Sermon Tone Analysis

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.