Interestingly, the Lord’s Supper was not always kept in the way we may be familiar with today. Nowadays many people celebrate the memorial of the Last Supper and Jesus’ death with small, identical wafers of bread, and small measured portions or sips of wine for all the participants. But things were not always that way.
In the New Testament, we find that the apostle Paul reprimanded the church at Corinth for the way in which they celebrated the Lord’s Supper. Apparently, people took their own food and drink to the event – the rich taking much, and the poor very little. As Paul wrote: “when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk” (1 Corinthians 11:20-21) Paul tells the church they must eat together and indicates that restrained amounts should be available for all (verse 33).
This was the regulated form which became practice in the remembrance of the Last Supper that is the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in many denominations today. But although we may remember this New Testament story, another change that we may not be aware of has occurred through time relative to the Last Supper.
Although we may be conscious of the abundance that many people enjoy in the developed world today compared to many other areas, we may not be as aware of the abundance so many have in today’s world compared to what was available in the past. Fascinating but little publicized research conducted several years ago at Cornell University throws light on the abundance which many of us take for granted.
In a careful study published as “The Largest Last Supper: Depictions of Food Portions and Plate Size Increased Over the Millennium,” researchers Brian and Craig Wansink analyzed the amount of food depicted in fifty-two paintings of “The Last Supper” produced over the last thousand years. Each painting was analyzed in order to ascertain the content of the meals depicted, and changes which occurred over time in the size of portions in the paintings. Cleverly, the sizes of the loaves of bread, the main food dishes, and the plates were all compared to the average size of the heads shown in the paintings in order to gain a benchmark reference of size. A computerized CAD-CAM program was used to allow selected parts of the paintings to be scanned, then compared in order to get accurate size comparisons to calculate the food portion sizes with more precision.
As the researchers suspected, the number and size of the food portions in these paintings increased dramatically over time. From AD 1000 to the present, the amount of the food depicted in the paintings increased by 69%, and the size of the depicted plates increased correspondingly by some 65%. This is certainly not a matter of chance, the researchers say. There is no question that the amount of food available to people in much of the Western world has grown dramatically over the hundreds of years covered by the study and this is reflected in artistic representations. What was first shown as a simple meal has grown in artistic interpretations to more recent depictions of the Last Supper which suggest almost feast-like proportions compared to earlier paintings.
Today, many of us enjoy much greater abundance than our ancestors, as well as those less fortunate than us in other parts of today’s world. Representations of the Last Supper can remind us that we have much to be thankful for physically, as well as spiritually. Paul himself reminds us of this when he refers to the cup of the Lord’s Supper as “the cup of thanksgiving” (1 Corinthians 10:16) – something we can, and should, appreciate physically as well as spiritually.
