( 1 Cor. 10:16-17 ) - [ Deutsch ] - [ Akündigungen448.15 KB ]
Maundy Thursday has a great and important symbol: namely, a table. Jesus and his disciples sit at a table and celebrate the Passover meal - the meal commemorating the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. They celebrate Yahweh-God who freed them from slavery. This is how believing Jews still do it today.
At the meal of Jesus and his disciples on this last evening, it is not necessarily joy that prevails. Rather tension over what is about to happen.
They are still all sitting at the same table, Judas is also present, and they hear, see and feel what makes this meal so special on this evening.
In early Christianity, the Lord's Supper was also associated with a meal together. Paul points out in 1 Cor. the core and vital importance of bread and wine:
16 The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? 17 Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.
At a table, people meet in a community. Eating and drinking together, that is what joins people together.
What is special about the Lord's Supper is the blessing.
Bread and wine take on a new quality. In addition to the visible, physical side, there is the invisible, spiritual meaning. Jesus Christ himself is present in the blessed gifts.
Paul emphasizes several times in this short passage the aspect of communion in Jesus Christ that the Lord's Supper brings about. The many become one body, blessed and saved by Jesus' death on the cross.
Picture by Sieger Köder (1969)
South of Rome, it is located in a country house in San Pastore, which belongs to the college of theology students. The picture hangs in the dining room where the students meet for meals. The picture shows a communion of a very special kind. Because: Around the table we do not see the twelve disciples of Jesus, but seven people who at first seem strange to me, three women and four men. We look for Jesus in vain.
The artist sees him sitting where we are, we who are looking at the picture. All those gathered around the table are looking at him. But we see only his hands at the bottom of the picture.
The left hand invites or points to the cup, the right hand holds the bread.
Between these people, who are indeed a colourful mix, something delicate, precious, symbolised by a rose, is blooming on the table.
The image meditates on a core part of the biblical message, namely the fellowship at Jesus' table. With everybody, especially also with the sinners, with the marginalised people of society. Not only at that time. Sieger Köder brings the fellowship around a table into present times.
Sieger Köder chooses a group of people that will hardly ever sit together again. In their faces I see the longing for someone who will set them free.
Let's have a look at the circle from right to left.
There is a black man on the far right, with a bandaged arm, wounded in the struggle for his right to live, who has nothing, whom no one needs.
There is a noble lady, from better circles. Actually, she doesn't want to have anything to do with this scum.
Next: an intellectual with glasses and a beard, one who asks questions, a doubter who may have become a nuisance.
Then comes a clown, a harlequin hidden behind the mask: sadness, longing, a person hovering between laughing and crying, a mirror of our lives.
Then an old blind woman, marked by poverty and sadness, wrapped in black cloth.
Next to her the whore. For her, love can be bought and sold, her body is her capital, her business. She lives without a place where she belongs.
Then, on the far left, the Jewish rabbi. His prayer shawl shows his fidelity to the law given by God. His face reminds us of the faces we know from the horrible pictures from the concentration camps.
Some may think: what an extraordinary bunch of people. I don't want to turn to Jesus and sit at his table surrounded by these people.
But those who harbour such thoughts will be looking for Jesus in vain. As a doctor we find him with the sick, not with the healthy, as a saviour with the sinners, not with the righteous.
As long as I do not also confess my shortcomings, as long as I do not realise my own neediness and poverty and thus confess to be part of the guests in this picture, I have no chance to sit at Jesus' table.
But what would it be like if we were to take the eighth place, the place of the one to whom all eyes are directed?
Then we would be the host and have those strange people at our table.
The last place at the banquet of sinners is a challenge.
To be able to share - and - participate - is only possible when I break through the barriers that surround us all.
The little rose on the table symbolises that love which overcomes barriers.
In the left part of the painting on the wall of the hall is another exciting motif of the merciful father and prodigal son. The father embraces the son who has returned home. In the embrace he experiences reconciliation and redemptive liberation from all misery.
Next to him, however, sits the other son, the brother without any fault, caught in his defiance. In this figure the picture finds its negative pole: the man trapped in himself, who neither needs reconciliation nor wants to allow reconciliation.
What is easily overlooked in the picture, but is there nonetheless:
the stumbling block at the doorstep.
Offense, annoyance, indignation, scandal, that is what Jesus' fellowship with sinners around the table was for the pious.
Jesus: impulse for a new beginning, for a rethinking.
This picture by Sieger Köder asks me, how do we actually celebrate the Lord's Supper? Do we celebrate it invitingly?
Is it a meal of unity or of separation?
Today, if we were to paint the picture, it would certainly look different again.
But the table is and remains the symbol of the celebration of the Lord's Supper.
We are together; we belong together - even if we do not celebrate communion at a table, but around an altar.
We belong together at one table - even with those we do not like. Those who want to sit at the table with Jesus are part of this fellowship. And will experience in eating and drinking together: you are God's beloved child. We are many and yet one.
One bread, one body which we all share. Without exception.
And when we go home afterwards, we see the stumbling block at the doorstep. Pay attention to it. Jesus wants to be the stone of stumbling.
And by this everyone will know you are Jesus' disciples if you have love for one another.
Amen.