The story of Jesus sharing the last supper with His disciples in a place that bears a parallel with the upper room in Acts 2 where the Holy Spirit came to bring fulfillment to the promise made such an impression in the mind of my 3-year-old, Anna.
The power of the historic Communion motivated her tender neurons to go on overdrive. Without adult supervision or persuasion, she quietly assembled a makeshift table with a leftover grocery box. With an artistic flare and a sense of dinner table decor, Anna juxtaposed the bread (signifying the body of Christ) with the cup of wine (the blood of the Lamb of God). I’m not sure how the carrot emerged in the arrangement because I do not recall a biblical account of it around the table of Communion. But that’s a forgiven stroke of imagination and therefore no disputation. Soon, around this makeshift table gathered Anna’s favorite friends from the animal kingdom.
It began with the Penguin who was seated at the end of the table. Then clockwise to the right sat the Fox, followed by the Reindeer, a Teddy bear, a puppy, her friend called Turbo, and finally a fashionable country girl. I wondered who among her animal kingdom friends represents Judas, the betrayer. I pressed her with that question and she walked boldly to the lineup and picked out the Teddy Bear as the Judas of the Communion Table. Soon, acting as Jesus, the proceedings of the last supper commenced; “Take, eat, this is my body broken for you; do this in remembrance of me. Next, she took the cup; this cup is the New Testament in my blood; this do ye, as often as you drink it in remembrance of me”. And on she went repeating “This is my body…”
A few weeks ago, at the Museum of the Bible, in Washington DC, The Table of Communion grabbed her attention too. On sighting the referenced table, she took my hand and pulled me aside, and said, ” I have to do, “This is my body”, meaning that she had to take Communion with Jesus. I obliged and we pretended we were having bread and wine. For Anna, the Lord’s Supper occupied an important space in her developing mind so much so that she built her memory around it. The subtle fundamental of the Lord’s supper is the yearning in the heart of the Father for man to be reconciled to Him. God sought Communion with man and with such desire He willingly went to the cross to pay in full the requirement of divine justice. Today, He is still standing at the door of many hearts knocking and hoping that the door will swing open so that He may come in and have Communion.
