Review: Eating with Jesus

December 15, 2025December 14, 2025 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Eating with Jesus

Eating with Jesus, Robert D. Cornwall. Cascade Books (ISBN: 9798385213450) 2025.

Summary: An argument against restrictions or “fences” around the Lord’s table, welcoming all who will to come and encounter Christ.

When your church has communion or celebrates the Eucharist or Lord’s table, may all who wish to come, participate? Or is participation qualified in some way? Once, while visiting a church in a different denomination than my own, i needed to be interviewed by an elder and complete a form before being permitted to take communion. Another time, I was a guest in a service celebrating the Jubilee year of my former spiritual director. It was deeply meaningful, but when it came time to partake in the Eucharist, I knew that church permitted the Eucharist only to those received into the church, and so I refrained out of respect. But I felt left out.

Robert D. Cornwall asks whether it is consistent with the table Jesus kept to erect such “fences” to coming to the Lord’s table. He argues that it is not. Part One of the book lays out his argument. Part Two then offers reflections on a number of relevant passages. The appendices offer resources including liturgies and prayers for an open table.

First of all, Cornwall lays out biblical and theological foundations exploring the significance of Communion including its Passover roots, New Covenant significance, and as a meal of thanksgiving, unity, and encounter with Jesus. Then he turns to the history of restrictions to participation. He argues that 1 Corinthians 11:27-28 reflected the discriminatory practices in Corinth in which more “entitled” persons ate, leaving others to go hungry. They devalued both the bread and cup and the body of fellow believers. It’s not so much a restriction as a warning about their behavior toward fellow believers.

Thus, he contends that the New Testament offers no restrictions and opens the table to be shared by Jew and Gentile. Rather, restrictions came in subsequent centuries, requiring baptism after a lengthy catechesis. While in the modern period, ecumenism has led to mutual recognition of baptisms in many denominations, restrictions remain barring the table to unbaptized, or unconfirmed children, and to the unbaptized, including those who have yet to profess faith.

While upholding the importance of baptism as one’s visible profession of faith and initiation into the church, Cornwall does not believe this should bar those who would come. He argues that Jesus placed no such restrictions. Even sinners were welcome to his table, often with transforming effects. He argues that if this is the Lord’s table and not the church’s, Jesus is the host. He does not need us to “gatekeep.” Cornwall also includes a chapter on the COVID pandemic, when online participation ruled out such gatekeeping.

Positively, he then considers more deeply the meaning of the table as a place of encounter with the risen Lord. This includes the significance this may have in welcoming non-believers to the table. While I haven’t observed the latter, I’ve seen non-believers converted during prayer gatherings and work trips with Christians. They experienced the reality of people encountering Jesus in a compelling way. This made sense to me.

Part Two turns to reflections on several biblical passages. Perhaps most unusual is Genesis 18, reflecting how Abraham’s hospitality to strangers is a model for us. In Matthew 9:9-13, he considers Jesus eating with sinners. Among the texts included, he turns again to 1 Corinthians 11:27-34 on the matter of eating worthily. The eschatological elements of the meal are explored in Matthew 26:26-30. The final reflection, on the Messianic banquet, offers a reading of Revelation 19:6-10.

In his concluding thoughts, Cornwall recasts the Lord’s table, not in ecclesiological, but rather missiological terms. Rather than the table being a closed place, Cornwall raises the missional potential of making the table a place of welcome.

I appreciated this argument. Reflecting on how I’ve been excluded, even as a believer from some tables, I am deeply sympathetic to what this might mean to seekers. After all, who would come to this table, understanding what it means, if not desirous of an encounter with Christ? In fact, might not such a desire reflect the work of the Holy Spirit, drawing one to faith? Why would we want to quench the Spirit? Also, I’ve found that it is a fool’s errand to try to defend Jesus, who welcomed sinners, and hostile religious leaders, and even Judas to his table. He’d rather we come, and bring both friends and strangers.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Come to the Table

August 30, 2017August 30, 2017 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

By John Snyder (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

In my day (and often evening!) work, I am a collegiate minister with graduate student and faculty groups. Perhaps many of my best memories are those of gathering around tables and sharing good food together. Often it is food prepared by many different people, and often from many different countries. And it is often accompanied by fascinating conversation ranging from public policy to dark matter to Jane Austin to the latest episode of Game of Thrones. A number of those at our tables come from countries where, even more than ours, serving food is the way we say “welcome.”

We often consider the cross one of the most central symbols of Christianity, focusing as it does on the work of Christ by which our salvation was accomplished for all trust and follow him. While I do not want to replace this as the central symbol of Christian faith, I do want to propose that the table is an important symbolic object.

It represents God’s seeking and welcoming of his people. There is a strange and wonderful scene in Exodus 24 where Moses takes Aaron and a group of 70 elders up Mt. Sinai. The rest wait at a distance while Moses builds an altar, offers sacrifices, reads the Book of the Covenant, which they all agree to obey. They are sprinkled with blood and then invited to dine with God:

“Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and the seventy elders of Israel went up and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something like a pavement made of lapis lazuli, as bright blue as the sky. But God did not raise his hand against these leaders of the Israelites; they saw God, and they ate and drank.” (vv. 9-11, NIV)

Many of us learned Psalm 23 as children. It concludes with these lines:

You prepare a table before me
    in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
    my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me
    all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord
    forever. (vv. 5-6)

God’s comfort in the valley of death and the presence of enemies (including, one must suppose, the ultimate enemy of death) is a table where one is honored as a guest with an anointed forehead and an overflowing cup, and the assurance the abiding welcome in the house of the one who has set this table.

While churches have various beliefs and practices around the Eucharist, or Communion, or the Lord’s Supper, the common element is that we gather around either real or ritual tables and partake of bread and wine (or grape juice) that represent or even in some way become the body and blood of Christ. We are reminded that we are nourished in Christ, and come close to both God and each other around this table. The wealthy, the widow, and the impoverished partake together.

I’m reminded of a folk hymn we sang years ago, “God and Man at Table are Sat Down” (words and music by Robert J. Stamps). It begins:

O, welcome all ye noble saints of old
As now before your very eyes unfold
The wonders all so long ago foretold.
God and man at table are sat down.

The fourth verse reminds us that the welcome of God to the table extends to all humanity.

Beggars, lame, and harlots also here;
Repentant publicans are drawing near.
Wayward sons come home without a fear.
God and man at table are sat down.

It concludes with the wonder at the heart of this time

Here He gives Himself to us as bread.
Here as wine we drink the blood He shed.
Born to die, we eat and live instead,
God and man at table are sat down;
God and man at table are sat down.

All this anticipates the great and everlasting table of the feast when Christ and his bride are united. Growing up, I went to a number of weddings of friends from eastern European and Italian backgrounds, with mountains of food, drinks that freely flowed, and dancing and celebration that went the whole night long. One wedding took over the whole foyer of the performing arts center in my home town, and we danced the tarantella up and down the steps. I have a sense that this great day is something like that only far, far better! John writes in The Revelation:

Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:

“Hallelujah!
    For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
    and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
    and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
    was given her to wear.”

(Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God’s holy people.)

Then the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!” And he added, “These are the true words of God.” (Revelation 19:6-9).

I am persuaded that all our gatherings around tables to eat and enjoy the company of each other are fundamental to our existence not simply because we need the nourishment of food and community, but also as anticipations of the great table to which God invites us.

One quality of God’s table is that he graciously welcomes all without distinction. Tables at their best are places of welcome, where distinctions of national origin, gender, economic status, or success in life matter not at all. Good tables include and embrace rather than exclude, unless, like the elder son in the parable of the prodigal, one excludes oneself and refuses the invitation to come.

Tomorrow, I will reflect on the question of who is not at our tables and how the logic of our joyous community and common Lord challenges us to keep making room at our tables for those who are not there.

When the Lord’s Supper was a Real Meal

January 15, 2014January 15, 2014 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Our church has begun a blog of responses from several of our congregation members to our pastor’s sermons each week. I will usually posting every other Wednesday and will re-post to my own blog. Enjoy!