Yoder on communion as an economic, even political, act

We looked at Jesus' "institution of the Lord's Supper" in Matthew 26 this week. The following are some reflection from John Howard Yoder's little book "Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before the Watching World."

He notes that there’s a whole pattern of living and believing connecting with eating together in the New Testament, and in that world. When Jesus says "as often as you do this..." Yoder suggests that Jesus means, whenever you have a communal meal - whenever you share a meal, sharing your resources, making sure no one is hungry- you are participating in 'economic ethics.' This, for Yoder, more important than a privatized spiritual experience, me receiving Jesus. Note his comment about "real presence."

The synthesis of Christianity and empire beginning in the fourth century had to replace the economic meaning of breaking bread together with something else… (p. 15)

[Some of the background to the Passover communal meal...]

1. …the simple social fact, undeniable in the record but often not taken to be important, that men and women left their jobs, homes, and families to constitute with Jesus a new “family,” a community of consumption, in which he exercised the role of head-of-household. Scholars have sometimes compared the disciples’ meals to the kind of gathering then called chabourah or “fellowship,” where friends would gather regularly for prayer and food, while remaining in the residential and vocational settings.

2. thanksgiving – every meal in a Jewish household was an act of worship…

3. context of Passover – liberation, deliverance, a new people…

4. memory of feeding crowds in the desert. (First proposed to Jesus as a temptation…); anticipating the Messianic banquet

What the New Testament is talking about wherever the theme is “breaking bread” is that people actually were sharing with one another their ordinary day-to-day material sustenance… Bread eaten together is economic sharing… That basic needs are met is a mark of the messianic age. (Acts 4:34; Deut. 15:4)

To do rightly the practice of breaking bread together is a matter of economic ethics.

Vocation (banking, real estate, judge, etc.) then will be to find ways to implement jubilee amnesty, to work for meeting basic human needs. “Technical vocational sphere expertise in each professional area will be needed not to reinforce but to undercut competently the claimed sovereignty of each sphere by planting signs of the new world in the ruins of the old. Baptism is one of those signs, and so is open housing. The Eucharist is one, but so is feeding the hungry. One is not more 'real presence' than the other."

(p. 18-27, Body Politics, John Howard Yoder)