Dr. Mike Graves, Scholar in Residence and Minister of Spiritual Formation
Down through the centuries, biblical scholars have learned a lot of interesting tidbits about eating in the first century Mediterranean world. They know, for instance, how diners reclined at their meals on a couch called triclinium, how they had bread before dinner and wine during dinner of course, but one ceremonial cup of wine afterwards. Archaeologists have unearthed things as mundane as the size of their dining spaces. Scholars also recognize how the Gospel writers try to set the so-called Last Supper during the Jewish holiday of Passover, which would have featured unleavened bread.
One thing that remains unknown is the size of the bread people ate. When the host broke off a piece of bread to welcome guests, how big a piece was it? A small morsel, the ancient equivalent of a crouton? Maybe a piece of bread the size of a biscuit? No one knows. I bring this up because the last few weeks at Country Club Christian, we tried cutting bread for Communion into larger chunks. We even came up with dimensions for the pieces of bread we would serve: 1” x 1” x 1.5”.
In part, this was for hygienic reasons. People are sometimes surprised to learn that intinction (Latin for dipping) spreads more germs than drinking from a common cup. I’m told that’s because there are more germs on our fingers than in our mouths. At our church, a common cup is not an issue so we don’t have to worry about that. But at 9:00 and 10:00 every week we do eat by intinction. (The 11:00 service passes trays, so it’s not really an issue except on special Sundays when we observe a more joyful Communion.) Because dipping tiny pieces of bread into the cup without getting one’s fingers wet proved nearly impossible, we started cutting bigger pieces.
But hygiene was only part of the consideration. A theology of bread (yes, there can be a theology of such things) would suggest bigger pieces of bread representing bigger pieces of God’s love. If God is generous toward us, then a small crumb of bread will not suffice. When our family was recently on vacation in Hilton Head, South Carolina, we went out to eat several nights, and at each of the restaurants they brought us huge helpings of bread. Imagine a restaurant trying to serve the size of bread churches offer.
At our church, we have decided the big pieces were too big, too much to handle. But heaven help us Christians if restaurants are more generous than we are when it comes to bread. We need big bread because we serve a big and generous God.
