitality and discipline. One might think that hospitality and discipline would be opposed to one another. But actually, hospitality depends on discipline. The Lord's Supper is a perfect example. It takes discipline to gather together as a body at God's table to partake in his meal. Protestants in particular are acutely guilty of lacking this kind of discipline, and as Christians, we need to seriously ponder what this lack of discipline has done to our own perspective on hospitality and doctrinal fidelity. Does it sound sensible that God's people would neglect receiving the hospitality of their Savior through the Lord's Supper and consider it optional or even non-essential? No! It sounds crazy because it is crazy. To neglect the Lord's Supper is to reflect a lack of discipline that results in a lack of receiving hospitality, and probably results in a less-than-vigorous extension of hospitality to others. It also manifests a wider lack of discipline that has wide implications on all areas of life. In our society, essentials have become optionals in matters of vocation, marriage, family, doctrine, etc. Neglect of the Lord's Supper may not directly cause this wider drifting, but it's very consistent with it. How many of us are seriously exploring whether our attitudes (and the church's attitude) about the Lord's Supper are culturally conditioned rather than biblically conditioned? The idea that the church's observance of one of the great sacraments of the Christian religion has become significantly tenderized by cultural attitudes, and that we have become so baptized by cultural individualism that we are too 'comfortably numb' to even explore the issue (much less challenge it) is no immaterial matter.

Good Friday is a sober reflection on the atoning sacrifice of Christ. But Maundy Thursday is also a time for sober reflection. It is a time to seriously consider the grace, mercy, and hospitality of the Lord's Supper, and to examine our reception of it as God's guests. The implications are wide and deep, but I fear the church is largely existing on the surface here.