Most all modern evangelicals experience the Lord's Supper purely as a symbolic act in their church service. They eat a piece of bread and take a sip of grape juice or wine. But the first Christians had a fuller experience of the Lord's Supper as an embedded element of a total meal eaten together. The Lord's Supper was, after all, an adaption of the Passover meal, also an entire meal eaten in its fullness as a sacramental experience, not a solitary symbolic gesture. In a way, evangelicals have wrested the symbolic act of communion from its more incarnate image of a full meal. We have turned a meal that is symbolic into a symbol that is meal like. Why? Because word is more important to us than image. We tend to think that what is most important is the abstract idea not the concrete experience, so why not reduce the idea of communion to its simplest symbolic act? And thus we build a version of Christianity that is more modernist than biblical.
Brian Godawa: Word Pictures: Knowing God Through Story & Imagination
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