The Breaking of Bread

My favorite resurrection story is Luke’s telling of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The story begins with the two disciples “talking with each other about all these things that had happened” (Luke 24:14) and ends with their telling the disciples “how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” (Luke 24:35) Between those two markers, an amazing story of defeat and despair morphs into the joy of knowing that the Lord has been raised!

One of the things in the story – in addition to the obvious joy of Jesus’ resurrection – that draws my attention and makes it a favorite is the phrase “the breaking of the bread.” Even more intriguing, in the earliest description of the Kingdom of God after Pentecost (Acts 2:42), Luke uses the same language as one of his descriptors of what life in the earliest, early church looked like. If you know the text, “they devoted themselves to . . . the breaking of bread . . .” And just a few verses later, again using the same vocabulary, Luke tells us “. . . they broke bread at home. . .”

The burning hearts of two sorrowful disciples were renewed and reinvigorated by “the breaking of bread.” Perhaps the “remembering” of “do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) is more than merely a recollection of a man named Jesus. As Paul would remind the disciples of Christ at Corinth, “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:26) For Luke, Paul’s companion, it was the “breaking of bread” that was the motivation for believers to gather on the first day of the week. (Acts 20:7) Almost incidentally, Luke mentions that Paul preached a rather long sermon on that occasion – but the meeting together was “to break bread.”

Think about that story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. The yet unidentified, but risen, Jesus began “with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” (Luke 24:27) That sounds very much like “proclaiming the Lord’s death until he comes.” Their eyes were opened to the risen Christ as together they ate the bread that Luke describes with these words: “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.” (Luke 24:30) It is hard to read this story without thinking that it was in “the breaking of the bread” that the veracity of the stories of resurrection was made real.

Having grown up in a tradition of weekly “breaking of the bread,” I do not remember ever thinking that communion (as we called it) was not important. It was so important in my little country church, that it was unheard of to think that grape juice was an appropriate substitute for wine. I remember one discussion of that subject when my grandfather (with the rather authentic sounding Christian Church name of Thomas Campbell Huxford) declared that if they changed to grape juice, my grandmother, who had been washing the glass communion cups for decades, would no longer “fix communion!”

What I am not sure about is whether or not our emphasis on “weekly” has not somehow disrupted the emphasis of the New Testament on the “passion play nature” of the Lord’s Supper. Is it possible that the weekly focus – in some sectors of our Stone-Campbell tradition a test of fellowship – has somehow made us less likely to focus on the reminder that even with Jesus as the teacher, it was in “the breaking of bread” that the two forlorn disciples headed to Emmaus had their eyes opened.

In a class I was teaching last night, a part of our discussion reviewed all the statistics that come out of groups like the Barna Group suggesting that the moral behavior of Christians in western cultures is not particularly distinguishable from non-Christians. Our discussion revolved around the need of good preachers to find ways to make better, more appealing, more compelling application in sermons.
This story makes me wonder. Is a part of our challenge here in the tendency of western Christians – even those of us who insist on “doing communion weekly” – to not pay enough attention to “the breaking of bread?”

I am not sure I know the answer to that question, but I am sure it is a question we ought to think about!