It’s no accident that a central part of Christian worship is sharing bread and wine. The center of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus, and when He rose from the dead, one of the things He did was eat with His disciples to prove that He was really alive, in a real human body.
But this relates to broader theme found throughout the Bible from beginning to end and that is the goodness of creation and the determination of God to heal and restore all things. There have been various religious movements throughout the centuries that have tried to pin our sin on the material world. And we broadly call these movements “gnostic” – heresies that teach that this material world is evil and bad, and that salvation means somehow transcending this material world through secret, mystical knowledge and experiences.
But not only is that not true, it creates cultures of fear and insecurity. How do you know if you have the right knowledge, enough knowledge, the true secret knowledge? How do you know you’ve had the real experience? And even well-meaning evangelical Christians can accidentally creep into this by implying that being a real Christian is having some kind of emotional experience with God. But a central part of the message of the resurrection is simply that evil has lost and now this world is being healed. When Jesus showed His hands and feet and side to the disciples, He was showing them an ordinary human body healed of sin and death, and then He ate with them.
Salvation is the ordinary healed. Salvation is the goodness of creation restored. How do you know you’re a Christian? Do you love Jesus? Have you been baptized? Do want to be here? Then you’re in. We share ordinary bread and ordinary wine because Jesus is risen from the dead, because He is making all the ordinary things new again. He’s making ordinary men into real men, and ordinary women into real women. He’s restoring families and marriages, and businesses and nations. Sin is what must go, but when we lay our sin down, He gives us ordinary bread and wine. When we lay our sin down, He gives us the world to enjoy.
So Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ.
Photo by Jo Leonhardt on Unsplash
Leave a Reply