Meal From Below: A Lenten DevotionalSample

Eating Brokenness

In the communion meal, Jesus invites us to eat brokenness, to take it into ourselves. Much of our human reflexive impulse is to distance ourselves from brokenness, pain, and shame. We push it away. This impulse is so strong that we construct entire cultural, religious, interpersonal, and psychological patterns to sustain our denial of brokenness. The project requires considerable effort and resources. For that reason, the poor typically do it unsuccessfully, if at all. Their brokenness is frequently on display. Those with more wealth and status usually have, among other prerogatives, the luxury of hiding their mess.

Nothing could be more ordinary than breaking bread among friends, but Jesus infuses the broken bread with extraordinary significance. He gives the meal sacred, ritual meaning—that is clear from the context of the ancient Passover meal Jesus “eagerly desired” to share on the eve of his suffering and death. The remarkable thing is not in elevating something as ordinary as bread to the level of the sublime;  art and religion are adept at that. It is not even in appropriating the human body as something worthy of high regard, as the ancient Greeks famously did. The jarring thing is Jesus’ invitation to eat his broken body. The symbolism must have baffled the first participants. Later, after the traumatic events it foreshadowed, we can imagine broken bread triggering vivid, repulsive memories the disciples would rather forget.

This is precisely what Jesus asks us to believe is the meeting point of the divine and human—not simply to believe it, but to eat! When Jesus was torn open in flesh and exposed to public ridicule, he did not simply acknowledge our broken humanity as an observer. He absorbed brokenness into himself. He became the broken One. This, we must take and ingest. We have so often turned away from our own human brokenness as well as Christ’s. We have tried to hide our sin and shame, and we have marginalized and made scapegoats of those we cannot bear to receive. We have attempted to deny or explain or control what is broken about us. Jesus says, “Join me in eating it.”

On one level, this jarring invitation to eat brokenness is an invitation to relax into the honest truth of our fractured human condition. This is not so simple for those practiced in refusal! We may have a gag reflex. The poor in spirit are more accustomed to this fare. But Jesus reminds us that we must digest it again and again: “As often as you do it.”

Because God has joined our human experience in Christ, we are relaxing into his saving work of transforming humanity through death and resurrection. The promise of the meal is union with God, wholeness within, and a table of joy with others. It begins with this invitation to eat.