The text below is a partial transcription of a sermon delivered by J.P. O’Connor, Ph.D., in a North Central University chapel service in November 2021. As we remember Holy Week and Jesus’ journey to the cross and resurrection, we pray these words will minister to your spirit.
Prayer
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when He was betrayed, took a loaf of bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, He took the cup, also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.
God of heaven. Would you guide our meditation today? Would you quicken our weary hearts? Would you lift your son Jesus high in our midst? Help us. Oh, creator to give thanks for one another. Today, we ask these things in Jesus name. Amen.
Today, I want to ask a simple question: Why do we give thanks? Another way to ask this is to whom or for what do we give thanks? Why are we grateful to God in the first place?
Why give thanks?
Today I’m going to argue that we give thanks to God for each other. For our scripture reading today, Paul’s community in Corinth is on the brink of utter dissolve. The Corinthian Christians would make the Kardashians look as innocuous as PBS Kids. Conflict, division, arrogance, and immorality seem to hide under every stone that Paul overturns. As a pastor, Paul is stuck in the middle of litigating a conflict between two polarized parties. On the one hand, you have poor members of the church, some of whom are enslaved and do not know or possess freedom.
On the other hand, some members of Paul’s church dine at the local yacht club and have never known insecurity or scarcity. When they come together to commune and partake of the Thanksgiving meal instituted by our Lord and Savior, they do so, but partitioned and siloed. The wealthy huddle around each other to discuss 401ks and the Dow Jones, while the poor huddle together to talk about the marketplace and what a life of freedom might taste like.
Division, discord, conflict. The Church is split right down the middle. The two groups, it would seem, have mastered the function of the church without the power of the church. They understand the motions of giving thanks, communal gatherings, the structure of a service order, but they carry on without any spiritual gravitas. In fact, they think they can proceed as scheduled, apart from the inbreaking of God’s disruptive, resurrecting power, that’s manifest in their neighbor’s body. As my pastor Fulton Buntain used to always say, “The Corinthian Christians have mastered the form without the force.”
So how does a divided congregation with a major social and economic wedge, lodged into the middle of it, how does this church get along? How does a church like this give thanks to God in the middle of backbiting and division?
‘Given for you’
In response to this problem, Paul quotes word for word from the Gospel of Luke. I like to tell my students this all the time, but Paul is quoting Luke before Luke ever existed. Luke was written 20 or 30 years later after Paul wrote this. Maybe his buddy Luke gave him a pre-released copy of his soon-to-be bestseller, or maybe these are very precious words of Jesus that everybody knew by heart. I like to lean toward the second option. Whatever the case, Paul reminds his church of the red letters. My mother had a red-letter Bible.
These are the very words of Jesus: “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” This is like Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia saying, “Do not cite the deep magic to me; I was there when it was written.” Paul cites the ultimate authority in this church feud. He cites the red letters.
I think one of the mistakes we can make—the same mistake that Paul’s congregation was making 2000 years ago—is we over-personalize these words of Jesus. The “you,” here, we read as a singular, “Me.” This is His body broken for me. My Greek students can hopefully all attest that this is a second-person plural. A better translation would be, “This is my, that is for all y’all. Do this in remembrance of me. Now, I haven’t seen Squid Games on Netflix. Maybe you have. But I have read Lord of the flies. (Savage!)
One way to interpret Jesus’ words is that a single body has been given to a large group but only intended for a small few. May the best player win. May the odds be ever in your favor. The idea is there’s only one body. We must fight for it, tear it apart, get it before the next guy does and stuff it in our mouths.
In this reading, partaking of the bread becomes a free market competition. I’ll get what’s mine; you get what’s yours. Friends, this is not at all what the scripture is telling us today. “This is my body that is for all y’all. Do this in remembrance of me.”
Many parts, one body
Another way to interpret Jesus’ words is through the lens of the following chapter. In First Corinthians 12, Paul proceeds to describe the body of Christ and what it entails. First Corinthians 12:12 says this: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body. So it is with Christ.”
Paul seems to believe this audacious idea that by participating in a communal meal centered on remembering the body of Jesus, he can actually solve the conflict in his church body. How many here believe that a little food can solve big problems?
Anyone ever been hangry before? I told this story a few weeks ago to my class, but when I was a pastor in Lakewood Washington, we served on the cusp of a sharp socioeconomic divide. There was a beautiful lake that split the city in half. The wealthy were on one side and the poor were on the other. It was cut right down the middle. We felt that it was our job as a church to bridge this gap. My pastoral mentor would say this all the time in almost every meeting: “The target of the gospel is salvation for humanity, but the bullseye is the poor.” So we partnered with local food banks. We had job fairs. We had mobile dental vans. And once a month, we put on a community dinner. I was the children’s pastor. So my job was to entertain everyone. So prizes and games and candy were—and still are—my specialty.
I’ll never forget one Friday evening, a handful of local police officers came into our dinner to share a meal with us. One officer pulled the pastoral staff aside and he thanked us for having these monthly meetings. He said, something like this: “Thank you for bringing our community together. You make our jobs easier. Crime goes down. When you guys eat together.” I’ll never forget that. By eating a meal together, by looking each other in the face, by playing a few games with kids, a community was growing stronger. Crime rates were dropping simply because we were gathered in Jesus’ name, eating a few burgers as a body.
Form without force
The original communion of the early church was nothing more than this: Coming together in probably a rented venue and eating food in Jesus’ name. Paul blows a gasket because the community has decided to come together to do the exact opposite—to separate the rich on the one side and the poor on the other, thus defeating the very purpose of the Eucharist meal in the first place. Instead of eating face to face, they’re eating back to back. So Paul has to grab them by the lapels and shout, “Stop it! No more.”
The form without the force is meaningless; the meal without the spirit-filled community and togetherness is a total sham.
In closing, I want to show you an image.
Give it a minute. So this is a fresco located in an early Christian catacomb dating to around the third or fourth century. A fresco is just a painted picture on a wall. As you can see in this image, there’s a group of people eating a meal together, and they’re sort of situated around an open grave. On the far left are the words, “agape” transliterated from Greek into Latin.
The agape feast, as it was called, was an early church practice mentioned explicitly in Jude, but it was likely modeled after First Corinthians 11. In this fresco, we see men and women, big and small, adults and children, eating together. One is sort of stuffing his mouth with a tasty morsel. Another is reaching across the table for seconds. I imagine there’s laughing and sharing and the jubilee.
Commune together until the Lord returns
The original intention of communion was exactly what you see in this image: A diverse group of people sharing a meal together, face to face, in love. Just like this image. When we partake together, it’s not an individual event, but a communal event. It’s often why we take the elements simultaneously. We band together as sisters and brothers, hand in hand. And we say, even though we have differences, we will continue to commune together until our Lord returns.
There’s one more thing I want you to notice about this image. The grave. The meal takes place over a grave. Eating a meal together, according to Paul, is an act of social resistance. An enslaved person—think about this—an enslaved person would never have a meal with a wealthy, intelligent maritime tradesperson under normal ordinary circumstances. This is different. This is a political act. When we eat together, when we partake of the Lord’s body and drink of his blood, we’re declaring a unity so radical, so emphatic, that death itself has no power here.
‘Oh death, where is your sting?’
I want you to etch this image into your minds. Communion takes place over a grave. In the act of raising Jesus from the dead, God shouted to the world that death had lost its grip on thee, or to quote the apostle Paul, “Oh death, where is your sting?” The residual effect of death, the decay that causes you and your roommate to despise each other. The residual chaos that festers resentment in our souls against our neighbors, washes away every time we take the bread and drink the cup.
So, would you join me in participating in one of the most radical acts you can do in this life as a Christian? You aren’t just eating the elements, you’re sharing them with people who are different than you.
So, returning to my original question: Why do we give thanks? I want you to look at your neighbor for a minute and say, “I give thanks for you.” Tell them, “I need you.” Don’t leave anybody out. “I need you. I love you.”
By sharing these elements hand in hand, you declare alongside the God of the universe that death has no power here. Sin and decay and division must leave the room, in Jesus’ name. Whatever you brought in here can’t come out. It’s washed away when we take these elements as a body. We must have the form, the liturgical practice of coming together, but we must also have the force: Holy spirit, agape love that binds us.
Let’s pray.
God of heaven, we remember the death of your son, Jesus, who was beaten and bruised for our sake. God, we remember the one who was rejected and despised so that we could be forgiven. God, for any of us in this room who may carry in here invisible burdens of discord and division, I pray that when we take of these elements, we would be taken back to the same tradition of the ancient church. And we would come together as a body. And we would say no to death, no, to chaos and division, and yes, to unity in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Watch the full chapel service.
