Devotional 154: The Institution of the Lord's Supper: A Memorial of Christ's Sacrifice

The Confession Read

Our Lord Jesus, in the night wherein he was betrayed, instituted the sacrament of his body and blood, called the Lord's Supper, to be observed in his church, unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance of the sacrifice of himself in his death; the sealing all benefits thereof unto true believers, their spiritual nourishment and growth in him, their further engagement in and to all duties which they owe unto him; and, to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other, as members of his mystical body.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 29, Section 1

Introduction

It was the night in which he was betrayed. The lamps of Jerusalem had burned low, and the city that would cry out for his blood before morning lay quiet beneath its Passover moon, while in an upper room a small company gathered about a table that would outlast every throne in the world. The Lord Jesus took bread, blessed it, brake it, and gave it to his disciples; he took the cup, gave thanks, and passed it among them. With those two simple acts, done in the very shadow of the cross, he gave his church an ordinance and a feast, which she was to keep, as he commanded, until he comes again. We have spent these last studies walking through the first of the two sacraments, the washing of baptism, that solemn admission into the visible church and sign and seal of the covenant of grace. Now we pass from the door to the table, from the sacrament of our beginning to the sacrament of our continuing. Baptism is given but once; the Supper is repeated throughout the pilgrimage. Baptism receives us into the household of God; the Supper feeds us at the household's table. What baptism seals at the outset, the Supper seals again and again, until faith at last gives way to sight. There is a peculiar tenderness in this ordinance that no other can claim. Baptism belongs to the threshold of the Christian life, and many a believer received it in infancy and keeps no memory of the day. But the Supper is the sacrament of the road. It meets us again and again across the long pilgrimage, at the first awakening of faith and at the last hour of old age, in seasons of joy and seasons of sorrow, beside cradles and beside graves. It is the Lord's appointed way of keeping himself near to a people who are always prone to forget him, and of feeding a faith that is always prone to faint. No wonder the church of every age has gathered to this Table as to no other, for here, in bread and wine, the risen Christ draws near and communes with his own. The sentence before us, which opens the Confession's chapter on the Lord's Supper, is at once an account of what happened that night and a careful statement of what the Supper is for. Mark its two halves. The first half tells us where the Supper came from: our Lord Jesus, in the night wherein he was betrayed, instituted the sacrament of his body and blood, to be observed in his church unto the end of the world. The second half tells us what the Supper is for: the perpetual remembrance of his sacrifice, the sealing of all its benefits to true believers, their spiritual nourishment and growth in him, their further engagement to every duty, and a bond and pledge of their communion with him and with one another as members of his mystical body. There is enough in that single sentence to occupy a mind, and to feed a soul, for a lifetime. Let us take it in order, beginning where we always must begin, at the word of God.

Scripture Foundation

The foundation of everything this sentence teaches is a passage in which Paul hands on to the church what he himself had received of the Lord. In 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 he writes: "For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." Mark first the night. The Lord Jesus did not institute this ordinance in the bright morning of his Galilean ministry, nor in any hour of triumph, but in the night in which he was betrayed. The verb is paradidōmi, and it carries a double force that the English blurs, for it means both "delivered up" and "betrayed." Christ was delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and he was betrayed by the treachery of a friend; the two senses meet in that one dark night, so that the sacrament was born, as it were, between the treason of Judas and the cross of Calvary. The Supper points, therefore, not to a pleasant memory but to a death. It is a feast set in the shadow of the cross, and every loaf and every cup stand beneath it. This is why our Confession calls it "the sacrament of his body and blood" and a remembrance of "the sacrifice of himself in his death." Then ponder the words, "this do in remembrance of me." The word rendered remembrance is anamnesis, and it is far richer than our English word "memory" suggests. In Scripture, to remember is not merely to call a past thing back to mind, as a man might remember a happy summer of his youth; it is to make the past present, to bring a finished act into living, present efficacy before God. When Israel kept the Passover, the redemption out of Egypt was not merely recollected but renewed in power for the generation that kept it. So when the church keeps this feast in remembrance of Christ, she does not hold a funeral for a dead founder; she sets the finished sacrifice of her living Lord before the Father and before her own faith, as her only plea and her only food. And note the closing words, "till he come." The verb is katangellō, to proclaim, to herald, to shew forth. Every celebration of the Supper is a proclamation of the Lord's death, preached to the eye and to the taste as well as to the ear, until the day when the sign gives way to sight and we eat with him in his Father's kingdom. Turn now to the words themselves, as Matthew records them in Matthew 26:26-28: "And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Two words in that sentence carry the weight of the whole ordinance. The first is "new testament." Christ does not speak of a bare covenant but of a testament, a covenant sealed in blood, and the blood that seals it is his own. Behind the word stands the whole sweep of the old covenant, sealed with the blood of bulls and goats, and the whole announcement of the prophets that God would one day make a new covenant, writing his law upon the heart and remembering sin no more. In the cup, Christ declares that the new covenant has come, and that it is ratified not by the blood of animals but by his own. The second word is "remission." His blood is shed "for many for the remission of sins." Here is the sacrifice of which the Confession speaks, the sacrifice of himself in his death; and here is the benefit of which the Supper is the seal. The blood of Christ is the price of pardon, and the cup holds that price before the believer's faith. This is why the Supper is, for the true believer, not a bare memorial but a feast upon the very sacrifice by which he is saved. And lest any should suppose that the sacrifice here remembered is a thing that must be offered again, hear how the writer to the Hebrews settles the matter once for all in Hebrews 10:14: "For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." One offering, perfected, for ever: three words that together cut the very ground from under the mass. The sacrifice of Christ was not a token payment to be renewed at every altar; it was a full and final payment, once made, never to be repeated, sufficient for all the sins of all his people. The Supper does not add to that sacrifice, nor continue it, nor repeat it; it remembers it, and holds its finished efficacy before the church until the Lord returns. Yet the Supper is more than remembrance; it is nourishment, and for that our Lord's own words in the synagogue at Capernaum are decisive. In John 6:51 he declares: "I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." And again, "For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." The image is not one of gazing but of eating. A man is not fed by looking at bread, however fine it be; he must take it, and chew it, and make it his own, and only so does it become part of his very frame. So it is with Christ. He is not to be admired at a distance but received, appropriated, fed upon, by faith; and the Supper is the appointed picture and pledge of that feeding. Here is the Confession's "spiritual nourishment and growth in him." As the body is built up by daily bread, so the soul is built up, by slow degrees, into the stature of Christ, as it feeds upon him in the Word and at the Table. The Lord's Supper is a meal, not a monument. There remains the last great end of the Supper, the communion it seals, and for this Paul gives us a word of rare depth in 1 Corinthians 10:16-17: "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread." The word rendered communion is koinōnia, and it means a shared possession, a fellowship, a partaking in common. In the Supper the believer is made partaker of Christ, and because he partakes of Christ, he is made one with all who partake of the same Christ. The many grains are ground into one loaf; the many members are bound into one body. Here is the bond and pledge of communion with Christ and with one another that closes our sentence. The Supper is a family meal, and it expresses and seals the family's oneness in their Lord.

What the Divines Meant

The sentence we are studying was framed with the utmost care, for in it the divines were answering the gravest error of their age, the error that had in large measure driven the Reformation itself. Rome had turned the Supper into the mass, a sacrifice offered by a priest for the sins of the living and the dead, in which the bread and wine were changed into the very body and blood of Christ and adored as God. Against this the divines set two words that strike at the root of the whole system: the Supper is a remembrance of the sacrifice, not a repetition of it. Consider how much hangs upon that single word. A sacrifice that is offered again and again can never be finished; a remembrance of a sacrifice points to one already made and never to be repeated. When the Confession calls the Supper "the perpetual remembrance of the sacrifice of himself in his death," it is declaring, with the writer to the Hebrews, that Christ has offered one sacrifice for sins forever, and that the Supper is not that sacrifice renewed but that one sacrifice remembered, held before the church's faith until he comes. The bread and wine are not changed into Christ; they point to Christ, they seal Christ, they feed the soul upon Christ, but they remain bread and wine, a sign and a seal of a sacrifice that was accomplished once, at Calvary, and is applied forever by the Spirit. But the divines are no less careful against the opposite error. There were those in their day, as in ours, who would make the Supper a bare memorial, a human ceremony of recollection and nothing more, carrying no grace and sealing no covenant. Against them the sentence insists that the Supper is far more than a monument. It is a seal: "the sealing all benefits thereof unto true believers." It is nourishment: "their spiritual nourishment and growth in him." It is an engagement: "their further engagement in and to all duties which they owe unto him." It is a communion: "a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other, as members of his mystical body." The Supper, in other words, does what a memorial alone could never do. It is a means of grace, an ordinance in which Christ really gives himself to the believer by the Spirit and through faith. And weigh the phrase "unto true believers." The benefits of the Supper are sealed to faith, and to faith alone. The divines will not have a grace that works mechanically in the bread, as Rome taught; nor will they have a grace that is offered indifferently to all, whether believing or not. The seal is affixed to the covenant, and the covenant belongs to those who receive it by faith. This little phrase is the hinge that keeps the Reformed Supper from falling into either ditch. It is no magic, for grace is received only by faith; and it is no empty form, for to true believers it is a true sealing and a true feeding. There was a third error abroad as well, less blatant than Rome's but no less dangerous, and the divines had their eye upon it. The Lutherans, in their zeal to hold a real presence of Christ in the Supper, had taught that his body is present in, with, and under the bread, so that all who eat, believing or not, receive the very body of the Lord. Against this the Confession's words are quietly decisive. It calls the Supper a remembrance, a seal, a nourishment, a communion; it never once says that Christ is bodily present in the elements. The body of Christ, being a true human body, is in heaven, at the right hand of God, and is received by the believer not with the mouth but with the heart, through the working of the Spirit. Here, as in the chapter on the sacraments in general, the divines steer a middle course between three errors: Rome, which would drag Christ down into the bread; the Lutherans, who would bind him to the bread; and the enthusiasts, who would leave the bread empty of him altogether. The Reformed doctrine holds Christ in heaven, received by faith through the Spirit, truly present to the believing soul. And one word in the sentence deserves its own pause: the church is called "his mystical body." The phrase is the divines' way of saying that the church's union with Christ is no legal fiction but a living, organic thing. As the members of a body are one with the head, joined to it and quickened by it, so believers are one with Christ and with one another, and the Supper is the appointed sign and pledge of that oneness. The Table is not a place of private devotion merely, a solitary soul and its God; it is a family feast, where the many are made one because they are all partakers of the one loaf and the one Lord. Finally, observe where the divines begin: not with the church's doctrine but with the Lord's own act. "Our Lord Jesus, in the night wherein he was betrayed, instituted the sacrament." The Supper is not a human invention, to be altered or laid aside as the church pleases; it is an ordinance of the living Christ, set down on a definite night, by definite acts, for a definite people, to be kept until a definite end. That "unto the end of the world" stands guard over the whole. The Supper is not a temporary help for a weak age of the church, to be outgrown as she matures; it is the standing feast of the covenant people, kept from the night of the betrayal until the morning of the appearing, when the Bridegroom shall sit down with his bride at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Theological Depth

We descend now from the wording of the sentence to the truths beneath it, and here the divines of the church have left us a rich inheritance. Calvin, to whom the Supper was a theme of lifelong tenderness, gives us the controlling idea in his treatment of the ordinance. He will not have a carnal eating, as though the body of Christ could be chewed in the bread; nor will he have a bare remembrance, as though the believer were fed upon empty air. Christ's body is in heaven, at the right hand of the Father, and there the soul is lifted by the Spirit to feed upon him truly. By the secret and wonderful power of the Holy Spirit, the believer is made partaker of the very flesh and blood of Christ, so that the life of the glorified Savior flows into the soul as truly as the life of the vine flows into the branch. The Supper, for Calvin, is not a picture to be looked at but a feast to be fed upon, and the feeding is real, heavenly, and spiritual. This is the mind that stands behind every word of our sentence. Watson, with his gift for making the doctrine sweet, presses home the remembrance. The Supper, he observes, is a monument of love, set up by a dying Redeemer to be kept until he comes. In it Christ says, I am going from you, but I leave you this; whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, remember me. Watson would have the believer come to the Table with a heart full of the memory of Christ: his love in dying, his agony in the garden, his blood in the judgment hall, his patience on the cross. And because the One remembered is not dead but risen, the remembrance kindles not grief only but joy and hope, as a wife remembers her husband who is away and will return. The Table is a feast of love, and love makes the memory sweet. Turretin supplies the precision that distinguishes the Supper from baptism and from the mass. Baptism, he observes, is the sacrament of initiation, to be received once; the Supper is the sacrament of nourishment, to be repeated often, for as the body is fed daily so the soul needs its continual food. And against Rome's mass, Turretin insists that the Supper is not a sacrifice but a remembrance and an application of a sacrifice. The bread is not the body of Christ locally; it is the sign and pledge of that body, given and received by faith. By these two distinctions, the sacrament of nourishment repeated and the sacrifice remembered rather than re-offered, Turretin holds the Supper firmly in its scriptural place. Hodge, in his commentary, lays the sentence out in its four members and shows how they belong together. The Supper, he writes, is a commemoration of Christ's death, a seal of the covenant of grace, a means of spiritual nourishment, and a pledge of communion with Christ and his people; and these four are not to be torn apart. The remembrance is of a sacrifice whose benefits are sealed; the sealing is of benefits that nourish; the nourishment is the life of one in whom all believers are one body. Hodge helps us see that the Supper is a single ordinance with a fourfold fullness, and that to keep only one of its ends is to keep none of them aright. Shaw, whose Exposition has walked with us through the sacraments, draws out the double face of the ordinance. The Supper is a bond of communion and an engagement at once. It is a bond, binding the believer to Christ and to his brethren, as one loaf is broken and shared so that the many become one; and it is an engagement, binding the believer to every duty he owes his Lord. The very eating and drinking is a solemn vow, renewed at the Table, to live no more unto himself but unto him who died for him and rose again. The Supper, says Shaw, is the covenant feast, in which the Lord and his people sit down together and pledge themselves afresh to one another. Owen, in his discourses on the Supper, takes us to the heart of the communion the sentence seals. The believer's fellowship with Christ, he insists, is a real and personal thing: the same Christ who died for us lives in us, and the Supper is the appointed ordinance in which that fellowship is expressed and strengthened. Owen would have us come to the Table not as strangers but as those who are already united to Christ by faith, to feed upon him and to be knit more closely to him and to all his members, until the whole mystical body grows up into him who is the head. Put these together and a single picture emerges. The Supper is the new covenant's feast, the table where the sacrifice of Calvary is remembered, its benefits sealed to faith, its grace eaten and drunk as the soul's nourishment, its obligations renewed, and its communion sealed between the believer and his Lord and among all believers as one body. It is, in the language of the church's wisdom, a feast upon a sacrifice, a visible word of the gospel, the believer's continual food on the road to the heavenly banquet. What baptism does once at the door, the Supper does again and again at the table; and the two together, the washing and the feast, carry the believer from the font to the grave and on to glory.

Puritan Application

Let us now bring this doctrine home to the heart, for a truth that is only believed and never lived is a truth half lost. First, come to the Table to remember. Before you take the bread, set your mind deliberately upon the sacrifice. Call to mind the night of the betrayal, the agony in the garden, the scourging, the nails, the darkness over the land, the cry, It is finished. The world will press a thousand other memories upon you; the Table calls you back to the one memory that saves. Do not let the feast become a habit, gone through with a wandering mind. Come as one who has been told to remember, and whose whole salvation hangs upon the death he is bid to remember. Second, come with faith, and with nothing else. The sentence we have studied seals all benefits unto true believers, and to no others. The bread does not save you; Christ saves you, and the bread points to him. The cup does not wash away sin; the blood of Christ does, and the cup sets that blood before you. Beware, then, of two opposite corruptions of the heart. Beware of coming with a superstitious trust in the ordinance itself, as though the bare receiving of bread and wine could do the soul any good apart from faith. And beware of coming with a presumptuous heart, unfaithful and impenitent, laying hold of the sign while despising the thing. The Table is for the hungry believer, not for the self-righteous formalist nor for the careless sinner. Search yourself before you come, and come resting wholly upon Christ. Third, come with hunger. The Supper is nourishment, and no man is fed who has no appetite. If you come to the Table full of the world, sated with its pleasures and its cares, you will rise from the feast as empty as you came. But if you come hungry, weary of your sins, conscious of your leanness, longing for more of Christ, then the bread and the cup will meet a real need, and the Spirit who makes them effectual will strengthen and grow your soul. Ask yourself before you come: do I truly hunger and thirst after righteousness? The Supper is a meal for the hungry, and the hungry alone are filled. Fourth, come with love to the brethren. The sentence closes with communion, and it is a communion not with Christ alone but with one another, as members of his mystical body. You cannot be one bread with a brother and be at enmity with him in the same hour. The Table is a family meal, and to sit at it harboring hatred, envy, or an unforgiving spirit is to belie the very thing the feast proclaims. Reconcile with your brother before you come, as our Lord commanded; let no quarrel bar you from the Table, and let no Table leave you as divided as it found you. The one loaf makes us one, and woe to the man who eats it while nursing a divided heart. Fifth, come with a renewed vow. Each communion is an engagement, a fresh giving up of yourself to every duty you owe your Lord. The old covenant meals sealed covenant and commitment; the Supper is the covenant feast of the new, and every time you eat and drink you renew your baptismal vow, you pledge yourself afresh to walk in newness of life. Let no Table pass without a deliberate self-dedication. Rise from it saying, with a fresh determination, I am not my own; I am bought with a price; I will live henceforth unto him who died for me and rose again. So the Supper becomes, as the Confession intends, not a monument to be visited but a feast to be lived, and the remembrance of a death becomes the spring of a new obedience. Sixth, and above all, come with thanksgiving. The very name by which the early church knew this feast was the Eucharist, the giving of thanks, for Christ took the bread and "gave thanks." The Supper is a feast of gratitude, and the believer who comes to it rightly does not come as a mourner at a grave but as a guest at a banquet, rejoicing that the sacrifice has been made, the debt has been paid, and the table is spread. Let joy be the ruling temper of your communion. If you come remembering, come also rejoicing; if you come in sorrow for sin, come also in the gladness of one who is forgiven. The same bread that sets the cross before you sets the empty tomb before you, and the cup that speaks of shed blood speaks also of a risen Lord who has gone to prepare a place for you.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, our Redeemer and our Head, we bless Thee for the night in which Thou wast betrayed, and for the ordinance which Thou didst then institute for our sakes. We thank Thee for the bread and the cup, for the remembrance of Thy sacrifice, for the seal of Thy covenant, for the nourishment of our souls, and for the communion which Thou hast made us to share with Thee and with one another. We confess that we have come to Thy Table with wandering minds and cold hearts, that we have remembered Thee too little and the world too much, that we have eaten the bread of life without hunger and drunk the cup without thanksgiving. Forgive us, we pray Thee, and kindle in us a truer love, that from this hour we may come to Thy Table with remembrance, with faith, with hunger, with love to the brethren, and with a renewed surrender of our whole selves to Thy service. Feed us, O Thou living Bread, and we shall live by Thee, even as Thou livest by the Father. Strengthen that which Thou hast wrought in us, and grow us up into the stature of Thyself, until at the last we sit down with Thee at the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the remembrance of a death gives place to the sight of a risen and reigning King. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.