Meals figure a great deal in the Easter narratives.
The one in the upper room is full of companionship, although tense at
times. And the remembrance of that night
has become the most important meal of The Church.
The Emmaus meal, although almost finished before it began, holds a treasured
place in the Easter sequence. This
enigmatic encounter, culminating in a single gesture of breaking the bread, an
action that said a thousand words, warms our hearts today as much as it did
Cleopas and his friend’s two thousand years ago.
And post
Easter Sunday there was that breakfast meal by the lake as Jesus meets his
disciples and reinstates a dejected, yet still faithful Peter.
I’m thinking of meals because yesterday I felt I had one of those ‘God moments’
that touched my heart. It was the
Tuesday of Holy Week and at Tea at Three, in our church hall, I was in
conversation with a church member over some delicious chocolate Brownies. She may live in a care home and is faithfully
brought to services and events by a wonderfully loving husband, yet she has great
and often insightful theology! For she
said, unprompted: When we sit here at Tea at Three, we are in the presence
of Jesus just as much as when we sit in church.
I loved hearing that! Some may call
it The Real Presence, but my friend just called it the presence of
Jesus. And I believe she’s spot
on. Just as our Lord was present in the
upper room, at Emmaus and by a beach barbeque, his living and life sustaining
presence is with us still, whether singing hymns of faith in church or eating
chocolate brownies with good friends around a table in a church hall on a
Tuesday afternoon. And in a sense, that’s
what resurrection is all about – those daily encounters with our living Lord.
Blog returns in two weeks.
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