When I was about 9 years old, I was given the option to start taking communion at the Pentecostal church I attended. My parents explained the purpose and symbolism in our church tradition, but the thing that stood out to me the most was the verse, “For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.” (1 Colossians 11:29) On the Sundays when I knew communion would be served, I approached the church with fear.  From the moment I woke up, I began frantically asking for forgiveness for the many things that I may have done wrong in the past month.  Right before I took the cup and the cracker, I would always throw in an extra prayer of, “please forgive me for anything that I’ve forgotten to mention.” Rather than have a sense of appreciation, I approached communion with obligation and dread.

My first experience of communion being paired with something other than those feelings was in high school. I started attending Catholic mass with my boyfriend, and although I couldn’t participate in the eucharist, I would recite, along with the rest of the congregation, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed.” (It has now been updated to “Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.”) That idea of communion bringing healing or wholeness was a new one for me, and I desperately wanted to be able to engage in that. As I was not Catholic, I contented myself with receiving a blessing instead.

On Good Friday, we reflect intentionally on the body of Christ, broken for us—his real suffering, his real death. The cross is where judgment and grace meet – brokenness and wholeness together. ” Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4-5, NIV).

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Fast forward to my adult life, in Ottawa.  We’d been attending a Brethren In Christ church for 15 years, and one Sunday, I went forward and the server holding the bread was a teenage boy I’ve known all his life.  As he held the bread out to me, I looked at him, and I remembered him as a child, as a toddler, as a baby, the day he was born, while his mom was pregnant, his parents before they were married, and it was such an impactful moment for me. He was offering me the body of Christ, and I had seen him grow up as part of the body of Christ.  This connection between Christ’s body and our bodies, as they grow and change and develop, started to solidify in my mind.  I took the bread from this young man and I felt like communion was not about judgment and cleansing, but about participating in a larger body.

That same church went through a hard time over the past few years. It went from a thriving community of about 250 people to a struggling congregation with numbers closer to 30. On one of these small Sundays, my pastor held the bowl of bread out to me and said, “The body of Christ, broken for you, Jasmine.”  Our church felt like a suffering body, but hearing my name in that statement made me realize that although I was grieving the many things our congregation had lost, there were deep treasures in being part of a small, intimate community.  It was a church body that knew me so well, and I was an integral part of it. Good Friday reminds us that the brokenness we experience together points us back to Jesus’ own brokenness. Communion isn’t just remembering Jesus’ suffering; it’s sharing in it together.

Nancy Eiesland writes, “In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God” [1]. Perhaps it was Jesus’ willingness to share his imperfections and his scars with his friends that drew them together. Through Jesus’ life, God comes to us as not only a master but a friend (John 15:15). This friendship – remembered through the communion we share – is part of healing.

More recently, I was at a spiritual retreat through my work at Karis Disability Services. I was part of the planning committee and had been working hard, not sleeping well, and my Myasthenia Gravis was causing me great weakness and pervasive pain.  Toward the end of the retreat, we had a communion service. As I returned to my seat after putting in what felt like a monumental effort to collect the emblems, I felt pain and exhaustion.  I looked at the cracker in my hand, and I was able to thank God for his broken body and for my broken body.  I am so glad that he was willing to come and live incarnate to experience the pain and the exhaustion that we experience so that he could be closer to us, and we to Him. In that moment, I felt closer to the physical Christ than I ever have, and I took communion with a full sense of appreciation for what it means to be part of the Body and what it means to have a body. On Good Friday, I am reminded that Jesus’ suffering body on the cross is God’s most intimate act of identifying with our suffering bodies, and through communion, we are drawn together as part of His Body (1 Cor. 10:16–17).

I often speak with the people I serve at Karis Disability Services about disability theology, and we’ve needed to find, together, very plain language to describe it.  What we have settled on is this: Studying God helps us understand disability better, and studying disability helps us understand God better.

On this Good Friday, I am grateful for the way my disabled, painful, chronically ill body opens windows of understanding for me to better understand Christ and God and the mystery of communion in a whole new way.