Paul S Speeches in Acts

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TALK 2

THE EUCHARIST - POSITIONS AT THE TABLE

BY BISHOP GRAEME RUTHERFORD

We have considered the back-ward dimension of the Eucharist. Now I would like to reflect on the horizontal, round-the-table dimension.

Three times in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus predicts his crucifixion. Each time it is misunderstood by the disciples.

So, for instance, immediately after the second prediction, the brothers James and John approach Jesus with a request that suggests that they have hardly been listening: ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’ (10:37). Jesus, startled at their temerity, replies: ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?’ With naïve bravado, they answer flatly, ‘We are able’. Jesus, who knows that that they will be scandalized and flee when his hour of crisis arrives, informs them, that they will indeed undergo suffering with him but that there are no guarantees of special honour to be had; that is a matter for God to decide.

Not surprisingly, the other ten disciples resent the attempt of James and John to hustle their way into the places of honour. Jesus seized the moment to make one final attempt at teaching them explicitly what discipleship entails.

‘You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (10:42-45). The scrambling of the two disciples for a position in the pecking order show that they have not yet grasped the nature of God’s Kingdom or of their calling. Those who are called into the community of Jesus’ disciples are to be servants not bosses. Among ‘Gentiles’, domination and self-assertion are the rule, but in the new community of Jesus’ followers, another logic is at work.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army understood this new logic well. A rather proud young man from America, Samuel Logan Brendel, decided that he would join Booth’s Salvationists. In order to teach him a lesson Booth set him to work in a downstairs room, cleaning the boots of the other Salvationists. ‘What’ he said to himself, as he scrubbed and polished their dirty boots, ‘Have I crossed the Atlantic, just to black boots?’ And then, as in a vision, he saw Jesus leaning over the feet of his rough, unlettered disciples. ‘Lord’ he whispered, his natural pride abated, ‘You washed their feet. I will black their boots’.

The apostle Paul instructs the Christians in Galatia to ‘bear one another’s burdens’ (Gal. 6:2). A consultant paediatrician, John Wyatt, has helpfully spelt out what this should mean. He writes: ‘I sometimes hear old people, including Christian old people who should know better, say, ‘I’m happy to live my life as long as I can look after myself but I just don’t want to be a burden to anyone else’. When you hear someone say that you must say, ‘You’re wrong. You are designed to be a burden. I am designed to be a burden to you and you are designed to be a burden to me’. We are meant to be a burden to one another. And the life of a family, including the life of the local church, the Christian family should be one of ‘mutual burdensomeness’.[1]

‘In a culture which prizes independence we must model a way of community which demonstrates ‘mutual burdensomeness’. This is the way we are made, this is the way we are meant to live. In becoming incarnate, God wrote himself into this story of ‘mutual burdensomeness’. God himself became a burden to an earthly mother, and even from the cross sought to ensure that his own mother would be taken care of.’[2]

I end this second meditation with an anonymous poem:

A TABLE THAT IS ROUND

It will take some sawing to be roundtabled,

Some redefining, some redesigning

Some redoing and rebirthing of narrowlong Churching

Can painful be

For people and tables.

It would mean no daising and throning,

For but one King is there,

And he was a footwasher

At table no less.

And what of narrowlong ministers

When they confront a roundtable people,

After years of working up the table

To finally sit at its head,

Only to discover that the table

Has turned round?

They must be loved into roundness,

For God has called a people,

Not ‘them’ and ‘us’.

‘Them and us’ are unable

to gather round

for at a roundtable there are no sides

and ALL are invited

to wholeness and to food.

At one time our narrowing churches were built to resemble the cross

But it does no good for buildings to do so

If lives do not.

Roundtabling means

No preferred seating,

No first and last,

No better, and no corners for ‘the least of these’.

Roundtabling means being with, a part of, together and one.

It means room for the Spirit and gifts,

And disturbing profound peace for all.

[1] Quoted in Jason Gardner, Mend the Gap, IVP, 2008, p.173

[2]op.cit., p.174