One Saturday they proudly told us they had permission to serve us lunch after eucharist the next week. I felt sick. Despite our weekly eucharist, I was afraid to eat with them. I told myself I was afraid of getting hepatitis, but I knew this made no sense; I eat in restaurants anywhere without that fear. The vestigial quality of our sacred meal stared me in the face. I valued the barrier that divided me from the prisoners. Eating with them would take the barrier down. I had a long hard week. I couldn’t talk myself out of the fear, but the next Saturday after eucharist I did eat lunch with them and saw gratefully how the meals they cooked us deepened to our eucharist through the year.

Paul touches this identity-shaking sacramental ground when he claims in 2 Corinthians, “For our sake God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). He says that God uses Jesus to break the boundary between God’s righteousness and us sinners, and to establish one goodness of God. The 1979 prayer book collect for the Last Sunday after Pentecost approaches this understanding,

Almighty and everlasting God, whose will it is to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of kings and Lord of lords: Mercifully grant that the peoples of the earth, divided and enslaved by sin, may be freed and brought together under his most gracious rule . . .

Paul goes further than this divine will. He sees God actually ending human division and slavery by restoring universal freedom in Christ. Just before saying that God made the sinless one into sin for our sake, Paul says,

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has entrusted the message of reconciliation to us. (2 Cor. 5:18-19)

Will Campbell calls Paul’s claim that we can only carry the news and live into the accomplished fact of God’s reconciliation, “the most radical passage in the Bible.” As a Baptist preacher, storyteller and advocate for civil rights, Will Campbell worked for reconciliation among black and white poor in the rural South. His reading of Paul left him no room to treat Ku Klux Klansmen as the enemy.

Archbishop Oscar Romero was preaching the same Gospel of reconciliation when he was shot at mass in San Salvador. Archbishop Romero’s work and martyrdom remind us that dangerous, frightened people still resist and reject God’s completed victory; they battle on like unreconciled partisans even though God’s peace has already ended the war.

Fear of those who have not (or cannot) hear the news can’t teach us how to enact our sacraments of eucharist and baptism. For that, we must “pattern the sacraments after Christ,” to quote the phrase my colleague Rick Fabian used to title in his article in OPEN.  1 We shape our practice of both eucharist and baptism from Jesus’ example and from Paul’s teaching of God’s accomplished reconciliation.

Patterning the sacraments after Christ begins with Jesus’ meal practice. Of this meal practice, the Lutheran liturgical scholar Maxwell Johnson writes

Entrance to the meal of God’s reign, anticipated and incarnated in the very life, ministry, and meals of Jesus of Nazareth, was granted by Jesus himself and granted especially to those were not prepared and not (yet) converted, to the godless and undeserving, to the impure, and the unworthy. Conversion itself, it seems, was a consequence of, not a pre-condition for, such meal sharing.  2

Two recent articles in OPEN, “Baptism and Eucharist: Challenges,” by Andrew Waldo (Summer 2000), and “Baptism and Communion,” by Stephen Reynolds (Winter-Spring 2001), concluded that an open table invitation to eucharist, like Jesus’ meals with sinners, is hospitable at the expense of full sacramental intent. Waldo frames the distinction between the “hospitality” of Jesus’ meals with sinners and a sacramentally richer “community memory and identification with Jesus” that Jesus gave separately to the church in the Last Supper.

Following Johnson (and ultimately Norman Perrin in Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus), practitioners of an open table find hospitality, identification and formative memory to be an imitation of Jesus’ risky prophetic hospitality which included and converted those who ate with him and so also defined his followers’ “identification with him” and the “community memory.” Jesus in his teaching and practice overturned an old “setapart” holiness, and any fully renewed understanding of Christian baptism (whether our congregations administer baptism before or after communion) must find its way back to this universalizing context of Jesus’ hospitality. I claim that this context of Jesus’ divine welcome is clearer in both eucharist and baptism where receiving eucharist precedes baptism.

When Paul speaks of the different, new holiness Jesus instituted, he calls it God’s “new creation”: if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new! (2 Cor. 5:17). Exercising Jesus’ hospitality in this new creation, a Christian eucharist must find some way to enact what Jesus enacted in his rabbinic teaching meal with unprepared, unclean sinners and outcasts.

Because in all his meals Jesus claimed to enact God’s hospitality, any eucharist will risk being

• a deliberate prophetic welcome to alienated, outcast sinners,
• a dangerous confrontation with the religious, political and social establishment, and
• a sacramental enactment of the Kingdom of God.

Our experience (and courage) may fall short of such divine hospitality. Nonetheless, discovering that the sacraments actually do accomplish what they promise (rather than imaging or reminding us of something we pray God will accomplish later), each eucharist manifests the Godcreated unity of humanity and all creation in feasting with Christ. The Byzantine liturgy says it wonderfully, “Thine own of Thine own we offer Thee, on behalf of all and for all.” We count on the power of Christ’s body and blood offered on behalf of all and for all to transform ordinary daily living into what God has already made our life, life in God that breaks boundaries and unites what is divided.

With all that we pray that our eucharist will accomplish, open communion appears to me simply faithful. Open communion is plain sacramental realism, letting God use our sacraments to reveal locally God’s already accomplished peace. It is as counter-cultural and uncomfortable as eating with prisoners in the county jail.

This logic echoes through the Passion material in the Gospels, fusing eucharist and baptism in surprising ways in Jesus’ death on the cross. Following Jesus in his baptism, we will suffer a painful washing away of all that separates us from even the worst condemned criminal or most despairing misjudged victim. To speak fully of baptism we must pay careful attention (as the Gospels do and Paul usually does) to Jesus’ companions in suffering and death and to where he dies.

Norman Perrin, like other Gospel scholars since, argued that Jesus suffered crucifixion because he wouldn’t stop welcoming all to feast with him. Jesus in the Gospels does speak of John baptizing at the Jordan, but when he speaks of his own baptism, he always refers to his coming death. Paul and Pauline material once attributed to him see communion with estranged sinners in this same death. The strands are inseparable. Jesus’ Last Supper, his shameful dying with criminals, and his (and our baptism) all signify and all accomplish universal reconciliation, breaking down what divides us. The Bible and our tradition say Jesus went freely to this baptism/death to unite himself to sinners like those with whom he feasted.

Anyone entering St. Gregory Nyssen Church in San Francisco will see these words carved into the base of the holy table, “This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them.” It is the ancient (very probably original) accusation Jesus’ disciples heard. On the other side of the table, the congregation re-entering the church from a baptism meets this startling sixth-century text from Isaac of Nineveh:

Do not distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy; All must be equal in your eyes to love and serve. Did not the Lord share the table of publicans and harlots, Without putting the unworthy away from him?  3

Knowing ourselves welcomed unconditionally at Jesus’ table and glimpsing how we are like the outcasts and condemned criminals Jesus dies with outside the walls, a longing stirs to be like Jesus, to live and die like Jesus. Our Lord Jesus who died outside the walls continues to draw us out to new, riskier, more loving discipleship. At St. Gregory’s, as we practice open communion, people do ask to be baptized like Jesus, imitating his committed practice of not holding himself apart from anyone. To be baptized like Jesus we join a fellowship with all the unwelcomed others, every imaginable, dreaded “them.”

Jesus’ death does not make his teaching meals mean less, but unlocks the meaning of his whole work within them. At the Last Supper Jesus made his impending death a sign of his self-offering and the forgiveness it brought, that is, everything he did as a teacher. In the institution narratives Jesus interprets what he had been doing through his ministry by pointing toward his baptism of suffering and death. In the words which accompanied the administration of the Last Cup, he says, “for you and for all [‘many’ reflects the Aramaic idiom for ‘all’] for the forgiveness of sins,” that is, for release and freedom from all that divides us.

The Last Supper was emphatically not a gathering of the faithful for a closed meal. The Last Supper, just like all the other meals of his ministry, was an unmerited, reconciling act of divine hospitality. Facing death, Jesus offered his kingdom feast to his betrayer and a few frightened disciples prepared only to prove their faithlessness and abandon him. In the institution narratives when Jesus says, “do this in remembrance of me,” we can only wonder that he is commanding them(!) and us(!) to carry on those meals.

Whenever we feast with sinners and outcasts and declare this feasting in Jesus’ name, we enter God’s accomplished peace of universal, unconditional forgiveness. Though the church through history has multiplied conditions and requirements on those who receive, Christians have never denied this core–we and all who communicate at Jesus’ table are wholly unworthy. Jesus’ eucharist makes reconciliation and universal forgiveness present.

Those who practice an open table also believe and sometimes see that Jesus’ prophetic sign destroys the root divisions in human history and culture. Both eucharist and baptism take us beyond simple initiation “into” a closed group to lead us into the new creation, an undivided humanity. Sinners rejoice in a welcome that can include even us. At Jesus’ feast we meet Jesus as our Risen Lord to be healed and reconciled to all. Continuing the meal, disciples must enact God’s humble, loving service to all humankind.

At least one of the possible biblical understandings of atonement taken together with Jesus’ meal practice offers solid theological grounding for open communion leading to baptism. As I set out and comment on that line of biblical thinking, I ask that readers consider the argument texts make together before mustering counter-arguments. Both argument and counter-argument are in the Bible, so Bible and tradition do not stand above this controversy. This contradiction and strain have been in our tradition from the first apostolic preaching.

We can begin with Jesus’ response to the request by the sons of Zebedee to sit at his right hand and left hand in his glory:

You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant.” (Mark 10:38- 40)

Skeptical Gospel scholars will hear in these words the apostolic community’s retrospective knowledge of Jesus’ passion. For our purposes this only makes the text more interesting. We hear in it sacramental theology from a very early community; the community’s concerns for sacraments in community life and the community’s experience facing persecution shape the saying.

Note the recurrent and seemingly nontraditional order in this passage: first cup, then baptism. Notice Jesus in the Gospels speaks of his baptism to refer to the death he anticipates; that is, Jesus’ words about drinking his cup or receiving his baptism point to the cross. Notice also Jesus here portrays himself neither as priest nor minister of sacrament, nor as sacrificial victim, but as the communicant and as the one baptized. His crucifixion will be his own communion and his baptism.

The synoptics offer cup imagery again in Jesus’ anguished prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane: “He threw himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want’” (Matt. 26:39). In the Gospel of John, Jesus uses identical language of “drinking the cup” when he reproves Peter for attacking the high priest’s servant with his sword: “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (John 18:11). Asking, “Am I not to drink?” Jesus claims his freedom in the choices he will embrace until he cries, “It is finished.” John completes this fused sacramental interpretation of Jesus’ death, saying that when Jesus hung dead on the cross, “one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out” (John 19:34). As sacramental theologians, the four Gospel writers consistently identify cup and baptism with Jesus’ dying on the cross.

In New Testament epistles, Jesus’ cross is also his “shame.” Gathering texts around this theme, we will see a crucial way that the discursive, explicitly theological writers of the epistles see the sacraments. Jesus’ shame is not one piece of suffering among others, but a central theological theme, what he chooses, exercising his freedom as the means by which God accomplishes the reconciliation of all.

In Jesus’ shameful death outside the city gates and with the worst sinners he freely chooses communion with them. The eucharistic prayer of the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus is on solid New Testament grounds here, imaging Jesus’ outstretched arms on the cross as a willing embrace:

Fulfilling your will and gaining for you a holy people, he stretched out his hands when he should suffer, that he might release from suffering those who have believed in you. And when he was betrayed to voluntary suffering that he might destroy death, and break the bonds of the devil, and tread down hell, and shine upon the righteous, and fix a term, and manifest the resurrection, he took bread...  4

Jesus’ chosen shame takes him deep into the desolate territory of exile and curse. His freedom in suffering undoes the helplessness we impute to a victim. Dying willingly with those who have no freedom, Jesus’ death completes his chosen, unconditional fellowship with sinners. We might imagine Jesus’ (or anyone’s) human terror in the face of such suffering, but like this ancient eucharistic prayer, still proclaim his freedom to the very end. It is an article of faith and flows from his courageous choices throughout his ministry.

Jesus accepts being condemned and accursed and cast out of his community in order to die in communion with thieves and murderers. All who pass him on the execution hill outside the city gates can gawk and mock. The place he dies is ritually out of bounds. He dies “forsaken” by God, dreadfully beyond reach of any piously conceived grace or righteousness. And when he has drunk his last communion cup to its dregs, the cup of reconciliation with sinners, in John’s Gospel he says, “It is finished.” Jesus’ solidarity in suffering in that place of exclusion is the final redemption and inclusion of all.

His words at the supper as he offered the final cup had already defined this moment, so his suffering and death are the final cup at the feast with its prayer for ultimate reconciliation. The cup literally does end the feasting ritual, as we hear in 1 Corinthians 11:25 (“he took the cup also, after supper”; 1 Cor. 11:25). The Didache gives a blessing prayer for the final cup that recalls the Jewish models. The last cup ends the meal in prayers for reconciliation and union: “gather [your church] from the four winds, into the kingdom which you have prepared for it.”  5

Or as Jesus says it in John, “I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).

The cross shows open table and baptism to be one sign. This death is also his “baptism,” because again he submits to be joined indiscriminately to ordinary people (making one sign of his baptism by John, his feasting with harlots and tax collectors, and his dying with condemned murderers and terrorists). As the Gospels tell it, supper (rhetorically this concluding cup) leads to baptism.

The epistles untiringly return to this theme of shame, curse and degradation, often combining it in startling ways with joy and freedom, Jesus’ or our own. I first heard this clearly in Hebrews thanks to James Alison (in Raising Abel)

. . . looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith who, for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb. 12:2)

Matching shame and freedom continues in Hebrews. After likening Jesus’ death outside the camp to the burning of temple refuse (the discarded, unclean portion of the temple sacrifice) the writer says, “Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured” (Heb. 13:12- 13).

The cross gives us and all humanity freedom exactly because it is “shame,” “abuse,” and “curse.” “For the sake of the joy that was set before him,” Jesus willingly goes where good people and pure community cannot go. He seeks the same communion with those who die there as he had established with those who lived beyond any welcome to temple or synagogue. We become his community as we learn to go to him outside the camp and share his abuse.

Paul is just as stark in his explanation of what this means and what it accomplishes for us. Jesus, he tells us, is cursed, is sin (2 Cor. 5:21). We cannot legitimately draw back from such designations or confidently claim that God only imputes sin, curse or abuse to Jesus; Jesus’ absolute and complete identification with curse and sin gives us our freedom and the promised Spirit of God:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us– for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”–in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. (Gal. 3:13-14)

In other words, Jesus identifies with and is cursed with outcasts, and his identification with them is so complete there is no “as if” left to it. For this we thank God. It is our Life.

Jesus goes to the place of our shame to make it the place of God’s feast, the place of baptismal cleansing and newness. Cursed Jesus hanging on the tree brings us blessing because in communing wholly with the suffering and death of the worst of us, Jesus’ baptism on the cross completes what he began feasting with sinners. He has taken on our secret, stripped it bare, and said, “me too.” We find Jesus (and our communion and baptism) wherever anyone abandons privilege, holiness or insider status to reconcile human divisions. Our baptism is not an initiation into set-apart status, but our free fall into God’s community without boundaries. Jesus’ embrace of outcasts in his baptism on the cross enables Paul to say,

. . . in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3:26-28)

The Byzantine hymn we sing at St. Gregory’s after every baptism translates it this way, “As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Alleluia.”

Is that Alleluia realistic now in the life we live? Consider how unerringly these passages from writers in Paul’s tradition speak of God’s completed peace and the ending of division and hostility in the past tense:

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaving, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col. 1:19-20)

Jesus makes peace by dying horribly and absorbing in himself all the violent rejection of those who died with him and as he did. We aren’t even talking about resurrection yet. To reconcile all things, he must go to the place of no reconciliation and there be baptized into suffering. Just what Paul calls “being made into sin” the writer of Ephesians calls “all perfection”:

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility, between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. (Eph. 2:13- 16)

So Paul and the writers of Ephesians, Colossians and Hebrews repeatedly assert that Jesus’ death completed God’s work of reconciling all humanity. When Jesus suffers the worst that divides us, our brokenness is then and forever broken open and made whole. Here we taste and feel the power to live the truth of God’s own torn brokenness in Christ’s dying. Here in this place of freedom, we can make new choices.

As we have tasted God’s welcome at Jesus’ table, we will follow Jesus into baptism, stepping outside our religion as we know it and into the single renewed humanity that church walls cannot contain and prison walls cannot keep out. This was the baptism Jesus promised his death would be. Can we be baptized with his baptism?

FINAL NOTE: James Alison and I have discussed open table and though he sees the theological rationale in our reading of the Gospels, as a faithful Roman Catholic he respectfully questions any congregation’s ability to remake sacraments as we have received them. Gil Bailie, Rene Girard, James Alison, Rowan Williams and others do see in Jesus’ enactment of the divine hospitality, whether at his table or on the cross, the destruction of in-group and end of its rationale for scapegoating violence. I do not claim that they or Maxwell Johnson are advocating an open table, though I will be interested to see where this conversation over the coming years takes any of them and all of us. Theologians and biblical and liturgical scholars whose understanding of atonement rides on the issue of scapegoating and the outsider do point where the Gospel scholarship takes us in understanding Jesus’ table fellowship.

Donald Schell djschel@attglobal.net, a member of APLM Council, is Co-Rector of St. Gregory Nyssen Church, San Francisco.

-- Originally published in OPEN All Saints 2002



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