Is the Table Open or Closed?

Of communion tokens and fencing the table

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

(A six-minute read.)

Back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially in Scotland and Northern Ireland, churches used to issue “communion tokens” to people who were deemed worthy of participating in the Lord’s Supper.

How it worked is that the minister or elders of a congregation would meet the week before communion to examine “the spiritual state of each member,” as Douglas A. Foster explains it, and those who demonstrated adequate spiritual fitness were issued a token. When they showed up to communion the next week, they’d present their token and be allowed to partake of the bread and the wine.

If a person didn’t have a token, they couldn’t participate.

It was all part of a very somber and serious attitude many within the Reformed tradition, taking their cues from John Calvin, had toward communion. They came to call it the “fencing of the table,” wherein religious leaders jealously and zealously guarded access to the body and blood of Christ.

Though they’d rejected the Roman Catholic idea that Christ was literally present within the bread and the wine, they still placed huge significance on the “sacrament” of communion, and believed a person could “profane the Lord’s Supper,” in Calvin’s words, if they came to the table in an “unworthy” manner (misinterpreting, I do believe, Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 11:27).

Of course, Reformed churches were—and aren’t—unique in this attitude. Roman Catholics generally have strict rules about who can partake of the Eucharist, and Mormons are issued “temple recommend” cards—good for two years, giving them access to Mormon temples—only after they’ve been examined by a bishop.

It perhaps goes without saying, of course, that such strict rules of access—access to the holiest places within religious thinking, whether it’s the communion table or the Islamic mosque or the Hindu temple—are endemic to all religious systems. Who is allowed to encounter God (or the gods), and how those people are supposed to come, is often strictly regulated and monitored.

When I read the Gospel accounts, though, one of the most common complaints leveled against Jesus went something like this:

“This man receives sinners and eats with them.”

The open table

Admittedly, I’ve been a part of a faith community my whole life that, like most newer denominations and non-denominations in America, practices “open communion.” If someone wants to receive the bread and (in our context) the grape juice, we don’t ask questions, we don’t hold inquisitions.

We just say “Come!”

Thus, the first time I read about “communion tokens,” or the idea of the “fencing of the table,” I was flabbergasted.

And yet, while admitting I’m not an expert on the topic of communion, I feel like I have biblical grounds for my objections.

When I read the accounts of the life of Jesus, one of the things that impresses me the most is how he gave access to anyone and everyone who wanted it. And that access was often—perhaps mostly—at the table, which became a point of frequent complaint for the religious leaders.

Perhaps most famously, Luke records one such occasion when “all the tax collectors and the sinners drew near” to Jesus to “hear him.” In response, the “Pharisees and scribes complained saying, ‘This Man receives sinners and eats with them’” (Luke 15:1-2).

Jesus then proceeded to tell three of his most famous parables—about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son—explaining what he was doing. He had come to “seek and to save that which is lost” (Luke 19:10), he said.

Indeed, elsewhere, when the religious leaders again complained about Jesus “eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners,” Jesus responded by saying, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:30-32).

So check this out: the people Jesus wanted at his table were not the clean but the dirty, not the righteous but the unrighteous.

It was the people who felt they had it all figured out, the people who felt like they were already healed, who were seemingly disqualified to sit at his table.

It was, on the other hand, the people who didn’t comply with religious conventions, the people who apparently didn’t measure up and reach the standard, who Jesus not only welcomed but desperately and fiercely wanted at the table with him.

Thus, Jesus didn’t seem to worry about people “profaning” his table, as Calvin stressed about. He was more concerned about communicating others’ belovedness than about maintaining his own holiness. He was more focused on convincing his children they belonged than on preserving his purity.

The truth is, there’s a great deal of theology—how we understand God—packed into the way we practice our religious rituals.

When we thus insist on rules and regulations when it comes to who can access the table, we implicitly communicate that God requires perfection in order to access him. We turn God into a God of the achievers, the doers, the religious 1%.

We insinuate he values the strong and disdains the weak.

But in so doing, we turn our backs on the God revealed in Jesus—who welcomed all to his table, so long as they wanted to be there and could work up the courage to believe God really wanted them there.

Cheap grace?

Of course, I’m not promoting a sort of wishy-washy, “cheap grace” theology that denies the importance of life transformation and discipleship.

I’m also fully aware of and agree that God is so holy and so wholly unlike us—that to be in his presence can induce feelings of anxiety and stress, as it did with Isaiah and Peter.

Indeed, as C. S. Lewis says of Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia series, Aslan is not a “tame lion.”

But I think God’s holiness, what makes him wholly unlike us, and induces the most stress in our hearts, is the fact that he is wholly love, that he practices radical inclusivity and radical acceptance—which is very stressful to sinful hearts that are naturally inclined toward exclusivity, selfishness, and bigotry.

In other words, if my heart is oriented toward condemning and exploiting others, I’ll feel very uncomfortable in the presence of someone whose heart is oriented toward constantly accepting and blessing others (including me).

I also believe we can only experience life transformation, we can only grow in our likeness to Jesus, by being in his presence—by sitting at the table with him.

It can’t come, and most assuredly won’t come, if I feel like I have to be transformed before I can sit at the table with him.

Indeed, to stay away from Jesus because of my imperfection and unrighteousness is the precise thing that will keep me imperfect and unrighteous.

It’s only as I allow myself to be fully known by God, as I sit at the table with him, and embrace his acceptance of me—despite my imperfections—that I can experience the transformation he longs for me to experience.

And Jesus knew this, which is why he was so eager to invite and sit with people at the table—no matter their background, no strings attached.

The only requirement, as John records in the closing scenes of the New Testament, was a desire to come.

It always has been, it always will be.

“And the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely.”

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.