What is the Lord's Supper?
New Member Class • Sermon • Submitted
0 ratings
· 30 viewsNotes
Transcript
Sermon Tone Analysis
A
D
F
J
S
Emotion
A
C
T
Language
O
C
E
A
E
Social
The sacrament was called the Lord’s Supper because it made reference to the last supper that Jesus had with His disciples in the Upper Room on the night before His death. In the early church and later, the Lord’s Supper was called the “Eucharist,” taking its definition from the Greek verb eucharisto, which is the Greek verb that means “to thank.” Thus, one facet of the Lord’s Supper has been the gathering of the people of God to express their gratitude for what Christ accomplished in their behalf in His death.
The Lord’s Supper is a drama that has its roots not only in that Upper Room experience, but the roots reach back into the Old Testament celebration of Passover. In fact, you will recall that before Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper in the Upper Room, He had given requirements to His disciples that they would secure a room for the purpose of their meeting together on this occasion because He was entering into His passion. He knew that His trial, death, resurrection, and return to the Father were imminent, so He said to His disciples, “I deeply desire to celebrate the Passover with you one last time.”
When Jesus celebrated His final Passover with His disciples, He departed from the standard liturgy in the middle of the celebration. He added a new meaning to the Passover celebration as He took the unleavened bread, attaching a new significance to it when He said, “This is My body which is broken for you.” Then, after the supper had been completed, He took the wine and he said, in effect, “I’m attaching a new significance to this element as you celebrate the Passover because this wine is my blood. Not the blood of the lamb in the Old Testament whose blood was marked on the doorpost, but now this cup is my blood.” In essence, Jesus was saying, “I am the Passover; I am the Pascal Lamb; I am the one who will be sacrificed for you. It is by My blood being marked over the door of your life that you will escape the wrath of God.” So He said: “From now on, this is My blood, which is shed for you for the remission of your sins. This is the blood of a new covenant.” This new covenant that He instituted that very night fulfills the old covenant, giving it its fullest and most meaningful expression.
Then came the day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover for us, that we may eat it.” They said to him, “Where will you have us prepare it?” He said to them, “Behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house that he enters and tell the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a large upper room furnished; prepare it there.” And they went and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.
And when the hour came, he reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, “Take this, and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table. For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed!” (vv. 7–22).
In this description of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, we see that Jesus refers specifically to two dimensions of time—the present and the future. In our culture, we generally measure the passing of time by referring to the past, the present, and the future. When we look at the meaning and significance of the Lord’s Supper in the life of the Christian community, we see that it has significance and application to all three dimensions of time.
I’m sure our Lord understood this human need to recapitulate and recollect important moments. When He gathered with His disciples in the Upper Room, one of the elements of this institution was His command to repeat this supper in remembrance. “Do this in remembrance of me” (). In a sense, what Christ said is that “I know that I’ve been your teacher for three years. I’ve done many things, some of which you’re going to forget; but whatever else, please don’t forget this because what you are going to experience in the next twenty-four hours is the most important thing that I will ever do for you. Don’t ever forget it. You are remembering me. You are remembering My death, the pouring out of My blood, the breaking of My body, which will occur on the morrow. Please don’t ever forget it.” And so, for two thousand years, the church has remembered the death of Christ in this sacred memorial of the Lord’s Supper.
Jesus also understood the traditional Jewish link between apostasy and forgetting. Linguistically, that link is found in the very word apostate, which means “a letting go of or forgetting.” An apostate is somebody who has forgotten what he once was committed to. We remember , where David cries, “Bless the Lord, O my soul! And forget not all of his benefits.”
Throughout church history, most people have favored the view that the real presence of Christ is present at the Lord’s Supper. In other words, we are in a real communion with Him at the table. Of course, not everybody believes that there’s any special way in which He’s present at the Lord’s Supper, but that’s clearly the minority report. In any case, the controversy regarding the presence of the Christ in the Supper goes even deeper. The majority has agreed that Jesus is really present; the point of contention surrounds the mode of that presence. Christians have not agreed on the answer to this question: In what way is Christ present at the Lord’s Table?
Part of the issue centers around how His presence is related to His words of institution. All three Synoptic Gospels report Jesus as saying, “This is my body.” Historically, the question that has emerged in these controversies surrounds the word is. How must is be understood? When something is said “to be” something else, the verb to be serves as an equal sign. You can reverse the predicate and the subject without any loss in meaning. For example, if one says that “a bachelor is an unmarried man,” there is nothing in the predicate that’s not already present in the notion of bachelor in the subject. The term is in that sentence serves as an equal sign. We could reverse them and say, “An unmarried man is a bachelor.”
In addition to this use of the verb to be, there is also the metaphorical use, where the verb to be may mean, “represents.” For example, think of the “I am” statements of Jesus that are found in the Gospel of John. Jesus says, “I am the Vine, you are the branches. I am the Good Shepherd. I am the Door through which men must enter. I am the Way; I am the Truth; I am the Life.” It’s clear from any reading of those texts that Jesus is using the representative sense of the verb to be in a metaphorical way. When He says, “I am the Door,” He is not crassly saying that where we have skin, He has some kind of wooden veneer and hinges. He means that, “I am,” metaphorically, “the entrance point into the kingdom of God. When you enter a room, you have to go through the door. In the same way, if you want to enter God’s kingdom, you’ve got to come through me.”
When we arrive at the words of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, the obvious question is, how is Christ using the word is here? Is Jesus saying, “This bread that I am breaking really is my flesh and this cup of wine that I’ve blessed is my blood?” When people are drinking the wine are they actually drinking His physical blood? When they are eating the bread, are they actually eating His physical flesh? That’s what this controversy is about.
Remember, in first-century Rome, Christians were accused of the crime of cannibalism. There were rumors that the Christians were meeting in secret places such as the catacombs to devour somebody’s body and to drink that person’s blood. Even that early in church history, the idea of a real connection between bread and flesh and the wine and blood had already appeared.
In the sixteenth century, the Lutherans and the Reformed found that the main barrier that kept them apart was their understanding of the Lord’s Supper. They agreed on almost everything else. Martin Luther insisted on the identity meaning of the word is here. In the midst of the discussions, he repeated over and over the Latin phrase hoc est corpus meum—“this is my body.” He insisted on this.
One of the major controversies of the sixteenth-century Reformation had to do with the Roman Catholic understanding of the Lord’s Supper. The Roman Catholic Church’s view then and now is what is known as transubstantiation. This is the view that the substance of the bread and wine are transformed supernaturally into the actual body and blood of Jesus when one participates in the Lord’s Supper. But there was a simple objection to this view. When partaking of the Lord’s Supper, the bread and wine still looked like, tasted, felt, smelled, and sounded like bread and wine. There was no discernible difference between the bread and wine before the consecration of the elements and after. A person could say, “You’re telling me about a miracle of Christ really being physically present here, but it sure doesn’t look like it. The elements seem exactly the same as they were beforehand.”
In order to account for this problem, the Roman Catholic Church came up with a philosophical formula to account for the phenomenon of the appearances of bread and wine. They reached back into the past to the philosophical categories of Aristotle and borrowed his language to articulate their view.
Aristotle was concerned with the nature of reality and he made a distinction between the substance of an object and the accidents of an object. The term “accident” referred to an external, perceivable quality of a thing. If you were to describe me, you would describe me in terms of my weight, height, the clothes that I’m wearing, my hairstyle, the color of my face, or the color of my eyes. In all of these descriptions, you are restricted to my external, perceivable qualities. You don’t know what I am in my personal essence. I don’t know the true essence of a piece of chalk. I only see a cylindrical shape, hardness, and the color white. Those are all the outward perceivable qualities of chalk.
Aristotle believed that every object had its own substance and every substance had its corresponding accidents. If you had the substance of an elephant, you would also have the accidents of an elephant. For Aristotle, if it looked like a duck, walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, it was a duck. The essence of duckness always produces the accidents of duckness. Any time you see the accidents of duckness, you know that what you can’t see beneath the surface is the essence of duckness.
The medieval Western church borrowed from Aristotle’s philosophical attempt to define the difference between surface perception and depth reality for the doctrine of transubstantiation. They said that in the Mass, a double miracle takes place. On the one hand, the substance of the bread and wine changes into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, while on the other hand, the accidents remain the same. What does that mean? Prior to the miracle, you have the substance of bread and the accidents of bread and you have the substance of wine and the accidents of wine. But after the miracle, you no longer have the substance of bread or the substance of wine. Instead, you have the substance of the body and blood of Christ, but you have the accidents of bread and wine remaining. Said differently, you have the accidents of bread and wine without their substances. The second miracle is seen in having the substance of the body and blood of Christ without the accidents of flesh and blood. That is the sense of the double miracle. You have the substance of one thing and the accidents of another. It is important to note that Aristotle himself would never have allowed for this line of thinking in the real world.
A few decades ago in Western Europe, there was a Dutch Roman Catholic theologian who published a work titled Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God in which he introduced a completely new idea. He said that what happens in the miracle of the Mass is not a supernatural transformation of the substance of one thing into the substance of another. It wasn’t transubstantiation, but it was what he called transignification. He said that in the Mass, the elements of bread and wine take on a heavenly significance. There’s a real change in the significance of the elements even though the nature of the elements remains the same. He was supported by the Dutch catechism and some other progressive theologians at that time, and it created a major controversy within the Roman Catholic Church. In 1965, the Pope published an encyclical titled Mysterium Fidei, “The Mystery of the Faith,” in which he responded to this issue and said that not only is the content of the church’s historic doctrine immutable, but its formulation is as well. He said the Aristotelian formulation of transubstantiation will continue to stand. That remains the official view of the Roman Catholic Church. This encyclical effectively rejected creative solutions offered by some to address the problem they perceived with transubstantiation.
Luther objected to transubstantiation because he believed it involved an unnecessary miracle. Luther believed that the real flesh and blood of Jesus were present in the elements, but they are in, with, and under them. The elements don’t become the body and blood of Christ, but rather the body and blood of Christ are supernaturally added to the elements. In this sense, he still argued for the real presence of the physical body and blood of Christ.
The Reformed, such as John Calvin and many others, rejected Luther’s view, though not on sacramental grounds but on Christological grounds. We’ll seek to understand this rejection in the next chapter as we unpack the dual nature of Christ.
The Lutherans answered that objection by developing a novel understanding of the communicatio idiomatum—the “communication of attributes”—in reference to their doctrine of ubiquity. Ubiquity means “present here, there, and everywhere at the same time.” It’s a synonym for omnipresence. The Lutherans argue that if the divine nature has the ability to be present at more than one place at the same time, then that power and attribute of the divine nature is communicated to the human nature in the Supper. This made it possible for the human nature, including the human body of Christ, to be present everywhere at the same time. The human nature was endowed with a divine attribute. In contrast, the Reformed churches said that this violates Chalcedon by confusing the natures of Christ so that each nature does not retain its own attributes. This is why Calvin and others categorically rejected the Lutheran view of the Lord’s Supper. Luther insisted on the corporeal presence of Jesus at more than one place at the same time. Our core beliefs concerning the nature of Christ are at stake in this, which is why the Reformed have affirmed the real presence of Jesus in the sacrament, but not in the same manner as Lutherans and Roman Catholics.
Remember that when you are in communion with the divine nature, you are in communion with the person of the Son of God and all that He is. When I meet Him here in the divine nature and enter into communion with the person of Jesus, this divine nature remains connected and united to the human nature. By communing with the divine nature, I’m not communing with just the divine nature; I’m also communing with the human nature, which is in perfect unity with the divine nature without having the human nature take upon itself the divine ability to be in all these different places. Remember, at no time is the human nature separated from the divine nature; thus, you can maintain the unity of the two natures and maintain the localization of the human nature without deifying the human nature. And yet, the person of Christ can be present in more than one place at more than one time by virtue of the omnipresence of the divine nature.
It is important to see the difference between this view and the Roman Catholic view. The Roman Catholic view empowers the human nature to come down to earth in all these different places at once. In this way, you can find the human body of Christ in as many Roman Catholic parishes as there are in the world. We’re rejecting this idea because Christ’s body is in heaven. We meet the actual person in all of our various churches and enter into blessed communion with the whole Christ by virtue of the contact we have with the divine nature, but His human body remains localized in heaven. This is consistent with the way Jesus speaks in the New Testament when He says, “I’m going away, yet I will be with you.” The presence He promises of Himself in the New Testament is a real presence and real communion with His people.
Consider the Westminster Confession again:
In the sacrament we partake not only outwardly the visible elements, but also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, but not carnally or corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified, all the benefits of His death: the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally in, under, or with the bread and wine; but really, as spiritually, present to the faith of believers, as the elements themselves are to the outward senses.”
Because of the omnipresence of the Son of God in His deity, we really meet the whole Christ in the Lord’s Supper and are nurtured by the Bread of Heaven.
One final note with respect to the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the Lord’s Supper. They believe that the Mass represents a repetition of the sacrificial death of Christ every single time it is celebrated. Christ is, as it were, crucified anew. Of course, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that there’s a difference between the original sacrifice that Jesus made at Calvary and the way the sacrifice is rendered in the Mass. The difference is this: At Calvary, the sacrificial death of Jesus was one that involved real blood. It was a bloody sacrifice. The sacrifice that is made today is a sacrifice without blood. Nevertheless, it is a true and real sacrifice. It was that aspect, as well as the doctrine of transubstantiation, that caused so much of the controversy in the sixteenth century because it seemed to the Reformers that the idea of a repetition of any kind does violence to the biblical concept that Christ was offered once and for all. So in the Roman Catholic view of the sacrificial nature of the Mass, the Reformers saw a repudiation of the once-for-all character of the sacrificial offering that was made by Christ in His atonement (; ).
Chapter Seven
Blessing and Judgment
In addition to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the reenactment of the sacrifice of Jesus, there were other aspects of the Roman Catholic view of the Lord’s Supper that were problematic for the Reformers.
Consider :
Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. 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. Consider the people of Israel: are not those who eat the sacrifices participants in the altar? What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? ().
Here Paul gives some strong warnings concerning the mixing of the Lord’s Supper with idolatrous practices. Apparently, some of the Christians of Corinth participated in the Christian services as well as pagan feasts and festivals. This provoked Paul to address questions about eating meat that was offered to idols. Oftentimes after these pagan services were over, the meat they used for sacrifice was sold in the marketplace. Some Christians had scruples about this, saying, “I’m not going to have anything to do with any meat that participated in any way in a pagan ceremony.” They believed that it was sinful to eat meat that had been offered to idols. Paul answered by saying that there’s nothing inherently sinful about the meat. How it was used before it went on sale in the marketplace shouldn’t cause any great concern for the Christians ().
From very early on, the church has had to struggle with the intrusion of idolatry into the practice of the liturgy, particularly with respect to the Lord’s Supper. Returning to the question of transubstantiation, we remember that the problem that Calvin saw involved the deification of the human nature of Christ. Calvin said that this would be the most subtle form of idolatry possible. Because Christ is the God-man, He is the Son of God, and the New Testament calls us to worship Him. We worship the person, but we do not extrapolate the human nature from the divine and worship the human nature apart from its union with the Second Person of the Trinity. To worship the human nature of Jesus apart from its union with the divine Son of God would be to commit idolatry because it would be to ascribe to the created aspect of Jesus a divine element.
But we need to be very careful here. The church does worship the whole person of Christ, but He is worthy of worship because of His divine nature, not because of His human nature. So the Reformers, particularly Calvin, were concerned about practices in the medieval church relative to the worship of the human nature of Jesus.
If you walk into a Roman Catholic Church today you will notice that they genuflect. They bow one knee and then sit down. If you watch during the process of the Mass, the priest frequently genuflects in the middle of his activity as well. Why the genuflection? The object of the genuflection is the tabernacle. The tabernacle is usually a golden box that is prominently featured at the top of the altar, and in that golden tabernacle is contained the bread that has been consecrated. Roman Catholics believe that bread becomes the actual body of Christ. So the reason for the bowing and the genuflecting is to genuflect towards the consecrated host. Roman Catholics view that consecrated bread as an object of worship, and the Reformers greatly objected to this. They’d say, “Why would people be bowing before consecrated bread? Even if it became the human nature of Jesus, it would not be appropriate to be bowing down before human nature.”
There was also another point that was a matter of controversy in the Lord’s Supper. This had to do with the church’s understanding of what actually happens in the drama of the Mass. After the consecration takes place, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that what happens in the Mass is the repetition of the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross. Now, the church makes it clear that this repetition of the sacrifice is done in a non-bloody way; nevertheless, they insist that the sacrifice is a real sacrifice. So even though it’s a non-bloody offering, Christ is truly and really sacrificed afresh every time the Mass is offered. The Reformers found that to be blasphemous, as it was a complete rejection of what the book of Hebrews tells us, namely, that Christ offered Himself once and for all (). The sufficiency and the perfection of the atonement that Christ made on Calvary was so thorough that to repeat it would be to denigrate the supreme value of the once-for-all atonement that had been made there.
In the Westminster Confession of Faith 29.4, there is this statement:
Private masses or receiving the sacrament by a priest or any other alone, as likewise the denial of the cup to the people, worshiping the elements, the lifting them up or carrying them about for adoration, and the reserving them for any pretended religious use are all contrary to the nature of this sacrament and to the institution of Christ.”
We see again that the Protestants reacted very strongly to the theology of the Mass, following Paul’s warnings in . But is not the only place where Paul gives warnings. He gives even stronger warnings in with respect to the abuse of the Lord’s Supper. Paul writes:
But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. When you come together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Whoever, therefore, 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. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.
So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another—if anyone is hungry, let him eat at home—so that when you come together it will not be for judgment. About the other things I will give directions when I come (vv. 17–34).
It’s obvious what’s going on here. The memorial agape feast, which was celebrated in conjunction with the Lord’s Supper in the early church and that which was to show forth Christ’s death and the repetition of the Passover, became an occasion for unbridled gluttony and selfishness in the Corinthian community. People were pushing each other out of the way to get to the table to gorge themselves with food while others were left hungry. In other words, the whole point of celebrating the Lord’s Supper was being destroyed by this behavior. So, Paul had to speak about two problems in Corinth. On the one hand, the mixing of idolatry with the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and the denigration of the sanctity of the event by people who were turning it into a church picnic for gluttony. It’s in this context that Paul gives these very sober warnings about the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
Because of this teaching, one of the strong principles that came out of the Protestant Reformation in reference to the Lord’s Supper is what we refer to as “the fencing of the table.” In some churches, before the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the minister will warn people who are not members in good standing of an evangelical church that they should not participate in the sacrament. He will remind the congregation that the Lord’s Supper is only for Christian people who are truly penitent. There are even some churches that won’t allow you to participate in the Lord’s Supper unless you are a member of that particular congregation. If you’re a visitor you’re discouraged from participating even if you are a Christian.
The purpose of fencing the table is not to exclude people out of some principle of arrogance but rather to protect people from the dreadful consequences that are spelled out here by the Apostle Paul, where in this chapter he speaks of the manducatio indignorum, which means “eating and drinking unworthily.” When a person participates in the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner, instead of drinking a cup of blessing, they are drink a cup of cursing. They are eating and drinking unto damnation, and God will not be mocked. If people celebrate this most sacred of activities in the church and they do it in an inappropriate way, they expose themselves to the judgment of God.
Oscar Cullman, the Swiss theologian, said that the most neglected verse in the whole New Testament is : “That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.” Some scholars believe that the meaning of is that God will not send Christians to hell who misused and abused the Lord’s Supper, but He might take their lives.
The point that Paul makes here is that the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is a sacrament that involves and requires a certain discernment. We are to discern what we are doing. We are to come with a proper attitude of humility and repentance. Of course, the point is not to exclude people from the table. Nobody is worthy, in the ultimate sense, to come and commune with Christ. We, who are unworthy in and of ourselves, come to commune with Christ because of our need. But we are to come in a spirit of dependence, not arrogantly, confessing our sins and trusting in Him alone for salvation. If we handle these sacred things in a hypocritical manner God will not hold us guiltless. That’s why we need to explore the significance of this sacrament.
In participating in the Lord’s Supper, we meet with the living Christ, receive the benefits of communing with the Bread of Heaven, and yet at the same time we must keep ourselves from any form of behavior or distortion of this sacrament that would cause the displeasure of God to fall upon us.