Reclaiming The Table

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

—Matthew 26:26–28

Both the church and modern life have wandered away from the table. The church has preferred to live in the mind and the heart and the soul, and almost not at all in fingers and mouths and senses. And modern life has pushed us into faux food and fast food and highly engineered food products cased in sterile packages that we eat in the car or on the subway—as though we’re astronauts, as though we can’t be bothered with a meal.

All through the Bible, all through the stories about God and his people, there are stories about food—about all of life changing with the bite of an apple; about trading an inheritance for a bowl of stew; about waking up to find the land littered with bread; about a wedding where water turned to wine; about the very first Last Supper, the humble bread and wine becoming indelibly linked to the very body of Christ, the center point for thousands of years of tradition and belief. It matters. It mattered then, and it matters now, possibly even more so, because it’s a way of reclaiming some of the things we may have lost along the way.