8 Taking the Lord's Supper Seriously
8
RECONNAISSANCE: WISDOM AND WEEDS
The launchpad for this chapter is my very uncomfortable suspicion that taking the Lord’s Supper seriously is something that deep down most of us simply don’t do—including, alas, many who have no idea that they fall short at this point.
Granted, we may belong to churches that include the Supper in their regular routine of worship, and we may attend and partake because we are expected to and know we should. But in honesty we must admit that we are really more interested in the sermon than in the sacrament. We feel the sermon is more important, we expect more from it, and we concentrate on it more intensively and brood more on it when the service is done. We are perhaps aware that long ago there were Christians who saw both the sermon and the Supper as of prime value and who made much of preparing for Holy Communion and practicing post-Communion devotions, but this knowledge leaves us unmoved. We do not imagine that such old-fashioned behavior has in it any wisdom for us today.
Why do we Protestants thus dumb down the Supper? Why do we take for granted, as we seem to do, that it is of secondary and minor importance? The trouble is, I suggest, that we have been shaped more than we know by a superficial and reactionary tradition that tells us there is wisdom in not making too much of the Supper (or Eucharist, or Mass, or Liturgy, or breaking of bread, or Holy Communion, or the Lord’s Table, or whatever we are going to call it). This tradition, like so many traditions, is a recoil—in this case, a recoil from what we see, or think we see, or are told is there to be seen, in Roman Catholicism, Anglican Anglo-Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, each of which makes the Supper the central act of the church’s worship, but (so we are assured) attaches misconceptions and superstitions to it and then (we are further assured) dumbs down preaching, so that the mistakes never get corrected.
Now this is an ignorant caricature, and my first move in this discussion must be to beg my readers to expel it from their minds, in whatever form it lies there and however deeply rooted it may currently be. As gardeners know to their cost, weeds choke the growth of healthy flowers; they flourish spontaneously where seeds carefully sown die almost before they have sprouted. And in the fallen human heart the story is similar. Prejudiced distortions and malicious fantasies luxuriate there, while sober truth has to struggle, and struggle hard, to get a look in. What we will be referring to as the Catholic heritage may slip up on specifics, but, as we shall see, it is basically more right than wrong, whereas the idea that in Christian worship this sacrament is of secondary importance is basically more wrong than right. I say this to clear the ground for thinking out the doctrine of the Holy Supper by the light of Scripture, which is the task we shall now tackle.
REALIZING THE REALITY OF GOD
When a topic becomes controversial and opinions about it divide, the first step in discussing it should always be to go back to the foundational points on which there remains agreement and try in the light of them to map out where, how, and why disagreement has come in. Doing this in the present case means letting the Bible lead us right back to God’s purpose for human life when he created our race.
God made humankind, as he made angels, to live eternally in fellowship with him, loving him for his loveliness, adoring him for his wisdom, power, and beauty, and serving him gladly in any way he might ask. Within the good creativity (or, if you like, creative goodness) of this purpose, he showed his love of significant variety by doing something for us that he did not do for angels. He made us integrated compounds, psychophysical units: that is, as we might prefer to say, embodied souls, or, we could just as truly say, ensouled bodies—in other words, personal selves living in and through physical organisms. Then he set us to live a preparatory life, lower than the angels, the purpose of which was to make us ready, through leading us to make ourselves ready, for an endless transfigured life, higher than the angels, in a world to come. We were given bodies to live through so that we might experience and enjoy other people and things in a way that angels, being bodiless, cannot do. We humans are so made that our bodily experiences and enjoyments, like the abstract, evaluative, imaginative, and controlling notions that make up our thought life, should naturally and instinctively awaken an appreciative awareness of God as the source of everything that is worthwhile. They should also stir up in us a sense of gratitude to him for the gift of life as such, and for all within us that enriches it; that is to say, all our powers of perception through the senses and the mind, and the many good, great, and glorious perceptions that result. More than that, every element and event in our ongoing existence is intended to stir up desires for, and hopes of, more of the same, but in quality grander and more wonderful than any of our present enjoyments—desires and hopes that God plans to satisfy up to the limit in the world to come. Thus the physical world that we have been made to inhabit and the processes of body and mind whereby we appreciate it are meant to be means whereby God engages with us, revealing his reality to us and drawing the reality of worship out of us.
And when in redemptive contexts God designates material objects as spiritually significant signs, visible pointers to particular aspects of his invisible but potent action to bless us (in the Old Testament, circumcision and Passover; in the New Testament, baptism and the Lord’s Supper), the same principle applies. Discerning the divine authenticity of the sign and its accompanying words, we are to tell ourselves that the spiritual blessings signified are as surely there for us as these visible tokens of them are. We are to recognize the goodness of God in providing for us both the blessings themselves and the assuring signs of their reality, and with confidence we are to move into communing with God on this basis, looking forward as we do so to the greater glories and joys to which the signs themselves are here and now pointing.
The time-honored way whereby the church expresses all this is that it speaks of the entire universe and its contents as sacramental, and of the significant signs as sacraments. Mainstream Christianity has for centuries used the words this way.
But we are running ahead of ourselves and must backtrack. Fast forward, now, from where we began. Sin came in at the start of human history and not only brought us all under God’s punitive judgment, but also twisted our human nature out of shape, so that now our hearts have a built-in distaste for, and aversion to, heart godliness, and our natural sense of God’s glory in the created order is blunted. But God has graciously implemented a saving strategy centering on the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and dominion of the divine Son, for the forming by him through the Holy Spirit of a new humanity, the covenantal community called the church. And Christ has commanded observance of two rites as bonds of unity within that community. In them, material items—water in one case, bread and wine in the other—become significant signs of his own saving ministry to us who as believers engage in the ritual actions. Both actions symbolize the restoring, through Christ’s reconciling sacrifice, of our relationship with the Father and the restoring, in Christ by the Holy Spirit, of our love for God and godliness, through the untwisting of our moral nature by sovereign regeneration. The one is a rite of cleansing and initiation (baptism), and the other a rite of sustenance and continuance (the Lord’s Supper). It is the second of these that concerns us now, and our next move must be to review in detail the way that the New Testament presents it.
REVIEWING THE NEW TESTAMENT DATA
The symbolism of the Lord’s Supper is that of the meal table where the food we need for life is regularly served. Bread and wine, staple items in a first-century Palestinian diet, were already on the table as part of the Passover meal when Jesus instituted the new rite. Matthew and Mark give almost identical accounts of how Jesus took bread and blessed it (that is, gave God thanks for it), then broke it in pieces and distributed it, saying, “This is my body.” Next he took and blessed the wine cup and handed it to the disciples for all to drink, with the words, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many”—and Matthew adds “for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24). The shared bread and wine over which these words were spoken thereby became pledges of the reality, availability, and actual bestowal of the beneficial effects of the divine action to which the words referred; this was the holy use to which material foodstuffs were now being put. Luke reports Jesus’s words as, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And then, “This cup that is poured out for you is in the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:19–20). Paul, relaying the wording that he received “from the Lord”—by which he meant, from the lips of the original apostles—adds to what we have in the Gospels: “Do this, as often as you drink it” (1 Cor. 11:25). So Jesus meant the rite to be repeated, just as ordinary meals are constantly repeated (for most Westerners, three times a day). Since Jesus had undoubtedly spoken in Aramaic, and what he said had at first been transmitted orally, it should not surprise us that these Greek renderings vary slightly, with some omitting wording that others include, and others including wording that some omit.
Three notes, now, on the meaning of these statements:
1. “Is,” with predicates “my body” and “the new covenant in my blood,” must mean “represents” or “symbolizes”—not “constitutes.” The idea that Jesus’s words worked like a wizard’s spell, changing bread, and perhaps wine too, whether through addition or transmutation, into something other than what they were, has had a good run for its money, but seems impossible, if only because Jesus himself as he spoke was still with them, personally unchanged. In fact, the reference to Jesus’s body being given for the disciples points to his forthcoming sacrificial death on the cross. He had, of course, stated earlier that he came “to give his life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45).
2. “Blood of the covenant” echoes Moses’s words as he threw sacrificial blood over the people at Sinai: “Behold the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you” (Ex. 24:8). The covenant was the imposed relationship whereby God declared himself to be Israel’s God, and Israel to be his people. The “new” covenant (of which Luke and Paul speak), prophesied by Jeremiah and expounded in part in 2 Corinthians 3:5–18 and more fully in Hebrews 8:1–10:18, is an upgraded version of the original covenant in which Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice for sin ends the repeated sacrifices of the Old Testament, and true holiness, motivational and behavioral, is imparted by the Holy Spirit.
3. The phrase “in remembrance of me” points to twofold action, both aspects being defined by faith-knowledge about “me”—Jesus himself. Deliberate remembering—calling him to mind; joyfully, adoringly, purposefully contemplating him; praising him and praying to him—is our action. Renewing our gratitude for grace, our confidence in forgiveness by grace, our hope of glory, and our strength for service all by the Holy Spirit is his action. Alive and with us now in resurrection power, he is the true minister each time the Supper is celebrated; we should think of the bread and wine as coming to us from his hand and as his guarantee to us that in love he will continue to nourish us spiritually forever.
In the course of correcting the Corinthians for their thoughtlessness about the meaning of the Supper, and their lawless, loveless behavior at it, as if it was some kind of wild picnic, Paul gives us what is in effect a mini-theology of this sacrament.
The objective significance. The symbolic routine of repeatedly sharing bread and wine made significant by Jesus’s words witnesses to the two most far-reaching events in world history. One is past, namely, Jesus’s self-sacrifice on the cross, which opened the gate to eternal life for all who believe; one is future, namely, Jesus’s return for universal judgment and the remaking of the entire cosmos, at which time sacramental rites will be no more. “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). Because of the supreme significance of this symbolism, reverence at the table is a must.
The subjective significance. “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:16–17). Participation means sharing in, assimilating, or being involved in something. Everyday eating and drinking brings bodily nourishment as our physical system assimilates the food. The ritual eating and drinking that Christ prescribed brings spiritual nourishment to us through unitive involvement with him in the shedding of his lifeblood and the giving of his body to be broken. We thus participate in the redemptive death that the words of Christ memorialize, that the actual eating and drinking symbolize, and that Paul affirms elsewhere as fact when he says that the believer has been crucified with Christ (Rom. 6:6; Gal. 2:20). And this is only half the story, for the symbolism is also of Christ feeding us to keep us in life. The life in question is his own risen life, into which he draws all believers in such a way that we become “one body”—that is, if we may put it so, one vital organism—in union with him. From this union, through the Holy Spirit, spiritual vitality flows: health and strength for devotion and service; inner resources of love, ability, and power that we continue to discover within ourselves throughout our lives.
When Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, instituted the Supper, he knew that he would shortly be killed. But he also knew that on the third day thereafter he would rise from the dead and in due course return to the glory that was his before and send the Holy Spirit to mediate knowledge of his presence and power to all who should call on his name, that is, pray to him with some awareness of who he is and what he has done. He had in fact spoken of all these things to his disciples. So clearly he meant the regularly repeated Supper to be an invigorating encounter between himself and each worshipper, and expectant reverence was to be the temper of the gathering as a whole, in contrast with the casual, self-indulgent disorder that prevailed at Corinth (1 Cor. 11:20–22). Lack of love and mutual disregard within the body of Christ are always an offense against Christ himself, the body’s Head and life; but never more than at the Lord’s Table. Hence Paul’s startlingly strong words to the disorderly Corinthians:
Whoever . . . eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. . . . Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body [i.e., the meaning of the symbol of the broken body of Christ, or possibly the scandal involved in disrupting the fellowship of the church] eats and drinks judgment on himself. (1 Cor. 11:27, 29)
These are not words to forget in a hurry.
RECEIVING THE BREAD AND WINE
For the members of every Christian congregation to remember Christ together by sharing in this symbolic meal is something that he himself has directed us to do, as we have seen; and as with everything else that Jesus tells us to do, it is up to us to do it in the best way we can. The words instituting the sacrament have shown us that remembering our Lord should mean both calling to mind his sacrificial death for us and embracing his covenantal commitment to us. And the act of actually taking the food and drink as from him should express the renewal of our trust in him and our ongoing dependence on him as our Savior, Master, discipler, friend, and indeed, as Paul says in Colossians 3:4, our life itself. It is this many-sided relationship that we must seek to express in what we do at the Lord’s Table.
Remembering Jesus, like remembering anyone else we want to honor, means in the first place centering our thoughts on him, his aims, his actions, and his involvements, and holding these realities steadily and admiringly before our minds. In everyday terms it is, we might say, a matter of looking his way, looking at him directly, and looking at what he himself looked at when he was on earth. And then (since he is now in truth risen, alive, and with us, and actually ministering to us through the hands and voices of the worship leaders), it is a matter of speaking to him in our hearts about the things we are remembering.
This communing in love can be circumscribed in four directions.
1. Look up. “Up” here signifies, of course, not distance from us (“up there”) but dignity overshadowing us. Though Christ is close to us, he is in every sense above us, and our way of approaching him needs to reflect our awareness of this. We should look up to the Lord Jesus, God’s incarnate Son, now enthroned at his Father’s side, as our Redeemer-ruler, our sovereign Savior, the supplier and sustainer of our peace, love, joy, and strength, and as the sender of the Holy Spirit to generate within us, in union with himself, the fullness of our newness of life. We should look up to Jesus the Mediator with awe and gladness that he has brought us into his Father’s family and is here and now feeding us in a way that supernaturalizes our lives, and we should honor him for it with our praise and our thanks.
2. Look back. We should contemplate Calvary and all that it meant for us in terms of sin’s penalty paid; reconciliation with the Father achieved; forgiveness made available for believers, and justification and adoption by God made real for them; permanent security with God guaranteed to them; Satan decisively defeated; and the foundation laid for the full-scale reintegration in due course, through and under Christ, of this entire sin-scarred, sin-marred universe. Christ’s transcendent achievement by his death on the cross must ever be central in our remembrance of and communion with him who is now our risen Lord and our true host at his table. “Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,” wrote Paul (Gal. 6:14). Glorying in the cross, as Paul gloried in it, should be part of each Christian’s mental and spiritual exercise as we come to receive the bread and wine.
Here it helps to recall the significance of Israel’s Passover, in the course of which Jesus instituted the Supper. Scripture tells us that this annual event began as a divinely prescribed meal preparing for the deliverance of the community from Egyptian enslavement. It was two things together. It was, first, a shielding of Israel from the judgment of the tenth plague, in which all Egypt’s firstborn died. The shielding was achieved by smearing the lamb’s blood on the lintel and doorposts of each home. “When I see the blood, I will pass over you,” the Lord said (Ex. 12:7, 12–13, esp. 13). In this, substitutionary atoning sacrifice was evidently being foreshadowed. And, second, the meal was given a form that spoke of hurried preparations for departure. “With unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. . . . let none of it remain until the morning . . . . In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste” (12:8–11). Egypt’s exit door would shortly be opened, and Israel must be ready to leave. Liberation from sin’s dominion through the cross, the spiritual counterpart of Israel’s earthly redemption, is being clearly anticipated here. Thoughts of all this will fitly enter into the look back in our devotional meditations as we come to the table of the Lord.
3. Look ahead. “As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). Christ comes, quite literally, to take every believer home, either at his future public coming for judgment, which Paul has in view here, or (as has been the case for every believer so far, and will continue to be till that momentous event) by personal self-disclosure to us at the point of our death. “I go,” Jesus said, “to prepare a place for you . . . , I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:2–3). This promise will be fulfilled, one way or the other, to all of us.
Courting couples, and married couples too, find great delight in phone conversations when they are away from each other, but the delight is greater when they are together, looking at and able to touch each other as they speak. Similarly, communion with the Father and the Son in prayer now will bring joy, but the joy will be greater in heaven, where each of us will simultaneously receive Jesus’s full attention (being God, he is able to manage that, and indeed already does), and we shall see his face, and our fellowship of love with him will be unimaginably close and rich. At the Communion table, we should be looking forward to this and, in our hearts, telling our Savior that we are doing so.
4. Look around. We who believe are limbs or units or, as the KJV has it, members of the spiritual body of Christ, which is the church viewed, as it were, from the inside and known by the way it works. Our Christian life as church people is meant to be a life of constant loving service, both to fellow-Christians and to needy people, individuals and communities, that are outside the circle of faith. Our service is to be shaped and measured by the way in which the real needs of real people present themselves: Jesus’s story of the Good Samaritan shows this. So as we share in the Supper, we should be asking ourselves, and asking the Lord Jesus to show us, what human needs we should devote ourselves to serving once our Eucharistic service is over and we have scattered back into the wider world. We would mar our professed discipleship badly, turning it into formality, hypocrisy, and radical unreality, should we fail to reconsecrate ourselves at each Communion service to serve the needy, for in that failure we would be declining to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
If these are the thoughts and concerns that should fill our minds as we come to the Lord’s Table, we can now see the point of Paul’s admonition, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Cor. 11:28). It is not just that we should not be thoughtlessly casual and disorderly, as the Corinthians were; it is rather that when we come to the holy table, we need to be reverent and properly prepared to focus on Christ our Lord. We need to be honest and penitent about ways in which we have come short of faithfulness and love to Christ and Christians. We need to ask the Lord for any new orders he has for us, and for new strength to do better the things we already know we have to do. And we need to express gratitude for grace received just as heartily as we can.
Worship patterns at the table vary widely. A common formula, following ministry of the gospel word in some form, consists of a hymn, a prayer for spiritual realism, a reciting of the words of institution, distribution of the elements, and a closing prayer of congregational thanksgiving, consecration, and dismissal. The historic Anglican Prayer Book liturgy, dating in essence from 1552, works up to the distribution with particular power by a dramatic sequence of the three key themes: sin, grace, and faith. Sin is articulated in a poignant congregational confession expressing penitence and pleading for forgiveness. Grace is articulated by a proclamatory prayer for mercy uttered by the minister and followed by “comfortable [i.e., encouraging, reassuring] words”—four New Testament quotations (Matt. 11:28; John 3:16; 1 Tim. 1:15; 1 John 2:1–2) declaring the saving mercy of the Father and the Son. Then faith is articulated in an outburst of thankful adoration, after which comes the sacrament, confirming and applying to each person the saving work of Christ that has just been celebrated.
RABBIT TRAIL: THE PROBLEM OF PRESENCE
The angle of our exposition so far has been devotional and practical, and it would be wrong to round it off by lapsing into jarring controversy. But something should be said before we close about a notion that has been prominent in the mainstream of Christian thought throughout the two millennia of the church’s life, yet seems to be neither biblically warranted nor devotionally fruitful. This is the notion of Christ being personally present in a unique way in the Eucharistic bread and wine once these have been consecrated for use in the Supper by a duly ordained bishop or presbyter.
The view in question affirms that, while the outward form of these foodstuffs remains unchanged, they have hereby become, literally and ontologically, Christ-carriers, by supernatural divine transmutation of their interior substance (Roman Catholic), or by Christ adding himself in a supernatural way to the bread and wine (Lutheran), or by a supernatural process that, though real, is entirely mysterious to us and must be acknowledged so (Eastern Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic). I am one who thinks that all forms of this idea of a special, somehow localized attachment of Christ’s glorified being to Eucharistic bread and wine are mistaken, but it is not my present concern to argue that point. My purpose is to flag the idea’s unhappy implication—that if the consecrated elements are unique because Christ is present in them in a unique and special way, and if Christ is received in unique fullness and with unique efficacy by partaking of them, as is regularly assumed, then Christ is neither so fully present nor so fully available anywhere else. To believe in this unique presence is likely to generate superstition about the Supper and to weaken the everyday exercise of faith in Christ.
The exponents of “real presence,” as all forms of this view are labeled, base their belief on Jesus’s words of institution (“This is my body . . . my blood”), supported by his earlier words in the Capernaum synagogue:
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. . . .
Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. (John 6:51–55)
But the thinking purported to find support in the words of institution is not cogent. As mentioned earlier, “is” in these words means representation, not identity. It is “is” as in the leader’s words in the Jewish Passover today when he holds up the bread and says, “This is the bread of affliction which our fathers ate in the land of Egypt.” “Is” here unambiguously means “represents.” And when Jesus said that the way to consume him, the true Bread of Life, was to eat his flesh and drink his blood (which, granted, sounds shocking, as if indicating cannibalism), he was talking about the faith that looks steadily to him as our sin-bearing sacrifice and draws steadily on him to sustain the reality of our spiritual life. Says Calvin:
It is a false interpretation to apply this passage to the Lord’s Supper. . . . It would have been stupid and senseless to talk about the Lord’s Supper before it had been instituted. Clearly, Christ is speaking here about the constant and ordinary eating of the “flesh” of Christ, which is done only by faith. (John, ed. Alister McGrath and J. I. Packer [Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994], 170)
Calvin is surely right. To point up Jesus’s meaning when he speaks of gaining life by eating his flesh, four times over John employs the relatively unusual, very down-to-earth word trōgō, which carries overtones of champing jaws and nonstop chewing, like the English word munch; and he uses trōgō each time in the present tense, which implies continuous, ongoing action. The action relates not to the Lord’s Supper as such, which, as Calvin points out, had not yet been instituted, but to that to which the Lord’s Supper itself relates—namely, direct faith-communion with Christ through the Holy Spirit in response to his own words of promise and saving work.
The down side of “real presence” teaching is twofold. At the Supper itself it encourages what we may call frozen or mystical prayer, the prayer of thought suspended and the mind made blank while attention hovers in face of what we perceive to be simply beyond us. Healthier is the alternative sketched out above, prayer that reviews and responds to key truths, both indicative and imperative, that God has revealed for our learning and to guide our living. Also, as has been said already, the doctrine of Christ’s “real presence” in the consecrated elements implies that under ordinary circumstances Christ is more remote and distant from us than he is at the Supper. And this thought, if entertained, is bound to cool the outgoing of our hearts to him in daily fellowship. Thus the truth that through the Holy Spirit Christ is always present to bless us in the full reality of all that he is will be overshadowed, if not indeed lost sight of altogether.
This is why I see “real presence” teaching, however reverent and well meant, as a rabbit trail, a track that looks clear but is ultimately off track. It does not deepen Eucharistic devotion as it believes itself to do, any more than it matches actual biblical teaching, but its tendency, at least, if not always its actual effect, is to hold its adherents back from the full-time, full-scale, full-throttle intimacy with the Lord Jesus into which the New Testament allures us.
What then should we say positively about the presence of Christ at the Supper? First, we need to be clear that the presence in question is the same presence that Jesus promised when, before his passion, he said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matt. 18:20), and when, following his resurrection, he told his disciples, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). It is the presence of the triumphant, sovereign Savior, who is there in terms of his objective omnipresence and here in terms of being always alongside each believer with a sustaining and nurturing purpose. Clarity requires us to say, then, that Christ is present at, rather than in, the Supper. Though not physical, his presence is personal and real in the sense of being a relational fact. Christ is present, not in the elements in any sense, but with his worshippers; and his presence is effected, not by the quasi-magic of ritual correctly performed by a permitted person, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, who indwells believers’ hearts to mediate Christ’s reality to them. It is not a passive but an active presence, known not by what it feels like (often it is, in any ordinary sense of the word, unfelt), but rather by what it does. For by it our risen Lord draws us close to himself and renews our assurance of possessing, either now or in days to come, all the good things that he died to secure for us. And then, as a good meal energizes the body, so our Savior energizes us for renewed ventures in faith and love, faithfulness and obedience, worship and service. This is what we who believe should seek when we come to the Supper, and if we do, then we shall surely find it.
REFLECTION AND REASSESSMENT
I said at the outset, provocatively perhaps, that with regard to the Supper we should discover that the Catholic heritage, taken as a whole, has been more right than wrong, whereas the evangelical heritage, taken as a whole, has often been more wrong than right. The time has come to try to make my bold words good, and to that end I offer the following conclusions to our study:
1. THE LORD’S SUPPER SHOULD BE CENTRAL IN THE CHURCH’S WORSHIP
In saying this, I do not mean the Lord’s Supper without preaching, nor do I imply that the Supper is more significant than preaching the Word. Word and sacrament are linked, we might even say twinned, in the kind of worship I have in view. My point is as follows: Jesus directed his disciples to join in this memorial meal on a regular basis, and it is clear that right from the start they did. Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day, congregations met for the Supper, as in Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches they still do. In the medieval West, however, the liturgy, being in Latin, was not understood outside a narrow circle, and lay Communion at Mass (as the Supper was then called) largely faded away. And then, at the time of the Reformation, when attempts were being made to put things back in order, two unfortunate events helped to marginalize the Supper in church people’s minds.
In Geneva, Calvin’s plea for a weekly Lord’s Supper was rejected officially. He had to settle for the sacrament once a month, while weekly preaching services came to constitute Genevan Sunday worship the rest of the time. And Geneva’s example was influential all across Protestant western Europe. Then in England, though the authorized Prayer Book, shaped by Cranmer, required clergy to serve Communion each Sunday following the Bible service of Morning Prayer, it was legislated that adults must communicate three times a year: at Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. The legal minimum became the conventional maximum; the propriety of infrequent Communion became a national assumption; and attending Holy Communion came to be thought of, not as a regular requirement entailed by one’s churchly identity, but as a devotional option, a matter of personal discretion and individual decision as to whether or not one needed to do this. Here, too, was an unhappily influential example.
It is ironic that in the circles most directly overshadowed by Calvin and Cranmer, both of whom desired so strongly to make the Supper properly central once more, most was done to prevent this happening. But that was how things went and for the most part have gone since, and the evangelical world generally still needs to take the Reformers’ point. Let it be said, however, loud and clear: the Supper, accompanied by preaching, is a divinely instituted church ordinance, and it ought to be the gathering point for every congregation each Lord’s Day.
2. THE LORD’S SUPPER SHOULD HAVE A REGULAR PLACE IN PERSONAL DEVOTION
As was said above, we live in days in which the Supper has been widely downgraded from a primary church ordinance to a personal option of secondary importance. At such a time, it is up to each believer to form a personal rule as to how best to fit the Supper into the pattern of his or her regular devotional life, alongside Bible reading and prayer, the other devotional basics. It is not for me to propose a pattern, but only to say that there needs to be one, and to declare that only when the Supper is part of the pattern, with prayerful preparation and follow-up, is it being taken with proper seriousness. So my present task is ended, and I leave my readers to pursue this matter with God our Father and Jesus Christ, our Savior and our Lord. How serious do we propose to be henceforth in honoring Christ by the way we share in his Supper?
QUESTIONS FOR STUDY AND DISCUSSION