What Is the Lord’s Supper?

Question 9006.

The Lord’s Supper goes by a number of names, and each carries some freight: communion, the breaking of bread, the Lord’s table, the Eucharist, and in some traditions the Mass. What we call it matters less than what we think is happening, and on that Christians have divided more sharply than on almost anything else.

So let me set out what Jesus instituted, what I believe the bread and cup are and are not, and what the ordinance is doing in the life of a congregation.

What Jesus instituted at the Lord’s Supper

The Lord’s Supper was given on the night before the crucifixion, during a Passover meal, which is not incidental. Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it and said take, eat, this is my body. He took the cup and said this is my blood of the covenant, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Luke and Paul add the words do this in remembrance of me, and Paul adds the interpretation that as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. 1 Corinthians 11 is the fullest account we have and the one the churches were meant to work from.

Notice the setting. A meal that had commemorated a deliverance by the blood of a lamb for fifteen hundred years is taken over and given a new referent. The Lord’s Supper is Passover fulfilled, and the lamb is at the table.

What the elements are not

I do not believe the bread and cup become the body and blood of Jesus. Transubstantiation, the doctrine that the substance changes while the appearance remains, rests on a philosophical framework rather than on the text, and it turns a memorial into a sacrifice repeated. Hebrews insists that the offering was made once for all and that the priest sat down, which is not the posture of a work still in progress.

Nor do I hold consubstantiation, in which the body is present in, with and under the elements. Nor a mystical real presence located in the bread. When Jesus said this is my body, he was sitting at the table in his body, holding bread in his hands, and nobody present imagined he was handing round his arm.

He used the same construction elsewhere without confusion. I am the door. I am the vine. The Lord’s Supper works the way a wedding ring works: real, meaningful, and not the marriage itself. I have written further on this in what transubstantiation is and in whether communion is just symbolic.

A memorial that looks back

Do this in remembrance of me. The primary direction of the Lord’s Supper is backwards, to a specific afternoon outside Jerusalem, and to a death that actually happened in history. The bread is broken because a body was broken. The cup is poured because blood was shed.

That remembering is not idle nostalgia. Biblical remembrance is active; it brings the past to bear on the present. When Israel kept Passover, each generation was told to say that this is what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt. The same personal application is meant here.

This is also why I resist any attempt to make the ordinance vague or general. It is not a celebration of togetherness or a moment of quiet reflection on life. It is about a cross, and the specificity is the point.

A proclamation that looks forward

Paul says that as often as you eat and drink, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. The Lord’s Supper is a sermon in bread and wine, preached by the congregation to itself and to anybody watching, and it has an expiry date built into it.

Until he comes. Jesus himself said he would not drink again of the fruit of the vine until he drank it new in his Father’s kingdom. So the table looks in two directions at once, back to the cross and forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb.

That forward look is often the neglected half. A congregation that takes the Lord’s Supper with its eyes only on the past has missed the note of expectancy that runs through the passage.

A communion in the present

The third dimension is fellowship. Paul asks whether the cup of blessing is not a participation in the blood of Jesus, and the bread a participation in his body, and then observes that because there is one bread, we who are many are one body. The horizontal and the vertical meet at the table.

So the Lord’s Supper is not a private transaction between the believer and God that happens to occur in a room full of people. It is a family meal, and the New Testament treats division at the table as a serious matter. The Corinthians were rebuked not for bad theology of the elements but for humiliating the poor.

That has practical consequences. If you are at odds with somebody in the congregation, the table is a good place to be reminded of it and a poor place to ignore it.

What about the Spirit’s part?

Holding a memorial view does not mean holding an empty view. God is not absent when his people obey him. The Spirit works through the ordinance as he works through preaching and prayer, stirring faith, applying the finished work to a troubled conscience, and knitting a congregation together.

What I resist is locating that work in the elements themselves, as though grace were being dispensed by the gram. The bread does not carry the blessing. The Spirit does, and he does it through what the bread signifies as it is received in faith. I have written on this in the Spirit’s role in the Lord’s Supper.

Put differently, the Lord’s Supper is not a magic meal and it is not a bare snack. It is an appointed means through which God ordinarily does good to his people, and neglecting it is not a neutral choice.

The elements themselves

Bread and the fruit of the vine. The New Testament does not legislate about the type of bread, and churches use everything from a broken loaf to individual wafers. I have a preference for one loaf actually broken in front of the congregation, because the visual argument Paul makes about one bread is rather blunted by a tray of identical squares.

On the cup, churches divide over wine and unfermented juice, usually for pastoral reasons connected with recovering alcoholics. I would not fight anybody over it. What is served should be recognisably the fruit of the vine, and the congregation should know why the church does what it does.

None of this affects validity. It affects clarity, and clarity in a picture is worth taking trouble over.

How often, and in what spirit

The New Testament does not command a frequency, though the early chapters of Acts suggest it was frequent. Churches practise weekly, monthly and quarterly observance, and I have set out my thinking in how often a church should observe communion. Whatever the pattern, familiarity is the enemy.

Paul tells the Corinthians to examine themselves before they eat, and the warning about eating in an unworthy manner is aimed at how they were treating one another rather than at whether they felt sufficiently holy. Self-examination is not a hunt for reasons to abstain.

The Lord’s Supper is for sinners who are trusting Jesus, which is the only category of person who has ever been welcome at it. If you are waiting until you deserve it, you have misunderstood what the bread is for.

Ordinance or sacrament?

Baptists usually speak of ordinances rather than sacraments, and the choice of word is deliberate. A sacrament, in the older usage, conveys grace by the performance of the rite. An ordinance is something ordained by Jesus and obeyed by his people, which pictures grace rather than manufacturing it.

I use ordinance for that reason, while admitting the word sacrament has been used by careful men in a perfectly orthodox sense. The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace in the sense that God ordinarily blesses his people through it, and it is not a means of grace in the sense that the elements contain anything.

The distinction is worth keeping because of where the alternative leads. Once the rite is thought to work in itself, attendance replaces faith, and a person can be assured by a ceremony rather than by Jesus. John 6:63 has Jesus himself saying that the flesh is of no avail and that his words are spirit and life, which was spoken in the very chapter people quote to argue the opposite.

Passover, and why the meal has a shape

It repays effort to notice how much of the Passover survives in the Lord’s Supper. A meal eaten in a household. Bread broken and explained. A cup blessed with thanksgiving. A retelling of what God did to rescue a people who could not rescue themselves. Even the question and answer format of the Jewish liturgy has its echo in the church’s habit of explaining the elements before serving them.

What changes is the reference point. Israel looked back to a lamb whose blood on the doorpost turned aside judgement. The church looks back to the Passover lamb who has been sacrificed, and John the Baptist had already made the identification years before that upper room.

So the Lord’s Supper is not a Christian invention grafted on to nothing. It is the older meal reaching its point, which is why the first believers, all of them Jews, would have felt the weight of it in a way most of us have to work at.

So, now what?

So what should change? For most of us the honest answer is attention. We take the Lord’s Supper on autopilot, thinking about the notices, and then wonder why it does nothing for us. Arrive expecting to meet with God, and give the minutes beforehand to actual thought about the cross.

If you have been staying away because you feel unworthy, come. Self-examination is meant to bring you to the table with your sin confessed, not to keep you in your seat with it unconfessed.

And if you are at odds with somebody in your church, deal with it before the plate reaches you. That is a harder application than any point of doctrine in this article, and it is the one Paul actually pressed.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

1 Corinthians 11:26 (ESV)