Communion at Emerge... "On the night of His betrayal..."

Emerge is our twenty-something college and career Bible study we have on Thursday evenings.  We meet at various places in our metro area, normally McAlister's Deli, Fool Moon, Chick-Fil-A or at my home.  The group has grown so much over the last year in our common unity, so last night was our first time to share the communion meal together in our home.

It was an awesome night of hanging out and thinking about our lives and purposes for which can only be properly seen through the body and blood of Christ.

As I read the various passages where Christ shared communion, a thought occurred to me in how Paul referenced this shared meal.  He said, "On the night of His betrayal..." and it made me think: Here was Jesus with the disciples and they were sharing this most intimate holy rite.  What other communion could rival the one that Christ Himself served so symbolically moments before He'd be betrayed and actually shed the blood they were at that moment, in that meal, honoring?

The irony of how near they were to their salvation, their Savior, and yet the meal is marked by being the night of His betrayal.  In just moments after eating and drinking, Judas would slither off to the shadows to purchase his eternal fate.  In mere hours, Peter would be marked by a renunciation times three of ever having known Jesus.  The other ten would abandon Jesus in the garden at the sight of the temple guards. And even with that foreknowledge, Christ was the common-unity that brought them all together and would ultimately bring each of them together again in forgiveness.

With this in mind, I remarked to the Emerge group that we were about to share the same meal and we too are each on the eve of our own betrayals of Christ.  It may not come Thursday night or even Friday, but if given enough life (it really won't take much life sadly) upon this earth we will miserably fail Christ and in a sense abandon Him as equally as the disciples had.  Yet on that same evening... the evening of His betrayal... the evening of our own betrayal of Him... they were holding in their hands the elements that would wreck any such betrayal of lasting any longer than the deed itself.  In the body and in the blood is our own forgiveness...  And as we shared together in the communion with each other, and with Christ ever so present, we are to keep Him in rememberance until He comes... until He comes.

Great is the faithful forgiveness or our Christ and Lord despite our faithfulness to rebellion and sin!