Take, eat

It is the last night, and everything is coming apart. Within hours one friend will betray Him, another will deny Him, the rest will scatter into the dark, and He knows it as He sits down with them. And what He does, on that night of all nights, is take bread. He gives thanks, breaks it, and puts it into their hands with words they will repeat for two thousand years. Take, eat; this is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in memory of me. Then the cup, passed hand to hand around a table about to be emptied by the cross. There is something deliberate in this, that He hands His friends not a doctrine to defend but a meal to eat, something for the hands and the mouth and not only the mind. And Paul, writing later to a divided church, sees a second thing in the broken loaf. Because there is one loaf, he says, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf. One bread, torn and shared, and the many who eat it become, in the eating, one. The table given out on the night it all fell apart turns out to re-root those who come to it twice over, to Christ broken for them, and to one another.

You may believe reconnection has to wait until your thinking is fixed, your doubts resolved, your worthiness somehow restored. The table says otherwise. Reconnection here is not something you think your way into; it is something you taste. You do not have to feel worthy or have every belief back in order. You come, you take, you eat the bread broken for you, and the doing of it re-roots what the mind could never reason its way back to. Faith here is not first an argument won but a meal received with empty hands. And you are never re-rooted to Christ alone at this table, for the one loaf makes the many one body. The same bread that joins you to the Lord given for you joins you, in the eating, to the others reaching for the same loaf. So come, even unsettled, even unsure. Take and eat, with all the others being made one with you. At this table reconnection becomes something you can hold, and the soul and the body are reconnected at once.