The Lord's Table: Meeting Place
by: Jessica Lugo Meléndez
Luke 22: 14-23
The Lord's Supper encloses in its celebration the past, present and future of the salvific and redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Last Supper is presented against the backdrop of the Jewish Passover that celebrated the liberation from Egypt and the covenant at Sinai. Luke fits elements of the old Passover with the institution of the new. Hence the two cups. If we frame this approach in the genesis of the meaning of the Passover, we can then affirm that the memory of Jesus is also a memory of liberation, equity, inclusion and communal redemption, making His table a place of encounter. The Jesus presented in Luke intends to configure a new symbolic world, in which mercy replaces purity. Access to God is not a process of separation and isolation, but of unity and inclusion.
From this point of view, the Lord's Supper is a meeting place where we remember our Savior and celebrate, united, the freedom received from Jesus, which we should share for all humanity. The table of Jesus gives us the space to meet and remember the self-giving of the Son of God for the reconciliation of the world. Despite the many differences, one thing has always remained unanimous among the different Christian traditions, and that is that the celebration of the Lord's Supper symbolizes that bond of unity between God and Christians.1 It is in the act of the Lord's Supper that men and women encounter God through their own history, to become then the effective revelation of the call to communion with God in union with all humanity.2 This is why the Supper should not be limited to a vertical relationship with the Lord - that is God and me, God and you, God and us - but to a horizontal relationship where the Table of Jesus also has to do with how we are all one among equals and with creation. This Lenten season, may we reflect on what the Lord's Table means for each of us as believers, may we present it as a salvific alternative that vindicates every human being who approaches it in faith to be transformed. Let us find ourselves at the Lord's Table!
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1 Justo L. González. Brief History of Christian Doctrines (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 184.
2 Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la Liberación (Salamanca: Ediciones Sígueme, 1975), 329.
Dr. Jessica Lugo Meléndez
Dr. Jessica Lugo Meléndez is the Executive Director of the Association for Hispanic Theological Education (AETH). She is an ordained minister of the American Baptist Churches, Puerto Rican and raised in the state of Florida. A pastor, educator and administrator, her passion is to promote theological education among men and women who are training for responsible ministry in their churches and communities.