The Lord's Supper, Part II (Biblical)
Protestants commonly use the term Lord's Supper for the act of worship that centers about the table of the Lord. The Lord's Supper originated with Jesus' last supper with his disciples, in the context of the Passover, and shares with the Passover the theme of the Lord's deliverance of Israel. As interpreted in the Gospels and by Paul, the Lord's Supper is symbolic of Christ's death, a memorial that places the worshiper at the Cross. It is the ratification of the covenant between the Lord and the people of God, an emblem of the communion or mutual participation of all members of the body of Christ. The Supper is a proclamation of the gospel and a symbol of faith in Christ.
Paul's Understanding of the Lord's Supper
The disorders at the Lord's Table in Corinth gave the apostle Paul the opportunity to provide teaching on the Lord's Supper that appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Paul's account of it is generally thought to be the earliest in the New Testament by several years. He says he "received from the Lord" (1 Cor. 11:23). This may mean that Paul learned of the events of the Last Supper and its meaning in the same way he says he had earlier received the content of the gospel: not by human teaching, but through a revelation of Jesus Christ (Gal. 1:12). More likely, however, Paul's statement should be interpreted to mean that he understood himself to be handing on in unaltered fashion that which had come to him as church tradition. The words he uses for "receive" and "deliver to" are equivalents of rabbinic terms for the normal passing down of tradition. Paul may have meant, then, that he received the story of the Last Supper and its meaning from the Lord through the apostolic witness. For the Lord was not simply a remembered historical figure but a living presence in the church, guiding the community into all truth (John 16:13) and seeing that this truth was transmitted accurately to each succeeding generation.
A Memorial Feast
"Do this in remembrance of me" (1 Cor. 11:24–25) occurs in Paul and Luke but does not appear in Mark and Matthew. Paul therefore understands that the purpose of the Lord's Supper is to commemorate the death of the Lord Jesus and that this purpose originated with the Lord himself. Here again is a parallel between this new feast and the feast of the Passover. As the Passover was basically a remembrance celebration calling to mind the mercy and greatness of God in delivering his people from Egypt (Exod. 12:14; 13:8–10), so the Lord's Supper is designed to constantly remind the church of God's greatest act, that of deliverance from sin through the death (not the teachings) of the Lord Jesus.
But the biblical idea of "remembering" is more profound than our modern conception of it. For the biblical writer it meant more than simply having an "idea" about something that happened. It also involved action, a physical response to the psychological process of recollection. When the dying thief asked the Savior to "remember" him, he meant more than "Have an idea of me in your mind"; he meant, "Act toward me in mercy. Save me!" There was, then, this closeness of relation between thought and action. Thus when the Jews celebrated the Passover, they did more than just think about what happened to their forefathers. In a sense, they reenacted that event and themselves participated in the Exodus. They became as one with their past.
There may also be this dimension to the word remembrance as it is used in 1 Corinthians 11. When the Christian partakes of the Lord's Supper, he or she not only has an idea in his or her mind about a past event; in a sense, the worshiper "recalls" that event in such a way that it can no longer be regarded wholly as a thing "absent" or past, but rather present, and powerfully so. Uniquely in the Lord's Supper, then, the death of Christ is made so vivid that it is as if the Christian and the worshiping body of which he or she is a part were standing beneath the cross.
A Proclamation of the Gospel
Paul also understood the Last Supper to be a proclamation: "For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death" (1 Cor. 11:26). The verb proclaim found here is used elsewhere in the New Testament of heralding the gospel (1 Cor. 9:14) and of making known one's faith (Rom. 1:8). Hence, its action seems to be directed toward humankind rather than toward God. In performing the rite, the celebrant proclaims to all the Lord's death as victory. The Supper, therefore, becomes the gospel, a visible verbum, as Augustine said.
This idea of the Lord's Supper as gospel is helpful in understanding the Lord's presence in the Supper. In the New Testament, proclamation has the character of event. As Edouard Schweizer has said, the Word is never "merely" something spiritual intended for the intellect. Christ himself comes in the Word: "He who listens to you listens to me; he who rejects you rejects me" (Luke 10:16). In a similar way he comes in the Supper. Christ's presence is brought about not "magically by a liturgically correct administration of the sacrament.… It comes to pass where the Lord's Supper is understood as gospel, whether this gospel is believed or rejected.… This means, therefore, that the real presence in the Lord's Supper is exactly the same as His presence in the word—nothing more, nothing less. It is an event, not an object: an encounter, not a phenomenon of nature; it is Christ's encounter with His Church, not the distribution of a substance" (E. Schweizer, The Lord's Supper According to the New Testament [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967], 37–38).
Communion (koin?nia)
The words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:16 are not easy to translate, especially the expressions "communion of the blood of Christ," and "communion of the body of Christ" (kjv). The word translated "communion" (koin?nia) may also be translated "fellowship," meaning a group of people bound together in a "communion" or "fellowship" by what they have in common with each other. And the preposition of does not exist in Greek but is an interpretation of the genitive case. It may also be interpreted to mean "brought about by" or "based on." Translated this way, Paul is saying, "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not (does it not represent) the fellowship which is brought about by the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the fellowship brought about by the body of Christ?" The Lord's Supper, then, is understood to witness to the fact that Christians belong to a special family, which includes the Son and the Father (cf. 1 John 1:3) and is marked by unity and love. It is a communion that required the death of Christ to create and that is so close that it is as though believers were one body: "For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread" (1 Cor. 10:17 kjv). Perhaps, then, this was the great disorder in Corinth that prompted what little teaching there is on the Lord's Supper. The Corinthians' sin was in not "recognizing the body" (1 Cor. 11:29), that is, in failing to understand the oneness of the body of which each person was a part.
In Paul's day a fellowship meal preceded the breaking of the bread and drinking of the cup. It was not an unimportant part of the Lord's Supper, and Paul had no desire to abolish it. What he was concerned to do, however, was to correct its abuses. For instead of symbolizing the unity its name intended, the fellowship meal at Corinth had become an occasion for manifesting the opposite. The freemen despised the slave class, going ahead with the meal before the latter had opportunity to arrive (1 Cor. 11:21). The wealthy scorned the poor, feasting to the point of gluttony while the latter went hungry (1 Cor. 11:21–22). Thus eating and drinking unworthily (1 Cor. 11:27) may have meant for Paul partaking of the Lord's Supper while holding each other in contempt, neither party striving to live up to the unity that the Lord's death had brought about.
The word koin?nia has still another meaning. It means also "participation in." Hence, 1 Corinthians 10:16 may be translated as the Revised Standard Version does: "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?" If this is so, then perhaps Paul understood the cup and bread to symbolize the worshiping assembly's participation in the death of Christ. Perhaps by borrowing his vocabulary from the mystery religions he showed that the Redeemer and the redeemed are so intimately bound up with each other that what happened to the Redeemer happened also to the redeemed. Thus when Christ died, the Christian died also, and partaking of the Lord's Supper symbolizes this participation in the body and blood of the Savior. Such a description of the Supper is Paul's way of stating what Christ had already said: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.… I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (John 6:51, 53).
The Lord's Supper, though of great importance to Paul, is not all-important. There are no magical qualities to it. It has no more power to communicate life and maintain it than did the spiritual food and drink provided Israel in the wilderness (1 Cor. 10:1–13). It cannot in and of itself debilitate or bring about death, despite the fact that Paul says that many who eat and drink unworthily are weak and ill and some have died (1 Cor. 11:30). Such sickness and death result from the judgment of the Lord (1 Cor. 11:32), not from any magical power of the Supper. The importance of the Supper exists solely in the person it points to and whose redemptive acts it proclaims.
The Lord's Supper in the Gospel of John
There is no specific reference to the Lord's Supper in the fourth Gospel. John describes a final meal Jesus had with his disciples (John 13) when he taught then the importance of humble service to others by himself washing their feet. But there are no bread or wine here, no words of institution. Many, however, see the Johannine Eucharist in John 6, the discourse on the bread of life. It is here that Jesus says, "My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him" (John 6:55–56). [This possibility is reinforced by the reference to Jesus giving "thanks" in John 6:11, 23, using the Greek verb related to the word eucharist.] If this is so, it appears that for John the Lord's Supper is spiritual food (cf. John 6:63) that nourishes and strengthens the life of the Christian (cf. Didach? 10.4).
But perhaps John's primary aim was to discourse, not on the Lord's Supper but on the meaning of faith. Certainly this is a subject that is continually being put forward in his Gospel. What does it mean to have faith in Christ? When "I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life" (John 6:47) is placed over against "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life," ( John 6:54), it seems that John, in searching for the way to answer this question, has at last found the model he needs. To believe on Christ is analogous to eating him. As one would take food and eat it, so that it is assimilated into the system and becomes one's very life, so faith is a similar appropriation of Christ with the result that he is at the very center and is the energizing force of the Christian's life. In any case, this is precisely what the Lord's Supper is designed to remind us of.
When Was the Lord's Supper Observed?
One might expect that if the Lord's Supper developed out of the Passover meal it would be celebrated only once a year, on 14–15 Nisan. There is some evidence in early church history to support this idea. Epiphanius, for example, observed that the Ebionites (an early Jewish-Christian sect) celebrated the Eucharist as an annual feast, like the Passover, in memory of Christ's death (Haereses 30.16.1). And Christians in Asia Minor in the second century held a special Eucharist as a parallel to and at the same time as the Passover. The mention in Acts of the disciples "breaking bread" every day (Acts 2:42, 46) need not refute this idea, for these meals, which were similar to religious meals elsewhere in Judaism, may have originated in the postresurrection meals Jesus had with his followers (Luke 24:30–43; John 21:1–14; Acts 1:4; 10:41). Whereas the Lord's Supper, as described in the New Testament, was a remembrance of Christ's death, these daily meals of the Jerusalem church were times of joyful fellowship celebrating Jesus' resurrection and his continued presence with the church.
In time, however, as the church moved out from Jerusalem and the role of Jewish influence in the development of Christian worship was reduced, the two meals were combined into one event. In Paul's discussion of the Lord's Supper, the joyful postresurrection fellowship meal has become the "love feast" element (1 Cor. 11:20–21), and the annual Passover meal has become the Eucharist element (1 Cor. 11:23–26). By this time, the Lord's Supper was apparently celebrated neither daily nor annually, but weekly, on the first day of the week, the day of the Resurrection, and possibly in the evening, like the Passover ceremony (Acts 20:7; cf. 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10; Didach? 1).
How Was the Lord's Supper Observed?
The New Testament provides little information about how the Lord's Supper was observed. However, from 1 Corinthians 11:20–34, it is possible to reconstruct the following order: (1) There was a dinner or love feast, to which each worshiper brought his or her own food (1 Cor. 11:20–22), though the intent was no doubt to share the food among the participants. (2) There may have been a period of self-examination, suggested by Paul's words "a man ought to examine himself" (1 Cor. 11:28–29). However, it is impossible to tell whether the form of this examination was inward, a public confession to the church, or a corporate confession in a liturgical prayer (cf. Didach? 6.14; 14.1). [However, since the burden of Paul's admonition to "examine [oneself]" is that the worshiper might "recognize the Lord's body" in the Supper, rather than discover some hidden personal shortcoming, this self-examination may not have been a part of the rite at all, but simply a warning Paul inserted in his teaching on the Lord's Supper. (3) Finally, the Lord's Supper proper involved only the bread and the cup, which recalled the death of the Lord Jesus (1 Cor. 11:24–26). Acts 20:7–11 suggests that some sort of homily may have preceded these actions, forming part of the liturgy of the Supper. The New Testament contains no traces of the eucharistic prayers found in other early Christian literature (Didach? 9.10), nor is there evidence of the ceremony of footwashing in association with the Lord's Supper. [Also, the New Testament gives no indication as to which ecclesiastical officers customarily presided over the celebration.]