| Jason Interview (5) | | Date Created: Oct 23, 2006, 09:58 AM |
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[only two more questions after this...]
JASON: The Jewish faith is rich in festival, ritual and tradition. Do you think as Christians we need to celebrate the Biblical story more in our homes? We do Christmas and Easter pretty well but if we had more festivals and rituals that helped us retell the Biblical story, surely that would help?
People are going to think that I paid you to air this question. (In fact I think I can hear Antony groaning, "Don't get him started!" Too late.) Yes, I very much think most Christians would be helped by a larger appreciation for festival, ritual and tradition.
You're certainly right about the Jewish faith, but Christians are called to go beyond that in some significant ways. The church, meeting together, is a way of deliberately transcending my natural family- and friend-allegiences. In Christ, I have a new and bigger and more varied family.
We still do Easter and Christmas and Harvest Festivals. But so many Christians have moved away from the weekly or regular celebration of the ritual and festival of the Lord's Supper. I told you I'd come back to the real purpose of the worship service... The celebration of the Eucharist has been taken seriously since before Paul's time.
The Corinthians, though, like many churches in our own era, had made their worship meetings more about themselves, their needs and their talents. As if it were any other club or clique of likeminded friends having a bite to eat together. That's why Paul told them that their meetings did "more harm than good" and his remedy was to call them back to celebrating the Lord's Supper as having to do with something other than natural food and drink, something supernaturally dangerous as well as wonderful (1 Cor. 11:17-34).
By all means, let's meet to have fellowship, let's meet to discuss and teach and learn, let's have seeker-friendly evangelistic/missional meetings. But let's not turn these into replacements for the worship service and the Lord's Supper, as the Corinthians did.
The Eucharist is a ceremony/ritual that Jesus himself instituted. It was sculpted out of the most important celebration in Judaism, the Passover. And as the Passover celebrates the central defining event in Judaism -- the whole exodus thing including use of the blood of a lamb to secure the passing-over of death from their first-born sons and that as the catalyst for moving from slavery to the promised land -- so the Lord's Supper celebrates what Jesus intended to be the central defining event in Christianity -- the whole incarnation thing, but zeroing in on the crux: the giving up of the body and blood of the lamb of God, of God's only son, as the means by which we can move from slavery to promise.
Interestingly, as an aside, you were asking about time for questions and so on earlier. Within some Jewish celebration and ritual, there is room for ritualized questions and answers -- thus as part of the Passover liturgy, there comes a time when the youngest person at the table should say the words "Other nights we can eat leavened or unleavened bread; but tonight we have only unleavened... why is this night different to all other nights?" And then there is a ritual answer to the question given by the father or host of the meal. The Church's liturgy, too, has responsive readings and chants, and in certain services like baptisms, ritualized questions and answers. |
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