It is Maundy Thursday. It is customary for Christians to gather on this day and share communion in remembrance of Jesus' Last Supper. This supper serves as a foundation for the celebration of the Eucharist/Holy Communion. With this celebration in mind, I am sharing a couple of paragraphs from my book Eating with Jesus: Reflections on Divine Encounters at the Open Eucharistic Table. I offer these words as background to our celebration, even as I offer the book itself as a discussion starter about the nature of our Table fellowship.
As we consider what it means to eat with Jesus, we must remember that what we believe and practice when it comes to gathering at the Lord’s Table has its roots in Scripture, particularly the New Testament. While Scripture provides the primary foundation, it requires interpretation. Our interpretations are influenced by our theologies. One of the questions we face as we consider what it means to gather for this meal, even if this meal involves partaking of a piece of bread and a sip of wine/juice, is the relationship of the institution of the meal we know as the Last Supper to the entirety of Jesus’ practice of table fellowship. If we look at Jesus’ experiences of table fellowship, as revealed in the Gospels, we will, I believe, discover that Jesus practiced a radically open table. If this is true, how might this inform what occurs at the church’s gatherings for the Lord’s Supper?
We trace our gatherings at the Lord’s Table to Jesus’ “words of institution,” given during his final meal with his disciples. At that meal, Jesus broke bread and shared a cup of wine with his disciples (I can imagine more than the twelve people gathered around the table with Jesus, despite what we see in the many images of the event), telling them to continue this practice of table fellowship as an act of remembrance of him until his return (1 Cor 11:23–26). By instructing the disciples to continue this practice until his return, Jesus gave the meal an eschatological dimension. While the “words of institution” provide us with an impetus to come to the table, if we are to fully understand the nature of this sacred meal, we must keep in mind Jesus’ much broader practice of table fellowship.
As we consider our eucharistic celebrations, which have their roots in Jesus’ institution of the meal at the Last Supper along with his practice of table fellowship, it is important to remember the connection of the Christian meal to the Jewish observance of Passover. Although the Gospels do not agree on whether Christ died on the Day of Passover or the Eve of Passover, they agree that Jesus died during Passover Week. To understand the meaning of the meal he shared with his disciples on the night before his execution, the meal that serves for us as an act of remembrance of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, so, it is appropriate to begin with the Passover meal. [Eating With Jesus: Reflections on Divine Encounters at the Open Eucharistic Table, (Cascade Books, 2025), p. 3-4]
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