At the Lord’s Supper we remember Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf. It’s a lot more than that—we eat God too—but it’s not less than a memorial because that’s what the scriptures tell us (1 Corinthians 11).
I concede, a memorial is not the same as ‘remembering,’ it’s a symbolic edifice that we can look at. Remembering happens inside our heads. What I mean by that is that the memorial is not the act of considering the gospel that we might do inside our brains, but the physical bread we watch being broken, the wine we watch being poured, and our eating of both of them. It’s concrete and cerebral. Think of the way memorials function in the Old Testament, that’s the thought world that Paul is referring to.
Also, as a sidebar if you’re new around here, by symbolic I don’t mean ‘just a symbol’ because that’s a weird thing to say. I deny that symbols are distinctly separate from the things that they signify and affirm that symbols participate in the reality that they signify. To say that the Supper is symbolic is, for me, a statement that it reaches beyond itself and invites us into something broader: you encounter Christ in bread and wine. I mean it in the same way that trees are symbols and people are symbols and Christ is a symbol. There’s lots more to say than that, but there’s not less.
To return to our starting place, at the Supper we remember. There is something of memory involved even though the scriptures mean more than that. I recently heard someone quip (but cannot recall where I encountered this—let me know if you have a reference) that at the Lord’s Supper we remember by re-membering. They were making an allusion to 1 Corinthians 12 where we are all described as members of the body of Christ and suggesting that the Supper makes the constituent parts up into the body.
Now, while it’s a fun quip we should be careful to point out that words don’t work like that. The word for memorial or remembrance (anamnēsis) doesn’t share a root with the word for member (melē). The word for remembering (mimnēskomai) doesn’t get used in the eucharistic passages as far as I can spot.
Even so, I think the quip gets at something that’s true, that Christ’s eucharistic body creates his ecclesial body. To put that in more common Christianese, the body of Christ that we eat in bread creates the body of Christ that we call the Church. Why are we one body? Because we eat and drink of one Christ together, because we partake of one baptism. You see this logic subtly at play in 1 Corinthians: we precede the discussion of the body metaphor in the context of public worship with a discussion of the Lord’s Supper.
It’s our corporate partaking of Christ that makes us his body, that makes us his church.
This was the broad consensus among all Christians prior to the late eleventh century. The Berengar Controversy caused the slightly mysterious middle to splinter, with the view of most contemporary evangelicals (that the body and blood are just ‘symbols’) being rejected by the Church in favour of a harder line view that over time became the Roman Catholic doctrine we know today as transubstantiation.
What exactly do I mean? Well, this is a blog rather than an article which gives me license to remind you that I’m thinking out loud. I’m entirely sure how far I want to push the thought. This isn’t all that’s required to make a church, I’m not claiming that, but we can definitely affirm that something that claims to be a church but does not partake of the Lord’s Supper is deeply suspect.
Do we mystically get knitted one to the other in the partaking of the Supper? I think so, that’s certainly the language of the symbols. The bread is reconstituted into one loaf as we eat it together. We become the single loaf, we become Christ’s body, as we chew. That’s one of the things that the ritual is telling us as a sermon we can eat and drink: he was broken in pieces so that we can be reunited with each other and with him.
Whether we’re talking about more than the story the actions tell I’ll leave to you to consider. I do wonder how often we explain the symbolic language of what we’re doing. I don’t think most Christians in my world are even aware of it.
Most could describe body and blood I suppose, but why bread and wine? There are symbolic reasons. Or why should it be broken and poured in front of us rather than pre-prepared? I hinted at that one above: we’re talking about the whole story being conveyed in the actions. Or why should it be visually obvious that we’re partaking of one loaf and one cup, even if our mode of taking doesn’t involve a single cup?
We’re not talking here about the sort of thing where it’s not the Lord’s Supper anymore if you don’t do it, but we are talking about losing something of the sense of the story being told if we strip out important ritual elements. It’s the same way that if we replace wine with grape juice (which is not unfermented wine and we all know it) we lose something. We don’t drink the wine because its red. If we did then pork, ironically, would be a better substitute for flesh than bread (beer and sausages, anyone?).
This is not to argue that you cannot make liturgical decisions for reasons of availability or tradition, but it is to argue that we should reckon with what we lose and then find another way to communicate that.
Perhaps I’ll write again on the symbol language present in the Lord’s Supper and start to tease some of it out. It’s very rich and we should learn to read it.
Photo by Nadya Spetnitskaya on Unsplash
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