We are Each Other’s Bread and Wine
no. 9
by Bradley Roth
Warden Mennonite Church (Warden, Washington)
February 15, 2009
Mark 6:7-13
In Mark 6, Jesus gathers the Twelve together and instructs them in their mission. They’re to go out in pairs, staying wherever they receive a welcome. He gives them authority over unclean spirits, and we find them proclaiming repentance, casting out evil spirits, and anointing the sick for healing (vv. 12-13). In all of this, the disciples are to travel lightly—extremely lightly. Jesus tells them to take nothing except a staff—“no bread, no bag, no money in their belts” (v.8). They can wear sandals, but they’re not to take an extra tunic—that is, no change of clothes.
To travel light is to be nimble, free to go where you need to at a moment’s notice—like fitting everything into a carry-on bag. But it’s also a recipe for an incredible sort of vulnerability. Jesus desired to remind the disciples of their dependence on God.
Something like this happens at the Lord’s Table. When we meet Jesus here, at the table, made visible in the bread and the cup, we’re reminded that we depend on God to sustain us. We recognize in the Lord’s Supper that we depend on God’s provision, and this truth makes it possible for us to be formed as people of trust and peace.
Jesus’ encounter with the disciples in Mark wasn’t the first time God reminded God’s people of their utter need for him. Think back to the book of Exodus. The Israelites, liberated from their Egyptian captors but so too, liberated from any false notion of who their true sustainer might be, learned that they could no longer depend on the systems of empire to care for them. You’re in the desert now. Nobody out here but the jackals. And so they found themselves face to face with their true circumstances, with themselves as they really were. It wasn’t pretty—not unlike the church in Laodicea that, though seemingly rich, in Christ’s eyes discovered they were “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev.3:17). Like most of us, the Israelites found that when it got down to brass tacks, they were grumblers and malcontents. They didn’t know which way to go—even, what was good and what was bad. The bird in the hand of slavery and at least moderate provision seemed more attractive than the two in the bush of the Promised Land and the seemingly endless wilderness wanderings.
Jesus continues to send us out, his disciples, instructing us to take no bread for the journey. Why is this? Why didn’t Jesus just load the Twelve up with bread before he sent them out? After all, Jesus provided for the 5,000—why not just give his disciples heaping sacks of bread for their journey?
I think Jesus desires that we be formed as people of trust. We must continuously come back to God’s table for sustenance. The manna can’t be stored. Part of what this means is that we are forced to become a people who journey, a pilgrim people. God won’t let us remain where we are, even if we encountered God there before. God desires that we move forward, meeting God at different stops along the way. Each time, we return to God for nourishment and are sent out again. We must trust God to continue to meet us on the way.
I think of marathon runners. As they jog along the course, there are tables with cups of Gatorade set up at various points. The runners have to keep moving forward, trusting that there will be refreshment up ahead, until they reach the end of the race. And so it is with life. God sends us out, urging us to rest in an authentic vulnerability that flows not from our weakness, but from a profound trust in the God who will not let us fall.
Ron Heifetz, a Jew who writes on issues of leadership, tells the story of being in England over the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. He and his wife found themselves in the countryside, with no other Jews anywhere nearby with whom to celebrate the holiday. They ended up going into a little Anglican church. It was empty, and Mr. Heifetz contemplated the image of Jesus on the cross. He felt strange being there, but he decided to ask Rabbi Jesus to keep him company. After a time, he asked: “Will you tell me your experience on the cross?” Shortly thereafter, he became very excited and took his wife by the hand, leading her out toward an old pine tree standing beneath the afternoon sun. He told his wife he wanted to share an insight he had just had with her, but that he had to show her. Together, Mr. Heifetz and his wife lay down on the ground, arms open wide.
When he asked his wife how she felt, she said: “Really vulnerable.” Mr. Heifetz responded that he just had the realization that we have to become like Jesus, who can at the same time cry out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.” He called this the “sacred heart.” It’s the “capacity to encompass the entire range of your human experience without hardening or closing yourself.”[1]
We take no bread for the journey. Instead, we stretch out our arms wide, as Jesus showed us on the cross. We move forward, even as we are ever returning to the Table of the Lord. This kind of vulnerability in motion forms us as a people of trust.
I think it’s only when we’ve learned this lesson of trust and vulnerability from the Lord’s Table that we can begin to also be shaped as a people of peace. James 4 comes to mind. James asks: “Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” (v.1). Making the shift—by God’s grace—from craving the objects of this world to desiring God, opens something within us. When what we truly desire is God, the rest—like so many bumper stickers tell us—is just details.
When we live as those who depend on the God who gives generously, we are trained to look out rather than in. We become more sensitive because we see just how tenuous our lives truly are. And we recognize that the source of our ultimate sustenance—God—stands beyond any sort of human conflict. The Table of our Lord is always laid, never empty. At Jesus’ feast, no one hungers.
The Acts of the Apostles tells us that the Apostle Paul, in chapter 27, was shipwrecked at sea. As the storm raged around the ship for weeks on end, the most obvious thing for him to do would have been to see to his own safety. But Paul, convinced that God held the people of that ship safely in God’s hands, and seeing that because of their great fear, they had not eaten for many days, took bread, and stood before them. After giving thanks, Paul broke the bread and began to eat, and the rest of the people did the same. The ship wrecked and was broken to bits on a reef, but no one lost their life.
This incredible capacity that Paul demonstrated to look beyond our own needs and see to the needs of others happens whenever we are convinced that God is the ultimate supplier of our needs. That confidence is what makes peacemaking possible. Paul trusted in the God who provides, and so Paul could therefore take the risk of seeking the peace of all those on the boat. He could break bread with them.
This is why the Lord’s Supper is such a potent symbol of Christ’s peace. This is why, each time we draw near to the table, we are formed as people of peace. At the table, we lay aside our defenses, lay down all our bristling, jagged armaments, and we lay hold of the God who provides for all of our needs. We are introduced to God’s gift of total, pure abundance that does not need defending.
A bill circulating in the Arkansas legislature[2] would allow people to carry concealed weapons into church. The idea is that, in light of some recent church shootings around the country, church-goers could arm themselves and thus be protected while in the congregation. It would sort of lend a whole new urgency to sharing the hymnal with your neighbor!
This sort of bill deeply concerns me—not just because I believe weapons in the sanctuary are a violation of the peace of Christ, not just because I resist any attempt by the government to control the moral life of the church. Carrying guns to church worries me because I think that in the interest of temporary safety, we would be losing an opportunity: the opportunity to be shaped at the Table of the Lord as a people of peace. We would be arming up at the table when we should be checking our defenses at the door and coming as those vulnerable before God.
Instead, I am moved by another story of an incident that took place in South Africa. In May of 2008, violence spasmed across South Africa. Mostly, the violence was directed against immigrants from poor neighboring countries. Many of these folks were escaping the harsh rule of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. They came with virtually nothing—without papers, connections, and education. They had scant prospects in South Africa. People were harassed, beaten up in the streets, doused with gasoline and set alight. In the city of Johannesburg, thousands of immigrants took refuge in the Central Methodist Church. They camped out in the sanctuary and did their best to keep out of the path of the raging street mobs.
In a report made on NPR’s The World, Methodist Bishop Paul Verryn describes how, upon hearing that a mob was gathering down the street and an attack was imminent, the people taking refuge in the church began to flounder about searching for any weapon they could get their hands on. Some tore pieces from the communion railing. Others pulled apart a wooden trellis near the front of the sanctuary.
Bishop Verryn came upon this chaotic scene. He stood before these thousands of folks who were rightly terrified for their lives and reminded them that to use these makeshift weapons would likely invite their enemies to take up even more fearsome arms.
Slowly, people began to come forward. They filed up to the front and laid their nail-spiked boards and posts and clubs on the communion table. Bishop Verryn remarked: “In the context of being warned that their lives were in danger…it was just profound.”
Jesus’ instruction that his disciples travel lightly, that they take no bread for the journey, molds us as a people who trust in God. We are formed as a people of peace. We come to the table of the Lord in the authentic vulnerability of the cross, as people whose hands are empty, who have laid down their defenses, and come unencumbered.
This might be blessing enough, but there’s more. Jesus commands us to take no bread for the journey because when we meet him at the table with our hands emptied, he is able to press the bread and cup into them, his very body and blood, broken and shared, that we might continue this journey of peace with him.
Thanks be to God!
Amen.
[1] Ronal Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 2002), 228-230.