Passover: the Lord's Supper
I washed some bottles yesterday and set them up as a background to a series of Wedgwood we picked up at the charity shop. The way they sparkled induced me to take a snapshot. Hand held with the natural daylight and lights on in our loungeroom, with just a little adjustment in Photoshop, and on the computer screen it looks like a winner. So today I set up the tripod and did a better one.
Thinking about the Lord's Supper while I toyed with the photo led me to the idea that it could hang as an illustration on the wall of that upper room. In a way it is a stylised image of such a gathering - some prominent figures in the foreground and even some shady customers at the back. Not sure that I like the severe class divide between fine bone china and common (if antique) bottles and glasses, but then it's not the fact of different orders that I object to, it's the way some privileges become embedded in the social structure.
It does seem necessary that any group or society must have 'leaders' to organise things, and to be a point of contact for unity in the diversity of the individual members. Of course the leadership role will be a position of prominence, and will require some initiative and freedom to act on one's own judgement (always under review by the group). These aspects of the role appear attractive to the newcomer. However it is in fact from first to last a position of service, demanding more of one's energy and resources to be placed at the disposal of the group, with no compensation. The true leader serves out of love, with a humble approach to every person and every situation.
As I write I am beginning to feel that the photo above is a parody of such a community as Jesus assembled in the upper room. Somehow it reflects the way things actually are in the church, with the hierarchs, dressed in finery and displaying their ontological difference from the ordinary members, taking the front row and standing out like painted vases while the lay folk cluster in the background, showing only their variety of shape and size, their work-roughened finish and their utilitarian style.
The Lord's Supper this is not, although if it had been the feature fresco in that room, Jesus might well have said to his friends: Make sure you be not like those fancy Wedgwoods up there on the wall. I have washed your feet - that's the way you are to serve one another. Oh, and remember what I said once before, the greatest among you will behave as if he were the least.
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