In the Lord’s Supper, we remember Christ’s sacrifice and recognize our unity in his body
Christians over the centuries have taken the Lord’s Supper seriously. The bread and the cup have been central to the gathered worship of Christ’s people, with the table occupying a prominent position in our worship spaces—even more central than the pulpit in many traditions.
The Didache, a manual for Christian practice typically dated to the late first century, relates a very serious view of the Lord’s Supper even at that early date: “But let no one eat or drink of this eucharistic thanksgiving, except those who have been baptized into the name of the Lord; for concerning this also the Lord has said: Do not give what is holy to the dogs.”
Centuries later, as Christianity was planted in American soil, there was great reverence and fear associated with the Lord’s Supper. Records from colonial New England indicate many parishioners actually shied away from taking the bread and the cup, convicted by the Apostle Paul’s admonition in 1 Corinthians 11:29: “He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body” (KJV). Cowed by the prevailing understanding of this verse, especially in the early eighteenth century, the reticence of one Medfield, Mass., man was typical: “If I should come unworthily to the Lords [sic] Table it would be far worse for me in the day of Judgment than if I had never come.”
Consumerized Communion
Such trepidation over the Lord’s Supper is little-known today, especially in evangelical congregations. Indeed, the bread and cup themselves have been commodified, pre-packaged for our convenience. Churches can go online and order “Prefilled Chalice Communion Bread and Cups” that “offer a great communion experience for your congregation” and feature “easy-open seals on top and bottom,” according to one online retailer’s product description. While there are good theological reasons to laud the swing from the apprehension of earlier generations, it’s little wonder that the Lord’s Supper’s true weightiness is easily lost in today’s individualized consumer culture.
Yet, as we dine at the Lord’s table, we must never forget: The bread and the cup matter.
Reinterpretation and Remembrance
The Lord’s Supper matters, as the New Testament tells us, in several significant ways. For one, it matters as a reinterpretation of a key Old Testament theme. The Passover meal was central for the ancient Jewish people, recalling when the Lord rescued them from Egypt. For Jesus to take the bread and the cup on the night before His crucifixion and say that they pointed to His own body and blood marked the dawn of a new era in the history of salvation. Now, Jesus’s followers would no longer look back to the Exodus from Egypt as the defining act of God’s salvation, but to the sacrifice of Christ.
The Supper also matters as a tangible remembrance of what Jesus has done. At the institution of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus tells His disciples, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me” (Luke 22:19, NASB95). Eating real bread and drinking from a real cup are a potent reminder that the real flesh-and-blood Jesus died on the cross, and the Lord’s Supper communicates the reality of Jesus’s death through the generations. As Paul adds in his discussion of the Lord’s Supper, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Cor. 11:26).
The significance of the bread and the cup in relation to the body and blood of Jesus is familiar to most Christians. More easily overlooked is the fact that the Lord’s Supper also matters because it involves a recognition of the gathered church as the body of Christ.
Recognition of Jesus’ Body
Paul is clear on this in 1 Corinthians, where he makes a dire assessment of the Corinthian church’s celebrations of the Lord’s Supper: “When you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper” (11:20). The reason for this is plain in the context. As Paul levels the charge, “When you come together as a church, I hear that divisions exist among you” (11:18). In their divisions, where some have abundance while others are left out, Paul notes with disapproval, “one is hungry and another is drunk” (11:21).
The solution to the Corinthians’ inappropriate eating of the Supper is simple. As Paul says near the conclusion of his discussion in this passage, “So then, my brethren, when you come together to eat, wait for one another” (11:33). What is primarily at stake is that the Corinthians are despising the church of God (11:22) in their eating of the supper instead of demonstrating their unity, as they should be. As Paul has already noted in his letter, the single loaf of the Lord’s Supper is tied to the church’s unity: “Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body; for we all partake of the one bread” (10:17).
The word “body” (Greek σῶμα, sōma) is prominent in 1 Corinthians, used by Paul of the bodies of individual believers, the physical body of Christ, and the mystical collection of Christ-followers, the “body of Christ.” This latter use becomes prominent in chapter 12, as Paul discusses spiritual giftings and how they should contribute to the church being a unified body. When Paul speaks of judgment for “whoever eats and drinks without recognizing the body” (11:29, CSB), in context there is a good case to be made that the “body” here is the body of believers, the church. As New Testament scholar Charles Talbert maintains, “Failure to discern the body can mean only inability to perceive the Christian unity rooted in the sacrifice of Christ and actualized in the sacred meal.”
Indeed, by the writing of the Didache, the link between unity in the body of Christ and the Lord’s Supper was already well established, as it urges, “Let none who has a quarrel with his fellow join in your meeting until they are reconciled, lest your sacrifice be defiled.”
The bread and the cup matter—as a reminder of Jesus’s bodily sacrifice as the definitive act of God’s salvation and a recognition that, through that act, His people have been brought together into a single body that transcends all that could divide us.