6

There is a Free Lunch.

During the iconic scene known as the Last Supper, Jesus says something he probably didn’t intend to be routered into small church tables. He distributes to his disciples some bread and a cup of wine and says, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

This moment is Christ instituting what we now variously refer to as communion, eucharist, common table, the Host, etc. It’s an ancient ceremonial meal – which for the title meal much is missing from the food pyramid – which calls to mind for the participants the broken body and spilled blood of Christ.

This is Christ mysteriously, figuratively, concretely, ritualistically giving himself away. In the final scene before dying on a Roman execution stake, he passes out food to his friends and says “do this and keep the way I did it front of mind.”

In John 10:10, Christ says,

“…I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly.”

In other words, had folks asked, “Jesus, what’s your agenda?”

His response would have been something like, “To give life. Buckets of it.”

Ticks on one extreme of the spectrum. Christ on the other.

I grew up thinking God demanded things. Everything, frankly. Like a cosmic revenuer that comes to collect if he comes around at all. But Jesus, by his own admission, came to provide something. People take or leave Christianity. But they’re drawn to Christ for at least this; Christ doesn’t take. Christ gives.

The Hebrew word ahava in the Bible is translated “love”. At its root (hav) it means “to give”. With the modifiers added (a-hav-a), it means “I give”.

When we speak of God’s Love, we speak of God’s unending gift of Self to us. I suppose then that the term unconditional love is redundant. Requiring that conditions be met are in effect a demand for payment. A clause that states in self-interested terms I will give myself to you after you satisfy my terms.

This isn’t ahava.

Ahava love is the risky, vulnerable, uninsured act of donating what you prize most. Self. And Christ gives this living, breathing, bleeding self away in a figurative meal and then on an nonfigurative cross.

“Love is unselfishly choosing for another’s highest good.”

The very Jewish, Hebrew speaking John wrote the words “God is love.” (1 John 4:8, 4:16). He’s saying that this is his experience of the essence of the God who made him. Not just loving, but by nature, is Love. God is by essence one perpetually choosing others’ best. This is very different than the folded-arm ego who created me to worship and please him. At the center of the universe is a continuum of benevolence. A bottomless well. An eternal anti-tick. I don’t know what you learned about God and God’s expectations of you and God’s feeling about what you are worth. But if you think that anything you have done or haven’t gotten around to can disrupt God’s nature, you’re just being a bit unintentionally arrogant. And cocky people are just as loved as anyone. You can’t get out of it.

One of the terms for the bread of communion is the Host, which I can now see is a pretty solid name for the thing on which parasitically-minded folks like you and I are invited to feed. The Giver gives. We take. This doesn’t seem to be an offensive proposition for Christ. Offering food to a deity is a premise for another religion. Ours seems to posit that we’re the ones who need the meal.

Perhaps there’s as much relief for you as there is for me in this: your selfishness isn’t evil. It’s out of tune. Maybe a lot. Maybe just some. The One who tunes us seemingly affirms that we aren’t capable of self-sustaining. And we are not hated for this. Our weakness is affirmed. The One who tunes us sets for us a time-enduring tradition of bread and a cup, food and drink, to among other things remind us that we’re to have a healthy, balanced self-interest, or we die.

“You love all things that are. . . . Never would You have made anything if You had hated it…”