The Practices of the Church 2 “Breaking Bread Together”

John Howard Yoder in his little book Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before a Watching World addresses the Eucharist as another practice of the church.

His contention is that the central element and meaning of the Eucharist has been buried under a mound of ritualistic and superstitious religious notions “borrowed from other religions and philosophical assumptions of the ancient world” far removed from the Upper Room where Jesus gave his “Do this in remembrance of me”. Yoder contends that what Jesus meant, and what the Eucharist should mean for us, is the sanctifying of the ordinary common meal.

What Jesus must have meant, and what the record indicates that his first followers took him to mean, was “whenever you have your common meal.” The meal Jesus blessed that evening and claimed as his memorial was their ordinary partaking together of food for the body (16).

The practice of eating a common meal together was the habit of Jesus during his itinerant ministry. And that the early followers of Jesus continued that practice after his ascension into heaven is evidence by Luke’s report that “They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42).

The Lord’s Supper carries the connotations of family meal fellowship, the Jewish thanksgiving blessing, the Passover and Jesus’ feeding miracles.

I think the point can be stated simply: The Lord’s supper is a real supper! And as such it is an “economic act”. The supply of basic needs is a “mark of the messianic age”.

What the New Testament is talking about whenever the theme is “breaking bread” is that people actually were sharing with one another their ordinary day-to-day material sustenance . . . bread eaten together is economic sharing. Not merely symbolically, but also in fact, eating together extends to a wider circle the economic solidarity normally obtained in the family (20).

Yoder has a great line in this chapter that captures part of the church’s mission:

Planting signs of the new world in the ruins of the old (27).

He argues that the Eucharist is just one of those signs. But so is open housing and so is feeding the hungry. He claims “One is not more ‘real presence’ than the other” (27).

This perspective is provocative no doubt. I don’t have a problem with the ritual of the Lord’s Supper that I’ll partake of today at Church. It has symbolic significance. Even my Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Reformed friends would agree that there is a symbolic element in the Eucharist. It is at the very least a pointer. But for both the Eastern and Western traditions of the church it is more, much more. And I would have wished Yoder made more of the Atonement element of the Eucharist that seems so foundational to the “words of institution” (cf. Matt 26:28; Luke 22:20).

Yoder has a point though. One that needs to be heeded. One that takes us to the core mission and practice of the church. The Gospel makes the ordinary sacramental. A common life together should be real sustenance for the hungry and thirsty world. We may disagree on what is the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, but we can all agree on at least this point: The work of Jesus, represented in the bread and the cup, has tangible, ordinary consequences.