If you are writing a play about [Holy Week}, the scenes
would be table, trial (with its various locations), cross, tomb (burial), tomb
(resurrection), and table. The table is the first setting, and it is the final
setting of the story. Indeed, when the disciples want to meet Jesus again the
next week, they return again to the upper room to meet him at the table.
They never return to the cross. Jesus never takes them
back to the site of the execution. He never gathers his followers at Calvary,
never points to the blood-stained hill, and never instructs them to meet him
there. He never valorizes the events of Friday. He never mentions them. Yes,
wounds remain, but how he got them isn’t mentioned. Instead, almost all the
post-resurrection appearances — which are joyful and celebratory and
conversational — take place at the upper room table or at other tables and meals.
Table - trial - cross - tomb - tomb - table.
What if the table is the point?
Diana
Butler Bass
________________________________________
What if the table is the point?
What if community is the point?
What if Easter is, when all is said and done, about
People gathering
Laughing
Eating
People listening to each other
Supporting one other
Being together when it is easy, and when it is not
Being together in the rejoicing and in the lamenting
What if Easter is about Jesus stepping in
And saving us
Not from God’s wrath
But from the enmity of the Rulers of the World
From hate and violence
From those forces that would divide and destroy
On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a
feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats, and the
finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that
enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
he will
swallow up death forever.
In the great story of love
We move from a table, where feet were washed
Bread was broken
And wine was drunk
Out into a dark and painful world
To a garden of anguish
To betrayal
And abuse
To injustice and death
To a tomb filled and a tomb emptied
And ends up back in an upper room, that same room,
perhaps
And at a table
Where once again bread is broken
And by the Sea of Galilee
Where once again bread is broken
And fish are served
Food for the stomach
Food for the heart
Food for the soul
Perhaps the point is that because of Jesus
We can be together
We can be stuffed with all good things
We can be love
The table reminds us we are family
That we are stuck with each other
And we might as well love each other
It reminds us that faith is about being fed
And feeding one another
Perhaps the table is the point. As Rachel Held Evans once wrote:
“This is what God's kingdom is like a bunch of outcasts
and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good,
but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there's always room for
more.”
