Meditation on the Lord's Supper - The Towel of Humility
/
Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles by Meister des Hausbuches, 1475
A Twilight Musing
By so simple an act as eating and drinking the plainest bread and wine, Christ seeks to draw His disciples together. It is a time when His servants should be poignantly aware of His lack of pretentiousness and should determine to gird themselves with the towel of humility and (in attitude) wash one another's feet. And yet how often do we partake of the Lord's Supper in an atmosphere of stuffy self-importance, congratulating ourselves that we have proven our superiority to the rest of the world merely by being in the assembly.
It is difficult in congregations of a few hundred or more to preserve the intimate fellowship of breaking bread as it was experienced by early Christians meeting from house to house; but the problem is not entirely one of numbers. In a larger sense, we always gather around a large table, for we share each Communion service with all the saints, past and present, and to fail to recognize this wider fellowship is to be spiritually provincial. The solution to our isolation from one another is not to make the table smaller, but to make our awareness of the presence of our Lord, the Suffering Servant, large enough and inclusive enough to fill the hearts of all who partake of His feast. Only thus may we capture the grandeur of His humility which links us together across time. We can be neither neutral nor antagonistic toward those with whom we sup; the Lord's Supper calls all of us to love and serve each other as He has loved and served us.
Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.
