The Supper: Lesson One

The Supper

Josiah Tilton

West Side church of Christ

November 17, 2019

Lesson One

For the next few weeks we are going to look at the Supper. I believe the Supper is a glorious thing, and we take it far too casually. Our thoughts are far too temperate, too calm. Many of our Supper talks are far too surface, too shallow. There’s so much more in the Supper we don’t speak of, perhaps have not really considered. I’m not pointing fingers. I’m just as guilty of these as any. On far too many Sunday mornings I take the Supper perfunctorily. I eat a tiny bit of cracker, sip a little juice and don’t really think “What am I doing.” In those moments when I waken from my routine, I feel shame. I tell myself the Supper is much too important to take so lightly. So, I hope this class will be helpful for all of us as we look at the Supper.

Simple Questions:

Who are we?

What are we doing here?

What is our purpose?

Why do things happen the way they happen?

These are all questions we, all mankind, want answered. Those of us in Christ Jesus feel we have some answers to these, but even the answers we have bring forth more questions. We are born into a world filled with evil. As David said of himself, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”, we can say the same of ourselves. We are brought forth in a world that is so tilted toward that which is ungodly, that finding righteousness in it proves to be a difficult thing.

So, we are born, and we find God and our Lord, Jesus the Christ. We grow, we work, we marry, we have children of our own, we struggle, we age, we weaken, and we die. Where are the answers to all of those questions I first asked?

I believe the answers are simple and easily answered. At the same time, I believe they are so complex that we will still be answering them deep into eternity. For instance… Believing John 1:14, “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory. The glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” KJV

We beheld His glory. When? When He dwelt among us. When we believe this, that the Word became flesh, then we are saying, whether we recognize it or not, that we believe in a very sacred ontology. We believe that being, just being, is sacred! God became flesh and blood. Several times in Romans five Paul tells us about the MAN, Jesus the Christ. I believe, the more we look into the fact of the incarnation, the more we recognize that God lived in this flesh, the greater will be our appreciation of Baptism, the Church and the Supper.

As we consider such thoughts, what does this do to our minds? Our hopes? Our vision of life itself?

Do we just sing, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream”? Look around us. Try and picture what we were like, what we looked like, how we felt and acted twenty-five years ago. We look back and say, “That was our life”. And yes, that is true. More than that, however, is the fact that that is also our death.

We almost always look at death as if it was a moment in time, when in reality death is a process. It begins at birth and leads us to that moment when we draw our last breath. But every moment of our life was death coming upon us. Ever since we ate the forbidden fruit, we have stared death in the face and he has always been around us, pushing, pulling, often dragging us to that final moment when, to most who have ever lived on this planet, death wins!

To reach a deeper understanding of the Supper, I believe, we need to first look at this most serious of issues…Death!

How dreadfully dismal is this introduction to something I think is divinely beautiful? But we must see some of the purposes behind the great supper, which we are going to be studying. And death is one of the great purposes. In fact, I read recently, and I thought it to be true, “Without death, what does it even mean to be alive?”

We don’t like to look at death, do we? When our folks get old, we send them off to a retirement village or a nursing home. When they are terminally sick, they end up spending their last days behind the gray walls of a hospital, plugged into an array of machines and drips that make them comfortable until they slip off to that next world. We weep for a few moments, have a nice funeral and then go on living, trying not to even think about death, until the next one comes along.

To gain a deeper understanding of the Supper, we need to look into this matter of death. It’s important because, included in this great Supper is this terrible enemy of ours, Death! And to look at the Supper without examining, at least just a little, this enemy is to miss out on some of the important issues we are going to be looking at.

Though she’s not one of my favorite poets, Emily Dickinson did write some very interesting things. One of her most famous poems (Because I Could not Stop for Death) begins like this:

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

So, think, if you would, take a few moments to think about death. Death. Most hate it. Many fear it. At the same time, some welcome it, even bringing it on themselves.

Depending on which source you use, suicide is either the second or third leading cause of death among teens and young adults. How could such young people find life so miserable that they would want to end it?

When I was in high school, there was a student there that many others picked on. (I honestly do not remember ever picking on him myself, but I didn’t try to stop others from doing it, so I was as guilty as they were.) After several months of torment, his mother came home from work, called for him, but received no answer. She looked for him in his room. He wasn’t there. She called again. No answer. Finally, she went down to their basement. She found him hanging from the ceiling. A rope tied around his neck and his body blue in death. He welcomed death because it would offer him the relief he could not find among his peers at school. For him, death wasn’t the enemy, life was. He didn’t fear death, he welcomed it.

Another kid in our high school was very popular. He was one of the cool kids. He was well liked and invited to all the parties. But, like many of us, he wanted to be cooler still. So, one day, he decided to put some spring jacks in his car to make it stand up a little higher, look a little cooler, seem a little faster. So, he jacked the car up, got under it and began putting the spring jacks in. Without warning, the bumper jack slipped. The car fell, and there was no one around to help him, except death. And death was more than willing to offer him his arm. Half the school went to his funeral…only a handful went to the other boy’s!

The contrast of these two seems to serve as a lesson to many of just how meaningless, senseless, life is.

“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
    says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!

Ecclesiastes 1:2

Have you ever felt this way? Ever thought, “Meaningless. Meaningless.”? Have you never been in honest despair? Unable to understand? Unable to find a meaning in something you are going through? Wondering why? Why?

There is that man we know as Job. He loved God. Taught his children about God, to love God, and he sacrificed for those children…just in case. We read:

⁴ His sons used to hold feasts in their homes on their birthdays, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. ⁵ When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would make arrangements for them to be purified. Early in the morning he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, “Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s regular custom. ESV

And then what? Satan joins the angels as they come before God and God begins talking to him.

“Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

From that moment to a very long time after, Job sat in sackcloth and ashes and thought, “This make no sense. Where is the meaning in this?” His suffering. His unfriendly friends. Even his wife! Meaningless. Nothing had real meaning any longer. Yes. He still believed in God, but… But where was there any real meaning in what he was going through. He didn’t, couldn’t understand it at all.

So, as we look at our own lives, we need to recognize that we are not the only ones who have wondered where the meaning was. We look at the greatest of enemies, Death and tremble because we are unable to do anything about him, and not able to understand the meaning of him.

So, what do we do with our inability to understand? What do we do when death reaches out its gnarly fingers, grabs us or a loved on by the neck and drags us out of this world and into the next?

To be sure, I don’t have all the answers to the questions that confront us. But some things I do know: Even if I can’t fully explain what it means that, even though Death is still right here with us, still making us tremble, Jesus has inaugurated a world that is beyond the realm of death. Remember in our class on the Revelation, Jesus said to us, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Revelation 21:5

Listen to N T Wright:

“YOUNG HERO WINS HEARTS.” Had there been newspapers in Jerusalem in the year we now call AD 33, this was the headline you would not have seen. When Jesus of Nazareth died the horrible death of crucifixion at the hands of the Roman army, nobody thought him a hero. Nobody was saying, as they hurriedly laid his body in a tomb, that his death had been a splendid victory, a heroic martyrdom. His movement, which had in any case been something of a ragtag group of followers, was over. Nothing had changed. Another young leader had been brutally liquidated. This was the sort of thing that Rome did best. Caesar was on his throne. Death, as usual, had the last word. Except that in this case it didn’t.

As Jesus’s followers looked back on that day in the light of what happened soon afterward, they came up with the shocking, scandalous, nonsensical claim that his death had launched a revolution. That something had happened that afternoon that had changed the world. That by six o’clock on that dark Friday evening the world was a different place.”

Brian Zahnd, in his book Water to Wine, says “Seen in the light of the Easter dawn, the cross is revealed to be the lost Tree of Life. In the middle of a world dominated by death, the Tree of Life is rediscovered in the form of a Roman cross.”



There, in the middle of the night, in what should have been the most religious, godly city in the world, a handful of armed men arrested Jesus. They took Him before the tribunal, screamed “Crucify him! CRUCIFY HIM!!” Then, after a severe beating, led Him away to Golgotha. A hammer drove nails through His hands and feet, the cross was raised, and the end dropped sharply into a carved-out hole meant to keep it upright. Blood poured from His head, His back, His hands and feet. People laughed, shouting caustic statements, and watched gleefully as He bowed His head and died.
And the small group of people who had been with Him, who had heard the stories and the promises, bowed their head, wiped the tears from their eyes, and walked away thinking “Meaningless, meaningless.” Everything they had hoped was just so much smoke and mirrors.

Death. He is an ugly coward, but try as we might to fight him off, we will always fail. We cannot stop him. Look at our own assembly of brothers and sisters. I have been here for more than twenty-five years. I have watched, perhaps, dozens of folks from here die. And, though we have great hospitals, wonderful medicines, learned doctors and nurses, death still seems to win. We die. We even read, “It is appointed unto man once to die and after that the judgment.” Hebrews 9:27 So, death seems to have the upper hand and there is so much about him that we don’t understand.
That’s it, isn’t it? That’s how we feel sometimes. All of this, and much more, is exactly why we meet for supper. Over the next few weeks we will look at the Supper in ways we might not have considered before.

There are three glorious things spoken of in the scriptures, Baptism, the church and the Supper that hold such great meaning that we could spend months, years really, looking at, studying, meditating on and learning from. For a few weeks we will look at the Supper and see if there isn’t more, much more we can learn from it. And maybe we can get to the point where John Donne’s sonnet holds truth for us:

Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud

By John Donne

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

I want us to think about the following passages taken from Hebrews 2:5-18

⁵ For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. ⁶ It has been testified somewhere,

“What is man, that you are mindful of him,
    or the son of man, that you care for him?
⁷ You made him for a little while lower than the angels;
    you have crowned him with glory and honor,^[a]
8     putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. ⁹ But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

¹⁰ For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering. ¹¹ For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source.^[b] That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers,^{[c] 12} saying,

“I will tell of your name to my brothers;
    in the midst of the congregation I will sing your praise.”

¹³ And again,

“I will put my trust in him.”

And again,

“Behold, I and the children God has given me.”

¹⁴ Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, ¹⁵ and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. ¹⁶ For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. ¹⁷ Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. ¹⁸ For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

Next week, a little more about death. It will be much more personal, closer to home. And I hope as we look at things, we will see that death deserves a seat at the table.

It is my prayer that you will be here for that.

---

[1] Wright, N. T.. The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion (p. 3). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

[2] Zahnd, Brian. Water to Wine: Some of My Story (p. 25) Spello Press, 2016