Sacred Eating – Thanksgiving and Beyond:
Testimony of the Early Church

By Neil Earle

Traditional site of Last Supper in Jerusalem. Source: commons.wikimedia.org.

Our congregation enjoys doing the bread and wine communion service around Thanksgiving. It allows a chance for the church to express solidarity with the wider national community and to pray more effectively for each other as Americans bothered by our fraying national life.

The Lord’s Supper, which we call these regular Eucharistic meals, is said to derive from the Jewish Passover and that is certainly a valid part of the story. There is also a long long tradition in Scripture of friendship meals going back very far, back to the Bible’s roots in the Ancient Near East.

God and Abraham

Like many things in Bible history, so much of this begins with the patriarch Abraham who is a progenitor of both Jewish and Arab national groups today.

In Genesis 18, Abraham looks up from the Middle Eastern heat haze to see three men coming towards him. The chapter starts “and the Lord appeared to him” and so we get much discussion in Jewish and Christian history of the three men mentioned later. Do they mean three angels or the trinity itself? But such theological refinements are not the import of the story right now. The main point is Abraham extends hospitality to his three strange guests and a wonderful blessing results – Abram is told that his long-barren wife Sarah will indeed have a son.

This exchange sets up the pointer for later friendship meals – eating together brings blessings. The same theme comes out in Genesis 31:51 where Jacob and Laban – two men who have swindled each other – enjoy a friendship meal of reconciliation on a mountain. In ancient times who you ate with was more important than whom you slept with! Jacob and Laban made peace and a meal was the final seal on the deal.

Moses face shone from being in God's presence on Mount Sinai. Basil Wolverton artwork.

Later, under the law of Moses, sacred meals were regulated as part of the holy day calendar Moses gave to the Israelites. But even then there were notable and mysterious exceptions “coloring outside the lines” as we say today. Sacred meals can be marvelous, mystical, mysterious and sometime spooky. Consider this account from Mount Sinai after the Law had been given regulating sacred eating:

“Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness…they beheld God and did eat and drink” (Exodus 24:9-11,RSV).

Many mysteries leap out at us here – was this God or an Angel? Israel could not look on God and live and they never had seen God, Jesus said. Regardless, the elders ate and drank in the presence of God showing God’s friendliness toward us. What a marvelous and mystical experience. Holy eating with God always seems to provoke questions that only serve to outline the impenetrable greatness of the Holy One and our utter human ability to ultimately define or predict the actions of the Great God.

“Apostle of Eating and Drinking”

When we turn to the New Testament in the two books written by Luke we find many examples of sacred eating. The Catholic scholar Eugene LaVerdiere has catalogued ten instances of Jesus eating in Luke’s Gospel. Luke sketches out Jesus eating with friends and crowds, Pharisees and new converts, despised publicans such as Zacchaeus and the climax – the brief post-resurrection meal with his own overawed disciples. Not only “dead man walking,” but”dead man eating.”

Notice: “And while they still disbelieved for joy and wondered, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish and he took it and ate before them” (Luke 24:41).

Eating with Jesus brings blessings. The two men walking to Emmaus who had not yet accepted the Lord's resurrection were astonished that when Jesus broke bread before them, they instantly recognized him before he vanished out of their sight. Eating in God’s presence brings blessings.

Christian magazine highlights simple yet essential elements of the Faith.

Eating THE Bread

In Acts 20 Luke gives us a snapshot of the early church in Troas meeting to break bread on the first day of the week – either Saturday night or Sunday morning, scholars debate this. Regardless, it is one of tbe best close-ups of an early church meeting we have. Paul was talking to them and he went on till midnight when a young man named Eutychus fell asleep and fell from the third story window ledge. “But Paul went down and bent over him, and embracing him said, ‘Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.’ And when Paul had gone up and broken bread and eaten he conversed with them a long while until daybreak (verses 9-12).”

The church had gathered to break bread which can mean a fellowship meal. But the fact that a resurrection occurs means something more is going on. In continuity with the Friendship Meals we have seen so far it is obvious that this is not a normal to relieve hunger. In Luke’s writings “breaking bread” conveys something more than a meal. The word used in verse 11 is not simply, arton, bread, but ton arton, the bread. This was Luke’s way of signaling something special.

The disciples, claims LaVerdiere and a host of scholars such as Conrad Gempf in The New Bible Dictionary simply“had communion.”

Communion Then and Now

Why was this communion service so important to the early church and among Christians today? I’ll let the Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance explain, interjecting some of my own comments as I go. For Christians the communion means setting forth the emblems of bread and wine and this is in effect the main ongoing sacrament of the Christian life.

The bread and wine are vivid but simple reminders of Jesus’ flesh and blood humanity. They are reminders that the Son of God came among us in great humility. “In entering into our alienated existence as a Jew from Palestine,” says Torrance, “Jesus as Son of God staked and risked his entire being for our sakes, helping us grasp the fearful depths into which we had fallen.”

Torrance had served as a chaplain in World War II in Italy and was well-acquainted with the ugly face of evil. That evil, he knew, if left unchecked would drag us all down to the pit of defeat and eternal death. But Communion or Eucharist reminds Christians of the soaring words, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:54).

Continues Torrance: “The good news of the Gospel is that God Himself, God in Christ, is burdened with the griefs and pains of men and women. He looks upon us in compassion and vexation of Spirit as he sees our fears and anxieties, our torments and oppression. As Isaiah said, ‘In all their affliction He was afflicted.”

Updated graphic of Paul preaching, Eutychus sleeping, miracle pending.

“Holiness on the Offensive”

“The flesh and blood set forth in the bread and wine ceremony reminds us that God himself has come among sinners, has made himself responsible for their condition and takes their sins and grief and guilt upon himself in a vicarious act we call Atonement.”

Nowhere does Jesus accuse the sick of their sins before stopping to shoulder their weakness. Nowhere does Jesus put the responsibility on the lepers, the blind, the paralytic, but says, “I will, be thou healed.”

All during his flesh and blood humanity, symbolized by the bread and wine, Jesus represented "holiness on the offensive," in the words of Professor Colin Brown. “He was occupying the terrain occupied by the enemy,” said Torrance, “and by His authoritative divine presence He laid claim upon it for God. He came to grips with the vast forces of evil that held the world captive whether in the synagogue, the throne room, or in the Temple itself or the poor minds and bodies if the sick and oppressed. The demons fled, the oppressed were set free and the wind and the waves bowed before him.”

A Vast Evil Defeated

“Jesus also knew that the sin of man had its roots not only in the depths of the human heart but also in a vast evil will beyond human control from which it could not escape unless Someone could do battle with it, could break its power and crush its tyranny and then lead us back into the freedom of God’s children.”

This attack against the evil power had to be led by a human being qualified to do the job. In the bread and wine Christians remember that the Son from heaven was also Son of man, perfect God and perfect man, just as the New Testament had always said (Colossians 2:9).

That’s why the Communion service is so special. We remember our Eucharistic sacrifice, Jesus Christ, who blesses us with his presence every day, but especially so when we partake together of the emblems of his own body and blood. So we pray for the safekeeping of our people, our nation and ourselves in that spirit, the spirit which makes every day a Day of Thanksgiving.