The greatest drama ever staged (part 2) - 14

14 The greatest drama ever staged (part 2)
Part Two THE THANK-YOU PARTY

‘Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them.’ Four actions heavy with significance. It would still be a Jesus-meal if you did all four in silence, with maybe a single word to refer to Jesus. You could make up some words of your own; some traditions do that (though they tend to sound rather the same as they did last time). But just as a wedding couple will choose a gold ring, if they can afford it, rather than a plastic one, so the church down the years has chosen special words, choice phrases, to approach the central mystery – God’s gift of his own very self in the person of his Son – in words that at least try to do justice to the reality. Liturgy at this point is like good orchestration for wonderful music; just as you don’t play a Beethoven symphony on a mouth-organ, so you will not want to celebrate the Jesus-meal casually or flippantly. The best demands the best…