I was out for a walk early one Sunday morning. I used the time to pray and think about what I would be doing in a few hours—gathering with other disciples and taking the Lord’s Supper. Since I tend to be a bit of a word nerd, I found myself thinking about the words associated with the Supper.
Some are longer words: remembrance, forgiveness, unleavened, covenant, Passover, discerning, etc. Others are in the short, staccato category: body, blood, bread, and cup. They come off our lips in small, punctuated puffs. Large or little, these words collectively rain down and drench us in wonderful, evocative ways with the redemptive, life-giving truths symbolized in the Supper.
Which of these words would you choose to focus on—or would it be a word not mentioned here?
That morning, I chose the small words (body, blood, bread, and cup). There’s an elegant simplicity to them—but there’s also symmetry and interrelatedness as well. The simplicity is in how small and ordinary these things are. We don’t think much about our body and blood, but there is no life apart from this union. In a similar way, bread and cup are staples of our lives. It’s almost impossible for a day to pass without at least one of them.
The symmetry and interrelatedness are in their pairing: body and blood naturally go together as do bread and cup. In the Supper though, body and blood don’t have reference to us but to our Lord Jesus. The cup and bread speak to us and our participation. We eat the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of the death of Jesus.
To fully appreciate this, we must move past the natural pairings of the bread and cup, body and blood to the spiritual pairings where the bread goes with the body of Christ and the cup is paired with the blood of Christ. In this arrangement, God uses two remarkably ordinary things to represent something extraordinary—the body and blood of Jesus. This means that as we eat and drink, we’re doing much more than eating and drinking—we’re memorializing Jesus and His death for us. We’re coming together as the body of Christ to lift up the body (and blood) of Christ to each other. We’re communing with one another as well as with our brother Jesus in the kingdom of God (Luke 22:18). We’re celebrating the goodness of God in the redemption of humanity. All these things and more are what the church proclaims in solidarity as we take the supper.
The pairing and symmetry go one step further though. As we do this, “we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). In this pairing, there is the death of Jesus and His return. As surely as He gave His body and blood for us in His death, “He will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for Him” (Hebrews 9:28). He came to die for us, and He is returning to take us home.
As you can see, the supper is simple yet sublime. We don’t have to be theologians to work with the wealth of material in the gospels and letters. All you really need do is read and reflect—the Spirit’s words are living and breathing and will provide us with insight, understanding, and appreciation.
Far from being a mindless ritual, there are many rich layers of truth to reflect and meditate upon whenever we take the Supper. This is important for us to know as well as those who guide our thoughts in communion. There is no excuse for superficiality in approaching the Supper!
A Taste of Grace with Bruce Green 