Read John 6:53–58

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Some of you hurry to eat your own meal without sharing with others. As a result, some go hungry while others get drunk…For if you eat the bread or drink the cup without honoring the body of Christ, you are eating and drinking God’s judgment upon yourself.” (1 Corinthians 11:21, 29 NLT)

Symbols carry memory and meaning far beyond words. The Church has always leaned on them—sometimes hidden in plain sight, sometimes dismissed or distorted. Yet the most powerful symbols are those that subvert the world’s expectations and draw us back to the radical heart of the Gospel. In this series, we’ll look closer at the sacred signs that shock, unsettle, and ultimately call us deeper into Christ.

Part 19: Bread & Wine. The symbols of Bread and Wine pull us into one of the earliest and most persistent scandals of the Christian faith. Outsiders heard whispers of a strange meal shared behind closed doors: “They eat flesh and drink blood.” This rumor—part fear, part fascination—was enough to brand Christians as cannibals, atheists, and subversive threats to the empire. What those rumors missed, however, is what they accidentally revealed: this meal was never meant to be respectable. It was meant to unsettle a world built on hierarchy, purity, and the consumption of the vulnerable.

Jesus does not soften His language in John 6. He intensifies it. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood…” It is an intentionally shocking metaphor. Because the Kingdom of God—unlike Caesar’s world—does not devour the poor to feed the powerful. Christ offers His own life so that no one else must be consumed. The Bread & Wine are divine care, not divine demand. They feed rather than exploit. They restore rather than extract. They reveal a God who sustains humanity rather than draining it for power.

In this way, the Table becomes the great reversal. Empire feeds on the weak; Christ feeds the weak. Empire uses bodies; Christ gives His own. Empire organizes itself around dominance; Christ organizes community around nourishment, memory, and love. When Jesus breaks bread, He is not founding a new ritual. He is founding a new kind of world.

But to understand how radical this sign truly is, we must return to the first Table. It was not set in a sanctuary. It was not overseen by a priest. It was not fenced off from the wrong sort of people. It was prepared in a borrowed room. The participants were not clergy—they were ordinary friends, one of whom was preparing to betray Him, another ready to deny Him, and all of whom would scatter before sunrise. Yet Jesus fed them anyway. He washed their feet. He entrusted the remembrance of His life, death, and resurrection to those who had no credentials, no rank, and no halo of holiness around them.

This leads to one of the most quietly subversive truths in the Christian story: Jesus never created sacramental authority. He never restricted this meal to a particular class of leaders. He never attached it to a hierarchy. The early Church broke bread in homes, around kitchen tables, with no formal structures and no official gatekeepers. Sacramental authority developed later—created by a Church anxious about order, purity, consistency, and control. That authority has done much good… and much harm. But it is a human invention, not a divine requirement. Ordination is a tool for service—not a fence around grace.

As an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, I carry the privilege and responsibility of presiding at Christ’s Table with the deepest reverence. I take that calling seriously. It is one of the greatest honors of my ministry to place the Bread and Cup into open hands and say, “This is the grace of God for you.” I cherish the sacramental trust the Church has placed in me. Yet it is precisely because I value that sacred trust that I must also tell the truth: authority exists to serve grace, not to restrict it. The Eucharist was never meant to elevate the presider over the people. It was meant to reveal Christ who gives Godself to all.

This matters, because Paul’s harshest rebuke to the Corinthians was not about ritual precision. It was about inequality. The wealthy feasted while the poor went hungry. The privileged ate early; the laborers arrived to crumbs. Paul’s outrage is simple: You cannot celebrate Christ’s feast while embodying Caesar’s hierarchy. A Table rooted in self-giving love cannot become a stage for self-preserving power.

Yet in many places, the Church has done exactly that—protecting the Table from the very people Jesus fed. Fencing it. Managing it. Measuring worthiness. Policing access. Deciding who is welcome to receive God’s gift and who must wait for institutional approval. When the Table becomes a throne, it stops being Christ’s Table. Bread and Wine become reminders not of grace, but of gatekeeping.

But the Spirit still whispers the truth: this meal was never meant to be guarded. It was meant to be given. Bread & Wine expose every system—religious, political, or cultural—that survives on consuming others. They invite us into a different way of living: a world where no one is devoured, no one goes hungry, and no one is turned away.

Bread & Wine are not symbols of consumption. They are symbols of communion. They teach us how to feed and be fed. They train us to become people of care in a devouring world.

Because the Table was never about power. It was always about the unconditional grace and love of God through Jesus Christ.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God’s Table is not a place of consumption—it is a place of care.

PRAYER
God of the Table, teach us to receive Your grace with humility and to share it with courage. Shape our hunger into compassion, our rituals into hospitality, and our lives into places where others find nourishment rather than judgment. Feed us with the Bread that gives life, that we may become people who feed others in Your name. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).