The Supper Does Divide Us

In our text this morning, Jesus declares that those who are persecuted are blessed, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them. This sort of persecution for the sake of Jesus and his Kingdom is prevalent today, just as it has been throughout history. I read this week that the German Judiciary has upheld a law forbidding Christians from homeschooling their children, and that all Christian parents in Germany are required to send their children to government schools. The reasoning the court gave, however, shows an understanding of what the church is and does on the part of the German court that many Christians, especially in America, don’t get. They said, “It is in the general interest of society to avoid the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions”. This is just fancy legal talk for saying, “We cannot permit the church to act as though it were an alternative and competing nation.” 2000 years ago, the Roman Empire said the same thing, only the way they said it was kaisar o`kurioj –Caesar is Lord—and you must burn incense to him”.

As we have seen as we consider some facet of the meaning and value of the Lord’s Supper each week, the Supper signifies and enacts many things. The Lord’s Supper stands at the very heart of the Christian life. One thing that it does, as it stands at the climax of our weekly liturgy, is shapes the Church into a community. When we come together, giving thanks and feasting with Jesus as his body, we have reinforced to us all that it means to be the church. The very point of the Lord’s Supper is the unity of the church, that we are a priestly nation unto God. Paul’s whole argument in 1 Corinthians 11 rests on this point—how can you take the Lord’s Supper in a way that actually divides you one from another?

But the supper does divide us—not one from another, but from the world. In the supper we are declaring that the risen savior is the King of the world, and that all peoples, tribes, and tongues, every Iraqi, every Israeli, every German, and every American must bring their lives, their families, their thinking, their behavior, their work, their play, their institutions into submission to him. By eating with Jesus together, we are saying that Caesar is not Lord, that the U.N. is not Lord, that the American government is not Lord, that the German judiciary is not Lord, and that all the petty idols of the world are not Lord. Jesus, and Jesus alone, is Lord. The Supper is the Supper of the Kingdom and so those who would cast off Jesus’ yoke, who would cast his bond asunder, those who foolishly rage together against the Lord and against his Messiah vainly persecute his church, insisting with coercion and force and violence that the church be something less than a Kingdom and a nation. But their efforts are futile, for in the Supper the Lord is gathering his people together, and strengthening us to suffer for his sake, so that walking after him, the blood of the martyrs shall be the seed of the church. One day we will cease to be a “parallel society” because the potter is coming with a rod of iron, and there will cease to be any other society to which the church can be said to be “parallel”

This is the Lord’s table…