By Fr Ron Rolheiser, OMI
JOHN Muir once asked, “Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven?”
The same might be said of us as churches: why are we so reluctant sometimes to welcome others into God’s mercy and to our communion tables?
We certainly can’t use Jesus as our model in doing this. Looking at the Gospels, there is never a recorded incident where Jesus laid down some moral or religious condition to sit down at table with him.
Our model is rather the well-meaning disciples of Jesus, who, like us, tried to protect Jesus by sheltering him from various groups, including little children. But always in the face of this we hear Jesus saying clearly: Let them come me! Small wonder he sent his disciples away so he could have a meeting with the Samaritan woman who had been married five times.
What I am about to suggest is a risk since, admittedly, the issue of intercommunion is more complex than can be resolved simply by saying Jesus welcomed everyone (even as we may never ignore that).
Regarding the question of intercommunion: There is wide agreement theologically that baptism gives you access to the communion table. As Christian denominations, we recognize the validity each other’s baptisms. So why can’t any Christian go to any Christian church and be welcome at the communion table?
Because each denomination is its own family – and normally families eat at their own tables. Normally you go to your own denominational family for communion. But this is a pastoral consideration not a theological one.
However, occasionally we do eat at someone else’s home and table. Most mainline theologies of the Eucharist draw on this distinction and distinguish between “Occasional” intercommunion (funerals, weddings, faith gatherings) and “Regular” intercommunion. The former makes sense pastorally, the latter doesn’t. You only eat regularly at someone else’s table if you are a member of the family or household.
Given that pastoral concern, churches have had varied norms, ranging from wide welcome to strict exclusion, depending on how their leadership accesses the situation. For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, Roman Catholics generally welcomed others to receive communion on special occasions. Then, during the nineteen eighties and nineties, more and more, those presiding the Eucharist on those occasions were asked not to publicly invite those from other churches to receive communion. Further, after the year 2000, those presiding the Eucharist were asked to publicly disinvite those from other churches from receiving communion. More recently, there has been a growing shift back to a more welcoming stance.
What’s to be said about this shift back and forth? First, that this is a pastoral rather than a theological issue, and pastorally it can be argued legitimately in different ways. Where there is common agreement is that everyone wants the various Christian Churches to someday be one family with one communion table for all. The disagreement is on how to get there.
Some believe and argue that having to “fast” from intercommunion will make us hungrier to become one Church and will help motivate us to work more proactively for ecumenism. Others disagree and argue that being more welcoming about intercommunion will motivate us to work proactively for ecumenism. Who’s right?
There’s a logic in both arguments, but I confess that my heart lies with the latter group. In my experience, excluding each other from the Eucharist table tends to harden rather than soften our divisions, just as welcoming each other at the Eucharist table tends to soften the suspicions of each other we have nursed for the last five hundred years since the Reformation.
As well, I disagree with the belief and argument that any one church (in my case the Roman Catholic Church) is the only fully authentic expression of Church and that other denominations somehow lack authentic discipleship and therefore we would in some way cheapen the Eucharist and the real presence by allowing non-Roman Catholics to receive it at our communion table.
Here, like the well-meaning but mistaken disciples of Jesus, we are trying to protect Jesus from persons we feel are somehow not ready to have this encounter and intimacy with him. We need to remember that Jesus always met this with the words: Let them come to me! Jesus doesn’t need nor want our protection.
Moreover, the love, mercy, and embrace of God which Jesus incarnated and preached, was the antithesis of stingy. It was wide, inviting, and embracing of everyone universally. God has no favorites, except that everyone of us is God’s particular favorite. God is not a private or tribal deity, owned and controlled by any one faith, religion, denomination, or Church.
This is not to say that all faiths, religions, and Churches are equal and all the boundaries that separate them should be erased. No. But it is to say that we must not be so reluctant to incorporate others in our stingy understanding of Jesus’ universal embrace.
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is currently serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his website, www.ronrolheiser.com. Follow on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser.
