When Eating Is Spiritual
If there’s any time of the year when we think about food, it’s during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Turkey, ham, dressing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, rolls, and cheesecake are among the many dishes that grace our tables during these celebrations. Hearty smiles, full tummies, and meaningful memories often result from these gatherings.
Yet is this all that table fellowship has to offer, or is there more? If Scripture is any guide, there is much more, as it teaches that the simple act of eating is filled with spiritual subtleties and implications otherwise often overlooked. We’ll begin our discussion nearly 2,000 years ago around a table in an upper room where Jesus shared a Passover meal with His disciples.
A Foundation: The Lord’s Supper
Students of Scripture know that this was no ordinary meal, for it was the eve of Jesus’ crucifixion where He instituted the Lord’s Supper. After washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus took a loaf of bread, blessed it, broke it, and distributed it to His disciples, explaining that it signified His broken body. He did the same with a cup, explaining that it signified His spilt blood. Then with each element, He instructed them to “do in remembrance” of Him (cf. 1 Cor. 11:24-25). And with this, the Lord’s Supper was born.
Nearly two millennia later, Christians still practice this ritual, remembering Jesus’ broken body and spilt blood, and celebrating its purchase of their salvation. Thus the Lord’s Supper symbolizes Jesus’ saving work on the cross, where He defeated eternal death and secured eternal life for believers [1]. This we are familiar with. However, the Lord’s Supper isn’t just a place of remembrance. It’s a place of action too. It’s not simply a picture of Jesus’ love, suffering, sacrifice, and death. It’s a picture of our participation in, and therefore continuation of, Jesus’ life.
Stated another way, salvation does not stop with justification. It concerns our sanctification and glorification too. It’s not simply about what Jesus has accomplished, but what He is accomplishing and will accomplish. Norman Wirzba puts it this way: “At the Lord’s Supper, Christians do not merely recall Christ’s sacrificial death but participate in it in such a way that their living is a proclamation of the resurrection life he made possible on the cross” [2].
Practically, this means that Christians should live their lives as Jesus would. Ironically enough, having defeated death through death, Jesus calls us to live our lives by dying daily: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me” (Mk. 8:34) [3]. While this isn’t necessarily a physical death, it could be. This was Jesus’ path [4], and it has been the path of many believers through history.
In other words, the Christian life isn’t one of comfort, ease, and convenience, but of love, suffering, and sacrifice [5]. The Lord’s Supper is more than a religious ritual. It’s a reminder of our sanctification as we share in His suffering. The Lord’s Supper is also a reminder of sanctification’s final result, glorification. For all of Jesus’ spilt blood and broken body, death could not hold Him [6]. Having laid a foundation, we now consider what this has to do with our eating.
An Application: Table Fellowship
Typically, when we think about Christianity’s place at the table, we most often think about grace before the meal, in which we recognize God’s provisions (as we should). However, we shouldn’t stop there. A right understanding of the Lord’s Supper will radically transform and expand the way we think about table fellowship.
Of all the places that Jesus could have chosen to illustrate His imminent sufferings, He chose the context of a meal. And of all the elements that He could have used, He used the elements of food. That is no coincidence, and it is not without consequence. The Lord’s Supper, together with feetwashing, symbolizes Jesus’ incarnation, humiliation, and death. And they represent the most perfect act of hospitality the world has ever known.
In this wake, Jesus calls believers to participate in that divine hospitality first symbolized by literal hospitality—this means table fellowship. Wirzba writes, “When Jesus…asked his followers to “Do this in remembrance of me,” he instituted a new way of eating in which followers are invited to give their lives to each other, to turn themselves into food for others” [7]. Hence we see that even something as seemingly simple as eating a meal is not an inconsequential or neutral exercise, but a deeply spiritual one.
This also teaches us to reject that Gnostic tendency to downgrade certain bodily or physical activities on our spiritual radar. “For everything created by God is good,” Paul writes, “and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4-5). In other words, eating is teeming with spiritual possibilities. What does this look like?
The Bare Bones of Table Fellowship
a. Table Fellowship Is Located in God’s Hospitality.
Christian hospitality is a response to God’s hospitality, demonstrated through His Son and illustrated in table fellowship. It’s not about personal benefit or gain. It’s about sacrificially pouring ourselves into others’ lives, like Christ. Although such hospitality finds its genesis in the Lord’s Supper, which is a distinctly churchly practice, it finds broader application in every meal at every gathering with anybody. That was certainly the example of Jesus. Time and again throughout the Gospels, Jesus shares His life with others through table fellowship—everyone from the religious leaders to the social outcasts [8]. We too should gratuitously open our homes and invite people to our tables.
In this way, hospitality isn’t about mere entertainment. It’s about liberally pouring our lives into others. By refusing hospitality in this fashion, we limit God’s work through and in us. As Wirzba puts it, “When eating is Eucharistic [based on the Lord’s Supper] the salvific reality of Christ is extended and made incarnate in the world” [9]. In sum, table fellowship is an opportunity for incarnational living in this world (cf. Jn. 1:14).
b. Table Fellowship Is Messy and Prophetic.
However, table fellowship, if we do it the way Jesus did, can be messy. Authentic hospitality often creates vulnerabilities and is therefore riddled with risks. When we invite people into our lives and homes, no doubt we risk the possibility of heartache and pain. People may take advantage of us, and walk all over us. While we don’t desire this, it’s a potential cost of the Christian life. Of course, the alternative is to keep people at arms-length, but this necessarily limits our effectiveness for God, and it’s not the way of Jesus. No, table fellowship often means sharing Christ with those whose lives are messy and who make our lives messy. And it may even mean showing others the messiness of our own lives too!
Second, table fellowship is prophetic. Despite the messiness, table fellowship ultimately points toward that perfect fellowship that we’ll enjoy with God in the age to come. Thus meals aren’t just about food and entertainment. No, having profound spiritual significance, they are about much more—in this age and the next. It’s no wonder that the Narnians celebrate with a meal when they hear of Aslan’s advent in Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe! And while we may taste the magnificence of feasting in our Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations, these pale in comparison to that great feast of the future, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb [11].
Conclusion
It’s all-too-common in today’s culture to not eat at the table. To the extent that this does occur, families don’t often spend the time in bodily, spiritual communion with one another and God. Instead, they gobble down their food and quickly retreat to living room, not to talk amongst themselves in community, but to stare mindlessly and silently into their various screens.
While there is nothing wrong with televisions, computers, iPads, and iPhones, something is askew when those devices effectively take the place of authentic communion with others. We should, like Jesus, recognize the spiritual significance of table fellowship as a symbol of and opportunity for love, sacrifice, and communion.
In the final analysis, table fellowship is teeming with spiritual implications, opportunities, and possibilities. Because the most perfect expression of hospitality is realized in Jesus’ broken body and spilt blood, He calls us similarly to sacrificially participate in divine hospitality with our family, friends, and even strangers. Table fellowship finds its richest foundation in the Lord’s Supper, which informs us of God’s hospitality and infuses our own hospitality with meaning beyond our wildest imaginations.
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[2] Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 128.
[4] Cf. Mk. 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34; 14:22-25.
[6] Cf. 1 Cor. 9:24; Phi. 3:13-14; 15:55-57; Col. 1:18.
[7] Wirzba, 153.
[8] Cf. Mt. 9:10-11; Mk. 2:15-16; 16:14; Lk. 5:29; 7:36-37, 49; 11:37; 12:37; 14:15; Jn. 1:1-12; 12:2.
[9] Wirzba, 153.
[10] Cf. Isa. 25:6-9; Mt. 22:1-14; Lk. 13:29; 22:30; Rev. 19:6-9.
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