The table of Plenty

This morning I woke up with a few important household goals in mind.  Instead I found myself enjoying a big cup of coffee and reading.  One part of my mind scolding me on how I must stay focused on the domestic matters at hand. The other part of my mind reminding me that this week is my “off” time, today is my time to just “play” around. Guess which side of my mind won?

So the book I turned to is one I have been reading off and on for some time now and sits on my nightstand.  It’s called “Forum Essays: Eucharist as Sacrament of Initiation”, by Nathan D. Mitchell.

This little Catholic collection of essays is full of great insights, building on the idea that our Christian conversion process leads us to the Lord’s Table, in other words, the liturgy of the Mass. Our conversion process is one that makes us aware of a call to the table, one that Jesus says is linked to the reign of God and with which we connect to it through his death and his resurrection. Even more than that, this book then challenges me to look at the mystery of God’s table with my own mystery. It challenges me to see that the Lord’s Body is not only on the table, but at the table as well.

Catholic theology understands all of God’s mystery as a great paradox.  He is everything AND nothing at all we can imagine.  God is pure mystery and yet he available to me as Father.

Great is the LORD, and highly to be praised, And His greatness is unsearchable.(Ps 145:3)

What has been is remote and exceedingly mysterious. Who can discover it? (Ecc 7:24)

As so, the mystery of our life is that our “death” is being enacted each time when we, of our own free will, surrender to God. Catholics often refer to this mystery as “taking up our cross”.

Paul said “we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” (Rom 6:3-4)

I am reminded that the NT insisted on our understanding that Jesus really did die and really did resurrect. In our baptism we are entering into this experience, which was both a historic and cosmic reality and therefore we too are made new through our faith in Jesus Christ.

The same historical cosmic reality that occurs at our baptism occurs when Christians come together at the Eucharistic meal.   It is easy to lose sight of the connection between our baptism, the cross and the table.

“As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes”, St. Paul reminds us and we hear these words at every Eucharistic meal.

Jesus laid eternal death at the table. We celebrate his sacrifice and death by remembering it through the ritual of broken bread and poured out wine, what Catholics call the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  Death that was restored and redeemed by a merciful Father for his son and for all of us; for you and for me. As long as we are willing to die, just as we died in our baptism and were reborn into spiritual life in Christ.

All of us are worthy to eat and drink at God’s table. The NT is full of stories of Jesus eating with sinners, outcasts, and marginal people. He wanted to welcome them back into the community. What he did was seen are rebellious and anti-establishment; he ate with social misfits at the table and he forgave their sins if they repented! His table was the place where healing and reconciliation occurred, as with the cross.

Baptism is our initiation into the mystery of the Body of Christ, and the mystery of the Eucharist is where we announce publically who we are and what we intend to do. Scandoulous!! We are called to rethink our own world view! We are called to do something about the injustices in our world.

The table, a powerful metaphor for social ranking and hierarchy, became a place where social norms were challenged by Jesus. Jesus comes to the table as a stranger who has traveled without food or money and needs hospitality. For Jesus, healing calls forth hospitality. He blurs the line between host and guest. Reading NT stories that tell us about Jesus at supper did away with food taboos, (Mk 7:18-20; cf. 7:15-17), table rites (Mk :1-15) and cooking customs (Lk 6:1-5) as a way to restrict others from sharing in our fellowship.  The meal around the table became a feast where everyone was accepted, all was shared among each other and all served one another. Jesus taught that we are to learn to receive hospitality as much as we are to give it. The table is where we all enter in life and death together.

Do we know “who we are”? So much news today is being reported about individuals who identify as this or that. Too bad many of us fail to identify ourselves as a “sinner”.  A sinner who is being called to a table where he can be healed and then can go out and heal others. Our identity is formed around this communal table, because the Eucharist is not only who we are but also our mission to be God’s presence in the world. We become open to all, to enter into the messiness (some may say mystagogy or mystery) of the world and forgive those who offend us. This is who we are to become. The Eucharistic meal is the climax of who are.

The Mystery leads us to Mission. Eucharist leads us to recreate the world, “rooted in baptismal regeneration and sustained by the community’s regular recourse to Eucharist.” (113)

As the proverb goes, “we are what we eat”. This is who we become each time we go with the right attitude, an open heart and mind, to the Eucharistic meal; we become Christ like.

I felt so my joy when we sang it the other day at Mass at St. Paul’s one of my favorite liturgical song, one I haven’t sang in a while, called “Table of Plenty”. 

Come to the feast of heaven and earth,

Come to the table of plenty.

God will provide for all that we need,

Here at the table of plenty.

                O come and sit at my table

                Where saints and sinners are friends

                I wait to welcome the lost and lonely

                To share the cup of my love.

Jesus, you are there at the table and you are on the table. You are both host and guest. You are the victim and the victor. You call me to do the same. The mystery is that this feast is an eternal one and you call me to this feast each day. It leads me to say, Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and you will restore me.

I end my reflection with a powerful catechesis by St. Leo the Great which sums it all up (135)-

“We are to celebrate the Lord’s pascal sacrifice with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The leaven of our former malice is thrown out, and a new creature is filled and inebriated with the Lord himself. For the effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive. As we have died with him, and have been buried and raised to life with him, so we bear him within us, both in body and spirit.”