We would hear this invitation occasionally at certain restaurants where we would have “dinner out.” On very special occasions at home, we younger family members would welcome the older folks to the table with the same greeting. It signified that we had learned something during our dinner outings, and that this moment, at home, was special for its own reason.
In the series of Gospel passages we are hearing in this and recent weeks, the manner of Jesus welcome of his disciples and his revelation to them of the foundation on which they would stand to appreciate fully the heavenly meal to come in the days of his Passion... this will be the meal that fulfills and surpasses the food given to the Israelites as gift for their journey from slavery to Pharaoh to freedom for God. It is to be the Sacred Meal in which Jesus, himself, broken on the Cross and raised in glory from the Tomb, IS the Bread of Life.
Words heard and said, lines to and from, ritual gestures that can be lovingly familiar but which might seem flat for the mere repetition of them...these are components of the foundation which Christ and the Church have given us as part of our spiritual legacy. It is the very heart of that which we do as Church each day, but especially on the Lord’s Day. For our own freedom in life and eternal salvation, and for the sake of the whole world, we are offered a seat of honor. We are invited into an exchange of sacred language which we are privileged to know. With movements at our places, and the movements that bring us forward to our sacramental encounter with Christ, we are possibly prepared for the meeting that reveals or gives meaning to all the other encounters in time to come, today, this week...
In him, we are “renewed in the spirit of our minds, and put on the new self ... “
Eph 4: 23-24