It’s Thursday of Holy Week

Flash mob choruses are likely to occur around Christmas more than around Easter and certainly far less likely to occur in reference to Maundy Thursday.  Even so, I'm drawn to the memory of watching flash-mobs in mall food courts today. Do you know what I mean, there are videos where someone in the middle of a crowded venue, like a Mall food court, starts singing some powerful piece of music, like Handel’s “Hallelujah." A young woman stands up from her phone call and sings the first notes alone, yet even in her solitude she is clearly part of something larger, waiting to rise around her.

There are places less sacred than a mall food court, but not many, and still that chorus of praise transforms the space for a moment. I think of that unlikely sanctuary whenever I remember Paul’s counsel to the Corinthians about meat sacrificed to idols, disciples trying to live faithfully in thoroughly secular places. 

Corinth was filled with temples where animals were sacrificed and the meat later sold in the marketplace or served at private dinners. Some believers, eager to separate themselves from idolatry, could not imagine eating such meat without betraying their new allegiance to Christ. Others, confident that pagan gods were nothing, were convinced it was “just meat” and that Christian freedom allowed them to eat without fear. Paul essentially agreed that idols are powerless, yet he urged the “strong” to limit their freedom out of love for “weaker” siblings whose consciences were troubled. For him, the real issue was not the menu but the community.

In the midst of that discussion he queried, 'Is not the cup we share a  sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” In this meal, he says, we participate in Christ himself and are bound to each other as one body. Communion is never merely a private spiritual exercise, even though solitude, meditation, and personal prayer are essential parts of the Christian life. At the Lord’s table, Christ draws us out of aloneness into a shared life of mutual belonging.

For Disciples of Christ, this is why Maundy Thursday matters so deeply: we are a people defined by the Lord’s Table, and this is the night Jesus set that table and gave us the Supper. A meal lovingly prepared is a small miracle. Seeds hidden in the ground become vegetables, grain ripens on distant hillsides, flour meets water, yeast, eggs, milk, and sugar in the hands of a baker, and from many places a single loaf emerges. Around any table, food gathered from all over the world becomes one meal, nourishing one group of people. So it is with us: scattered and fragmented lives, drawn by Christ and his church into one body to share a meal and remember the Lord who gathers us. It's really not much different than a beautiful chorus being sung in a busy mall food court. 

On Maundy Thursday we remember that at one time each of us was far from God, strangers even to one another. In Christ, God has embraced us and brought us close to God’s heart, making us siblings whose sorrows and joys now belong to one another. To follow Christ is to choose a difficult path, the way of the cross, where we share the fellowship of his sufferings and hold fast to the hope of resurrection. At this table we remember and give thanks, we acknowledge our unity in the body of Christ, and we commit ourselves again to the way of God’s Son. Like that young woman who finds her lone voice suddenly surrounded by a great choir, we discover that we do not sing, believe, or suffer alone; through baptism and communion we are joined to Christ and to each other, a single chorus of praise rising in the most ordinary places.

Here is an invitation to the Lord's Table Alexander Campbell wrote. You can find it in the Chalice Hymnal on page 401.

"You, my beloved, once an alien, are now a citizen of heaven: once a stranger, are now brought home to the family of God. You have owned my Lord as your Lord, my people as your people. Under Jesus the Messiah we are one. Mutually embraced in the everlasting arms, I embrace you in mine: your sorrows shall be my sorrows, and your joys

my joys. Joint debtors to the favor of God and the love of Jesus, we shall jointly suffer with him, that we may jointly reign with him. Let us, then, renew our strength, remember our Sovereign, and hold fast our boasted hope unshaken to the end.'