Let Us Feast 🫓

Are we doing Communion right?

How did the Lord’s Supper go from this…

...to this?

The night before His death, Jesus and His disciples shared a massive multi-course Passover feast. We’re talking wine, flatbread, roasted lamb, bitter herbs, and sides like lentil stew, eggs, fruit, nuts, and olives.

After the meal, Jesus gave his disciples bread and wine, declaring them to be His body and blood. He told them to repeat the act in His memory. For a century or two afterward, the early church followed this meal-first model with the Agape meal (or “love feast”).

At a love feast, a church gathered in a home for a potluck-style banquet where rich and poor, free and slave, all sat at the same table as equals. They would eat, sing, read Scripture, pray, and observe Communion together as a family. It was a stark contrast to the Roman banquets, where social status was everything.

Sounds nice, right? So what happened? Well, sin crept in…

In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul scolds the church for how they were handling the Lord’s Supper. The rich were getting there early and hogging all the good food. People were getting drunk. The poor were being ignored. Paul told them it would be better for them to eat at home than abuse the Lord’s Supper.

Also, as churches grew bigger, it became harder to organize huge sit-down dinners. Over time, the practice was stripped down and streamlined to its core symbols, the bread and wine, to keep it easy to share with everyone and protect it from abuse.

The love feast was a picture of the kingdom of God, just like the bread and wine are a picture of Jesus’ sacrifice. Many churches have potlucks, but they’re separate from Communion. We call a bread flake and a thimble of wine a “supper” because they’re symbolic. But without the actual supper, are we missing out on something… something besides fried chicken and delicious banana pudding?

After all, Jesus combined it with a meal!

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.