The Last Supper's Table

There is, after all, no table like it. This table reaches from that upper room in Jerusalem all the way through cathedrals in Europe and America, to the place where you will next take the sacrament. This table is revered in mud hut churches in Africa, where people speak the sacred words in languages you and I have never heard. It has often been set up, in crude fashion, in the darkest pits of confinement, where people imprisoned for their faith in Christ have saved a fragment of bread and a spoonful of water just so they can say, "His body. His blood." And they do it with a triumph that shakes the dungeon walls ... So I ponder that once, long ago, there was a table, where thirteen men sat ... But who could have imagined that night that where thirteen sat at the table, hundreds of millions would sit at the same table, two millennia later, everywhere on this planet. And someone will say, "The body of our Lord. The blood of Christ, shed for you. And in that moment, eternity will break in upon human souls. At a common piece of furniture called a table, you and I will eat a crumb of bread, we will drink from a cup, and for that moment, all of the company of heaven will observe in splendid awe. Such a table! Such a table!

- J. Ellsworth Kalas in "New Testament Stories from the Back Side"