The Pointing Table
Sermon
An Idle Tale Becomes Good News
Messages On Lent And Easter Themes
Part of Jesus' last night with his disciples was spent gathered around a table. To say that this was a table that pointed is to say what, in a physical sense, could be said about any table -- unless it were round or some other shape, of course. But it is not in a physical sense that I am thinking now. True, the table pointed physically, but it pointed also in a far more significant sense than that. Let's say, to begin with, that it pointed to events.
The thoughts of Jesus and the disciples as they reclined around that table were not of the table itself. Yet the table had a part in their thinking; we might say that it was an aid to thought, and the table itself is forever associated with what was said and done there that night.
The table pointed in two directions: It pointed to the past, and it pointed to the future. At least as Jesus used the table, that was what it did. What took place around that table pointed the thoughts of his disciples both toward the past and toward the future.
To A Deliverance
First, the table pointed to the past. Scholars are not agreed as to whether or not this was the Passover meal that Jesus was eating with his disciples. The truth is that the Gospels themselves do not agree about that. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke -- the so-called Synoptic Gospels -- indicate that it was, and the Gospel of John implies that it was not. But at any rate, it was the Passover season, and it is not likely that a special meal like this could have been eaten without the thoughts of the participants turning back to that Passover in Egypt centuries before. The table around which they reclined pointed them to that momentous event in the distant past.
The Hebrews considered this event so significant that they felt themselves under obligation to recall it again and again. They had been delivered from the misery of Egyptian slavery in so dramatic a fashion that they could not but believe that it was God who had delivered them. They needed to remember this; so once a year they had a special meal in which they commemorated that deliverance.
It was a time of remembering, of reliving the experiences through which their forebears had passed. It was a time of thanksgiving, of expressing gratitude for their deliverance and for God's watchful care through the centuries. And it was also a time when the participants in the meal committed themselves anew to loyalty and obedience to the God to whom they owed so much.
We have no reason for doubting that Jesus regularly kept the Passover. He was not bound by tradition, it is true, yet he pushed aside only the traditions that were a hindrance to the true service of God. So he must have been glad for the table at which he had his last meal with his disciples to point them to that event whose remembering would help them to be truer to God. Indeed, he must even have wanted the table so to point them.
To A Cross
It was not the distant past, however, that was uppermost in Jesus' mind during that meal. They were eating in the shadow of a cross, and what he said and did there caused that table to point to that cross also.
In his Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain, telling the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, says that God warned them that they would die if they ate the forbidden fruit. That was a strange thing for God to say, Twain says, "for the reason that inasmuch as they had never seen a sample of death they could not possibly know what he meant."1
But Jesus' disciples had seen samples of it, maybe even samples caused by crosses, and they knew that "Death is a grim dividing door / That shuts and keeps its tenants fast."2
Jesus might then have done what is commonly done today: He might have avoided the subject of death. That was not a pleasant subject at all; why discuss it? A meal with one's friends -- especially a last meal -- should not be ruined by thoughts of death!
But James Baldwin says that "perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."3
Jesus, however, was not denying or ignoring the fact of death. He was facing and accepting it, and he wanted his disciples to do the same. He was not interested though just in their getting used to the idea of death, like Aldous Huxley wrote about in Brave New World. Huxley described a world in which freedom was dead and all concepts of morality were forgotten. Savage, this leftover from a previous and inferior civilization, is being shown around this brave new world, and he sees five busloads of boys and girls roll past over the vitrified highway. Dr. Gaffney, the Provost at the school Savage is visiting, explains: "Just returned from the Slough Crematorium. Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They begin to take dying as a matter of course."4
It was not "death conditioning" Jesus was seeking for his disciples as they ate and talked together that night. He was not afraid of death; he knew there were greater dangers than dying. But if there was anything he did not want, it was for his disciples to take his dying as a matter of course. He wanted them to remember it, and so he called it specifically to their attention, gave them symbols of it, and told them to let those symbols keep reminding them of his death.
This is really a remarkable thing. He spoke many profound and significant words and performed numerous beautiful and meaningful deeds. But, as Alexander Maclaren said, "The moment in which he gave his life is what he would imprint forever on the memory of the world."5
Certainly, this was not because death is a lovely thing, nor because it is a tragic thing. He wanted them to remember his death because it is an instrument of the salvation of God. Multitudes, remembering his death, have found themselves being reconciled to God and brought into a saving relationship with God.
No wonder Jesus wanted that table in the upper room to point to a cross, and no wonder either that he wants us to gather again and again at a table which points, nearly twenty centuries later, back to that cross and to his death on it.
To A Kingdom
There is a story that when Ben Hecht was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and sent in bloody preliminary details about a hanging, the editor, Henry Justin Smith, sent word saying: "Please omit gruesome details. Remember ours is a family newspaper." Hecht replied, "Will make hanging cheerful as possible."6
It is not possible to make a hanging very cheerful. Yet when the early Christians gathered at what they called "The Lord's Table," they did so with great joy, though that table pointed them back to an ugly crucifixion. Jesus himself inserts a note of joyful anticipation in his conversation with his disciples. All was not gloom and despair there, for Jesus did not believe that his death would put an end to the purposes of God. In a little while he would be surrounded by men with staves and spears; he would be condemned and executed as a criminal, but God would not be defeated. God's kingdom would be culminated yet.
So Jesus talked about drinking the fruit of the vine with his disciples again, but this time in his Father's kingdom. He said, "I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom" (Matthew 26:29). MacLean Gilmore says that for Jesus that supper was a "feast of anticipation," for Jesus looked beyond the cross and the grave to a victory wicked men could not prevent.7
He knew that dark moments were ahead for these dear friends, but he wanted them to know that there would be other moments and another day. T. S. Eliot expresses something of Christ's faith when he has Archbishop Thomas Becket, with death imminent before him, to say that another moment is coming "when the figure of God's purpose is made complete."8
"The figure of God's purpose!" Jesus believed that God's purpose included but extended beyond the dark hours in which they were then living. So he did not talk simply about his death, but also about the coming kingdom and the gladness they would know together then. He himself had, and he wanted his disciples also to have, a quality of faith that would keep them looking forward to the coming kingdom, even in the midst of the tragedy of the cross.
He wants us to have that same faith today. It is not hard to become pessimistic about humankind and our world, but Christ calls us to the faith that says, with Tennyson:
Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.9
Christ is more than "our little systems" and more than we ourselves; so we can believe that God is not through with us or our world yet, and we can trust that someday we will know that "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever" (Revelation 11:15).
"When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him." There was nothing distinctive about the appearance of that table, but what was said and done around it that night has caused so many other tables to be called "The Lord's Table." It was a table that pointed -- to the past and to the future. And all of the Tables of the Lord today point, too. They point to the past, to a cross and a dying Savior, and they point also to the future, giving us sound basis for hope in the consummation and perfecting of the Kingdom of our Lord.
____________
1. Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., Crest Reprint, 1963), p. 578.
2. John Masefield, "The Night of Kings," in The Bluebells and Other Verse (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961), p. 22.
3. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), p. 105.
4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Bantam Books, 1953), p. 110.
5. Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Matthew 18-28 (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), p. 244.
6. Harry Golden, Carl Sandburg (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., Crest Reprint, 1961), p. 161.
7. S. MacLean Gilmore, Exegesis of Luke in The Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1952), Vol. VIII, p. 377.
8. T. S. Eliot, "Murder in the Cathedral," in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 209.
9. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam."
The thoughts of Jesus and the disciples as they reclined around that table were not of the table itself. Yet the table had a part in their thinking; we might say that it was an aid to thought, and the table itself is forever associated with what was said and done there that night.
The table pointed in two directions: It pointed to the past, and it pointed to the future. At least as Jesus used the table, that was what it did. What took place around that table pointed the thoughts of his disciples both toward the past and toward the future.
To A Deliverance
First, the table pointed to the past. Scholars are not agreed as to whether or not this was the Passover meal that Jesus was eating with his disciples. The truth is that the Gospels themselves do not agree about that. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke -- the so-called Synoptic Gospels -- indicate that it was, and the Gospel of John implies that it was not. But at any rate, it was the Passover season, and it is not likely that a special meal like this could have been eaten without the thoughts of the participants turning back to that Passover in Egypt centuries before. The table around which they reclined pointed them to that momentous event in the distant past.
The Hebrews considered this event so significant that they felt themselves under obligation to recall it again and again. They had been delivered from the misery of Egyptian slavery in so dramatic a fashion that they could not but believe that it was God who had delivered them. They needed to remember this; so once a year they had a special meal in which they commemorated that deliverance.
It was a time of remembering, of reliving the experiences through which their forebears had passed. It was a time of thanksgiving, of expressing gratitude for their deliverance and for God's watchful care through the centuries. And it was also a time when the participants in the meal committed themselves anew to loyalty and obedience to the God to whom they owed so much.
We have no reason for doubting that Jesus regularly kept the Passover. He was not bound by tradition, it is true, yet he pushed aside only the traditions that were a hindrance to the true service of God. So he must have been glad for the table at which he had his last meal with his disciples to point them to that event whose remembering would help them to be truer to God. Indeed, he must even have wanted the table so to point them.
To A Cross
It was not the distant past, however, that was uppermost in Jesus' mind during that meal. They were eating in the shadow of a cross, and what he said and did there caused that table to point to that cross also.
In his Letters from the Earth, Mark Twain, telling the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, says that God warned them that they would die if they ate the forbidden fruit. That was a strange thing for God to say, Twain says, "for the reason that inasmuch as they had never seen a sample of death they could not possibly know what he meant."1
But Jesus' disciples had seen samples of it, maybe even samples caused by crosses, and they knew that "Death is a grim dividing door / That shuts and keeps its tenants fast."2
Jesus might then have done what is commonly done today: He might have avoided the subject of death. That was not a pleasant subject at all; why discuss it? A meal with one's friends -- especially a last meal -- should not be ruined by thoughts of death!
But James Baldwin says that "perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have."3
Jesus, however, was not denying or ignoring the fact of death. He was facing and accepting it, and he wanted his disciples to do the same. He was not interested though just in their getting used to the idea of death, like Aldous Huxley wrote about in Brave New World. Huxley described a world in which freedom was dead and all concepts of morality were forgotten. Savage, this leftover from a previous and inferior civilization, is being shown around this brave new world, and he sees five busloads of boys and girls roll past over the vitrified highway. Dr. Gaffney, the Provost at the school Savage is visiting, explains: "Just returned from the Slough Crematorium. Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They begin to take dying as a matter of course."4
It was not "death conditioning" Jesus was seeking for his disciples as they ate and talked together that night. He was not afraid of death; he knew there were greater dangers than dying. But if there was anything he did not want, it was for his disciples to take his dying as a matter of course. He wanted them to remember it, and so he called it specifically to their attention, gave them symbols of it, and told them to let those symbols keep reminding them of his death.
This is really a remarkable thing. He spoke many profound and significant words and performed numerous beautiful and meaningful deeds. But, as Alexander Maclaren said, "The moment in which he gave his life is what he would imprint forever on the memory of the world."5
Certainly, this was not because death is a lovely thing, nor because it is a tragic thing. He wanted them to remember his death because it is an instrument of the salvation of God. Multitudes, remembering his death, have found themselves being reconciled to God and brought into a saving relationship with God.
No wonder Jesus wanted that table in the upper room to point to a cross, and no wonder either that he wants us to gather again and again at a table which points, nearly twenty centuries later, back to that cross and to his death on it.
To A Kingdom
There is a story that when Ben Hecht was a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and sent in bloody preliminary details about a hanging, the editor, Henry Justin Smith, sent word saying: "Please omit gruesome details. Remember ours is a family newspaper." Hecht replied, "Will make hanging cheerful as possible."6
It is not possible to make a hanging very cheerful. Yet when the early Christians gathered at what they called "The Lord's Table," they did so with great joy, though that table pointed them back to an ugly crucifixion. Jesus himself inserts a note of joyful anticipation in his conversation with his disciples. All was not gloom and despair there, for Jesus did not believe that his death would put an end to the purposes of God. In a little while he would be surrounded by men with staves and spears; he would be condemned and executed as a criminal, but God would not be defeated. God's kingdom would be culminated yet.
So Jesus talked about drinking the fruit of the vine with his disciples again, but this time in his Father's kingdom. He said, "I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom" (Matthew 26:29). MacLean Gilmore says that for Jesus that supper was a "feast of anticipation," for Jesus looked beyond the cross and the grave to a victory wicked men could not prevent.7
He knew that dark moments were ahead for these dear friends, but he wanted them to know that there would be other moments and another day. T. S. Eliot expresses something of Christ's faith when he has Archbishop Thomas Becket, with death imminent before him, to say that another moment is coming "when the figure of God's purpose is made complete."8
"The figure of God's purpose!" Jesus believed that God's purpose included but extended beyond the dark hours in which they were then living. So he did not talk simply about his death, but also about the coming kingdom and the gladness they would know together then. He himself had, and he wanted his disciples also to have, a quality of faith that would keep them looking forward to the coming kingdom, even in the midst of the tragedy of the cross.
He wants us to have that same faith today. It is not hard to become pessimistic about humankind and our world, but Christ calls us to the faith that says, with Tennyson:
Our little systems have their day,
They have their day and cease to be;
They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.9
Christ is more than "our little systems" and more than we ourselves; so we can believe that God is not through with us or our world yet, and we can trust that someday we will know that "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever" (Revelation 11:15).
"When the hour came, he took his place at the table, and the apostles with him." There was nothing distinctive about the appearance of that table, but what was said and done around it that night has caused so many other tables to be called "The Lord's Table." It was a table that pointed -- to the past and to the future. And all of the Tables of the Lord today point, too. They point to the past, to a cross and a dying Savior, and they point also to the future, giving us sound basis for hope in the consummation and perfecting of the Kingdom of our Lord.
____________
1. Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., Crest Reprint, 1963), p. 578.
2. John Masefield, "The Night of Kings," in The Bluebells and Other Verse (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1961), p. 22.
3. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dial Press, 1963), p. 105.
4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Bantam Books, 1953), p. 110.
5. Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Matthew 18-28 (New York: A. C. Armstrong and Son; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), p. 244.
6. Harry Golden, Carl Sandburg (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., Crest Reprint, 1961), p. 161.
7. S. MacLean Gilmore, Exegesis of Luke in The Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1952), Vol. VIII, p. 377.
8. T. S. Eliot, "Murder in the Cathedral," in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), p. 209.
9. Alfred Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam."
