Edible Words

What do rainbows and the bread and wine that we will share today have in common? From a biblical point of view, two things.

First, they are signs to us of God's covenants with his people. Rainbows are signs of God's promise never again to use water to destroy all living things. The bread and the wine are the sign of God's promise to forgive the sins of those who eat and drink trusting in Christ's death for their sin.

In Luke 20, Jesus was being criticised by the religious leaders of Jerusalem. Physical violence can't get rid of Jesus, because of the adoring crowds (19:47-48), so he is plied with trick questions - first in the personal arena (1-8), then the political arena (19-26) and finally in the theological arena (27-39). By 20:40, each interested group has asked a question and every avenue has been explored. They've failed to expose Jesus; instead their own spiritual bankruptcy has become transparent whilst Jesus' authority is established more vividly than ever.

This attempt to unseat Jesus is a fulfilment of the dramatic conclusion of Palm Sunday recorded in 19:41-46. Jesus is cheered by the crowds into Jerusalem, but then he stops to make the very public gesture of weeping. He weeps because he can see the devestation to befall the city and the temple in 40 years time, devestation that will come as God's judgement because this city did not recognise her Lord when he visited. After weeping, he symbolically drives the profiteering merchants out of the temple, as a symbol of the judgement to come. The rejection he weeps over is all too apparent in the deceitful questioning of chapter 20.

Lev 9:24: "And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces."

Aaron offers the prescribed sacrifices. God signifies his acceptance of the sacrifice by eating it - fire comes out and consumes the sacrifice.

Lev 10:1-2: "Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the Lord."

In his first preface to communion in the book of common prayer, Thomas Cranmer writes this about the communion meal: "...[it] being so divine and comfortable a thing to them who receive it worthily, and so dangerous to them that will presume to receive it unworthily"

It might seem strange to us today that eating bread and drinking wine could be divine and comfortable for some people and dangerous for others. How are we to be worthy to eat?