Recovering the Revolutionary Table

Communion as Reconciliation and Resistence

Tara and I recently watched a documentary called The Mosaic Church that details the findings of one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the twenty-first century to date—the “Megiddo Mosaic.” Discovered in 2005 outside of a prison in northern Israel, the Megiddo Mosaic is a 580 sq ft. chunk of well-preserved floor that experts believe is a part of the first building built for Christian worship. It dates to roughly 230 AD, which is some 200 years earlier than the earliest church building that was discovered until then (pictured below).

Three things about the markings of the mosaic are especially important in helping us understand how the first generations of Christians lived and worshipped before Christianity became the state religion of Rome in the fourth century.

First, the inscriptions explicitly refer to Jesus as God. This may not strike many Christians as breaking news, but among scholars, there is some debate about how early the evolution of the doctrine of the divinity of Christ came to be. This shows that very early on, Christians were not only venerating Jesus as Lord (in contrast to Caesar, to whom faithful Roman patriotic citizens also bestowed the same title), but also as God.

Second, the inscriptions show the crucial role that women played in early Christianity, in funding early Christian communities, and—especially as it pertains to this one—likely even leading it. Despite women in ministry being commonly labeled a new, “progressive” ideology, archaeological findings like this continue to show that, as N.T. Wright notes in the documentary, early Christianity was viewed as a place where women could flourish. Women have led within the church since its very beginning. We should learn from the first Christians and better empower women to lead today. (More on how to do that in my book Your Daughters Shall Prophesy.)

Third, and the point I want to stay with for the remainder of this piece, can be illustrated in the picture above. The square fixture in the center of the church…a table. At the center of Christian worship in this—the earliest of dedicated worship spaces—is the same focal point that we see in the book of Acts. It’s the same focal point that we see in the ministry of Jesus. It’s the table.

The Eucharismatic Church

NT Wright is often quoted as saying that when Jesus wanted to teach his disciples, he didn’t give them an atonement theory—he didn’t give them a set of instructions—he gave them a meal.

Following the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, this was the shape of what it meant to even be a Christian. More than billing themselves as a new religious order or theological construct, the first Christians—women and men, Jew and Gentile, young and old, were a people of Spirit and Sacrament. They were, as Andrew Wilson coined the term, a Eucharismatic people.

They ate together. They sought the mind of the Spirit through prayer, worship, and teaching together. They moved outward into the Roman world together declaring that, in Jesus, a new revolution had begun and the resurrected Messiah, Jesus, was the rightful King of creation.

They lived lives that were unbelievable hospitality, charity, and prophetic resistance to the whims of empire that it completely remade the world and continues to do so today.

For the earliest Christians, the Eucharist (a.k.a. the Lord’s Supper or Communion) was not a tightly prescribed form of ritual but closer to what we would call a Jesus-focused potluck. People brought food to the feast, they would bless the bread and the wine, eat together and enjoy fellowship with one another alongside singing hymns and hearing the reading of the Scriptures, a short exposition, and share in some time of prayer and prophesy. (We see the layers of all of this in Paul’s writings to his churches, especially the church in Corinth.)

When I think about the focal point of the table in Christian worship, not only as the sacred ritual act we know today, but also as the common meal it was centuries ago, it casts a different a different light on the sacred role of meal-sharing in Christian community today.

Joel Green, former provost at Fuller Seminary, once noted that in some sense all meals Christians share are eucharistic. You could also call them eucharistish. Regardless of what you believe about Communion (whether it is only a symbol or something more) it is absolutely crucial that we recapture the sacred, eucharistish nature of each and every time we sit down together to share a meal.

But why? Why is the table so significant?

It is significant because the church in North America has, in many respects, lost its way. We are in dire need of both reformation and revival.

We need reformation to bring change to the outward shape of the church—our practices and postures, while often done in the name of Jesus, serve to harm people, drive them further from him, and tarnish the witness of the gospel.

We need revival to bring change to the inward shape of the church—our cavalier disposition toward holy things, our priority of power and prestige, our consumerism, our racism, our misogyny, our individualism, and our avarice.

The table plays a crucial role in this reformation and revival. We need to reach back to the ancient practices that have anchored our faith in order to move forward into what God has for us in the future.

The Power of the Table

At this point, you may be asking, “When Todd says ‘the table,’ is he referring to our regular meals or to the Lord’s Supper?”

The answer to that question is yes.

We need to begin to view our meal sharing with a more eucharistic shape. This necessitates several important steps.

First, we need to prioritize eating together. We live in a time when we are disconnected and individualistic. We program and schedule our lives to death. In doing so, we have lost the art of eating together—as families, with friends—we consume food as “fuel” rather than sacrament, stuffing our faces in the car or in front of a screen.

This not only avoids the spiritual benefits of sharing a meal together with family and friends, but the physical benefits as well. Longevity and nutrition studies continue to demonstrate that the more you spend time eating with loved ones in meaningful ways, and the more you are mindful (i.e., aware) of the food you’re eating, the greater your chances are of living a long life and being healthy in the process.

Second, we need to prioritize our home table. Often, when we do eat with other people, we choose neutral territory like a restaurant. There’s nothing wrong with that! But there are many benefits to meal sharing that we get exclusively by being in a home.

When you invite someone into your home, to sit at your table, there is a hospitality that is extended to them. You’ve prepared the meal with your own hands (ideally, though not a deal breaker), you’ve prepared the space. You’ve honored them by giving them access to a sacred space in your life—your home.

What’s more, while there’s tremendous benefit to the cultivation of sacred relationships through extending hospitality to others in your own home, there’s also enormous benefit to those relationships by receiving hospitality by going to the home of someone else.

In that, you experience their norms, culture, and customs. You surrender to their willingness to feed you and to honor you. The rhythm of both extending and receiving table fellowship is a holy thing that deepens relational bonds.

Third, we need to prioritize creating table liturgies. This means we should dispense with the cursory, “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, yay God!” prayer that is offered in a formality (if a prayer is said at all!).

Instead, create a prayer, recite a prayer from the Scriptures or from the history of the Faith, or speak a heartfelt blessing over those at the table. Let the prayer call those sitting around the table to remembrance of the sacred act of breaking bread together.

Fourth, we need to prioritize the missional nature of meal sharing. Too often, Christians conclave off into our own little Christian bubbles. When I did my doctoral research, which focused in part on how table fellowship contributes to spiritual formation, I found that one of the biggest barriers the Christians I interviewed faced when it came to opening their lives to non-Christians wasn’t a lack of willingness insomuch as it was the simple, but lamentable fact that…they didn’t really know any non-Christians.

We need to consider how the art of evangelism shouldn’t look like walking someone through a formula of Bible verses or using a silly gospel tract or having some awkward confrontational sales pitch conversation. Instead, the easiest way to engage in evangelism is to invite people into your lives and live like Jesus around them.

If Jesus is important enough in your life, he’ll come up in conversation, just like Tara always comes fairly soon in a conversation I have with someone I’m just meeting—I’m kinda obsessed with her, so I tend to talk about her a lot. The same goes for Jesus. Invite non-church people to your Labor Day cookout, your small group party, etc. Spend time with people who don’t love Jesus and watch the love of Jesus begin to grow.

The Table as Reconciliation and Resistance

In a time when people are polarized ideologically and politically, isolated in algorithmic echo chambers, and tribalized in the punditry of cable news, Christian table fellowship offers a powerful antidote to this pervasive disease of fragmentation.

The Table is Reconciliatory. When we are sharing a meal, we are reminded of our common humanity. “Those people” you hate, for whom you harbor bitterness, whose politics or convictions you find abhorrent, require the same 2,000(ish) calories of sustenance a day that you do.

We all consume food in the same, rather grotesque manner of grinding meat and plants between the jagged bones in our mouths to pass them into an internal stew of acid and bacteria. All meals have the same “end” among all people—the ultra wealthy and the destitute both assume the same undignified posture to evacuate the remnants of a fully digested meal.

We all spill soup on ourselves. We’ve all burned the roof of our mouths with an overly eager bite. Whether the plate is pure gold or made a hunk of wood, we instinctually prefer to share it with someone than to eat alone.

This equalizing effect has a powerful impact on us if we let it. It reminds us that even when we think we’re too cool for school, in the end we all desire the sustenance of bread and the hope of breaking it with a companion.

The Table is Healing. Similarly, the practice of meal sharing has a healing effect on relationships. When we break bread together and share stories, we create open space in our lives for the perspective and experience of another and vice versa.

The hospitality space that opens between people over food has the capacity to heal rifts, clear up misunderstanding, expel notions of social, economic, or ethnic superiority, and give opportunity for the Spirit to mend broken spaces in our lives.

The Table is Resistance. In the way of Jesus, who frequented the tables of tax collectors and prostitutes so frequently he was labeled a drunkard and a glutton, coming to the table with the “other” is how we resist the call of the current political order that desires for us to fear people unlike us, who think and vote differently, and whose customs and language may be different.

Table fellowship is the long-held Christian tradition of resisting xenophobia, classism, poverty, ethnic superiority, nationalism, and more. The empire would have you only break bread with the “right” people. But Jesus compels us to prophetically reject the whims of empire for the way of the Kingdom.

The Table is a Metaphor for Christ. The prominent placement of the table in the Megiddo Mosaic Church is not by accident, nor only for practical purposes. It was an early version of a Eucharistic altar, symbolizing the placement of Jesus as an anchor point to the Christian community life. We would do well to remember that our tables hold a similar sacred meaning, calling to mind the Savior who commanded us to, as often as we eat bread and drink wine, to do it in remembrance of him.

Grain once scattered

Brought in. Beaten. Fire birthing

One loaf from vast golden fields.

Body broken,

crackling crust gives way

the warmth of inner love sustaining

flesh and spirit.

Holy Vine of Wisdom

Crushed. Pressed. From darkness

New vintage, healing for the nations.

Chalice poured,

tannins pucker the soul to

receive gladness heralding the

triumph of the Vintner.