Ritual or Reality: The Lord’s Table

Historically the Lord’s Table has been fraught with controversy. Even in the New Testament there were indications of problems with its practice. The famous passage in 1 Corinthians 11 says the following:

But in giving you the following instructions I do not commend you, because it is not for the better but for the worse that you gather. For first, indeed, when you gather in assembly I hear that there are divisions among you. And I partly believe it. For it is necessary that there be sects among you so that the true ones should be visible.

But when you gather together it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper….

Paul goes on to explain that by all eating their own food and not sharing, they missed the whole point of the Lord’s Supper. It was supposed to be a proclamation of unity (we all partake of one bread—1 Corinthians 10:17) but the way they did it emphasized that some were rich and had plenty while some were poor and had nothing.

Paul emphasizes the need to “discern the body.” This somewhat enigmatic phrase, along with the sanctions associated with not doing so, caused a cottage industry to grow up surrounding the metaphysics of the “real presence” of Christ in the “elements” of the Lord’s Table (or perhaps the “eucharist”). Luther and Zwingli had a famous debate about the question of whether Christ was “really present” in the elements.

Eventually there came to be several positions regarding this question:

1. Christ is “really present” in the elements through the actions of the priest in the ceremony of the eucharist. An Aristotelian metaphysic describes the way this happens.
2. Luther’s view: Christ is “really present” “in, under and with” the elements of the eucharist, though the elements remain literal bread and wine. This is sometimes called the doctrine of “consubstantiation” though Lutherans generally avoid this term.
3. Christ is present in his divine nature, spiritually (but not physically), in the bread and wine. This is (I think) Calvin’s view.
4. The “memorial” or “symbolic” view. The bread and wine symbolize the body and blood of Christ, but bear no concrete relationship to them. This is Zwingli’s view and caused Luther to part ways with him.

In considering these views, I am struck by the focus on the “elements,” what one could call the visual aspect. Everyone is arguing about the nature of that visible aspect. And, ironically, the focusing on the visual aspect results in the enervated version of “communion” practiced by evangelicals: a piece of cracker and a thimble of grape juice.

But what was going on when Jesus said “This is my body, broken for you”?

First, context is everything. Jesus did this in the context of a full fellowship meal. And this is exactly what the early church did. They had fellowship meals, also called “love feasts.” This is what Paul was talking about in 1 Corinthians 11: a love feast where there was no love.

When, on the night before he was crucified, Jesus held up the bread and broke it, saying, “This is my body broken for you,” he was standing there in full body. Clearly the bread was not “literally” the body of Christ. Similarly with the wine. Instead, the bread and wine pointed forward to that coming event, the crucifixion.

Does that mean that the bread and wine were purely symbolic? No, because they occurred in context. What context? Jesus was eating a full meal with his disciples. In particular, he was eating a Passover meal.

Luke 22:14-20 describes the scene.

The bread was broken at the beginning—indicating the beginning of the meal. Jesus said, “This is my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” Wine was also passed and shared. At the end, the wine was again passed around as Jesus said, “This is the New Covenant in my blood, which is shed for you.”

Just as the Passover marked the moment when God, with a mighty hand, liberated Israel from the Egyptians, so the Lord’s Supper marks the even greater moment when God, with an almighty hand, liberates us from sin and death.

As we read the New Testament, we see that one of the main things the early church did was to eat together (see Acts 2:41-47). See also the infamous midnight sermon (Acts 20:7-12). Why is this?

The reason is that we eat to live. Eating is a physical necessity. But when we eat “the Lord’s Supper,” we overlay on the physical meal a spiritual meal. The spiritual meal is invisible but far more real, more important and more ultimate.

As a result, the physical meal becomes proclamation of the Lord’s death. But because it is a means of life, we are proclaiming that we live because he died. The New Covenant is life through his death.

The overlay is crucial. The spiritual becomes incarnate, visible, because it is expressed through the human event. It is the very thing itself—life through physical food elevated to life through spiritual food. This elevation is the reality of Christ’s death and resurrection as embodied in eating a physical meal that has become a spiritual meal.

The idea that the Lord’s Supper involved incarnation was something most of the church leaders were aware of. Luther infamously talked about Jesus allowing his body to be “handled like a fried sausage.” The arguments about “transubstantiation”, “consubstantiation” and the mode in which Christ was “really present” in the elements were motivated by a desire to affirm the incarnation: the ability of the material to impart spiritual value.

But by wrapping the Lord’s Supper up in a ceremony—a ritual— involving various weird metaphysical aspects, the incarnational aspect became lost. It became obscured by doctrine, hidden behind an ecclesiastical hierarchy, and separated from normal life. Even in evangelicalism, the ritual aspect, a purely symbolic “crackers and juice” and a solemn “self examination,” replaces the celebratory nature of the Love Feast as an actual shared meal.

First of all, away with crackers and juice! Give them to your kids before naptime. Instead, the Lord’s Supper should be a full fellowship meal.

This meal is dedicated to the Lord as we remember his death. The live-giving aspect of food becomes a proclamation of the life giving aspect of his death. We humble ourselves and eat and drink his death to say that we are not enough. We cannot live without him. The physical food is redirected to point to the eternal life that Jesus bought with his death.

Second, it should be a pot-luck or in some sense shared. Again the meaning of that meal is that we are sharing life with one another—life that has its source in the death of Jesus, but life nevertheless. “We love because he first loved us;” it is a Love Feast.

Third, we should talk during the meal. It is a moment of joy, of life, of victory. Jesus won it all for us! And he brought it to us in the celebration of his table. It is a foretaste of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, when he will wed his bride. To act like it is a funeral is to miss out on the victory—the resurrection that we partake of along with his death.

And here we come to what, for me, is perhaps the most mind-boggling aspect of this whole matter. Christians have divided and even fought over where and in what mode “Christ is present” in the “elements.” But there is no special sense in which Christ is present in the bread and wine. The local presence of God is an Old Testament idea.

But Christ is present! Where? In his Body, gathered together. We “discern his Body” as we see Christ in one another—in the lowliest, poorest fellow believer. In you and me as we eat and share and love one another because he died for us. We are one Body because we partake of one loaf—a loaf imbued with the spiritual significance of his death. And because we all live by his death we are one. But even more, we are inhabited by his life. We all share in one Spirit—that Spirit being the presence of Christ in us, binding us together, making us one, making us alive as one Body.

And that’s what it all means.