Devotional 157: The Efficacy of the Supper: Christ Truly Present to Faith

The Confession Read

Private masses, or receiving this sacrament by a priest, or any other, alone; as likewise, the denial of the cup to the people, worshiping the elements, the lifting them up, or carrying them about for adoration, and the reserving them for any pretended religious use; are all contrary to the nature of this sacrament, and to the institution of Christ.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 29, Section 4

Introduction

Picture a room full of hungry people, a table spread with bread and wine, and a host who sits down alone and eats while everyone else watches. He lifts the loaf above his head for them to admire, passes the cup before their eyes, then drinks it himself and locks what remains inside a cupboard, so that the guests may come later and bow before the box that holds it. No one eats. No one drinks. The feast has become a performance, and the guests have become an audience. This, dear listener, is not the Lord's Supper. It is something else entirely: a meal turned into a spectacle, a gift turned into an object, a communion turned into a private ceremony. And if that picture sounds exaggerated, it is only because we have not lived in the world that produced it. For centuries the people of Christendom gathered every Lord's Day to watch a single man eat the body of Christ on their behalf, to gaze at a lifted wafer while the cup was denied them, to kneel as the host was carried through the streets, and to bow before bread locked away in a box. The Reformers looked at all of this and said, gently at first and then with increasing firmness, that it was not the Supper Jesus left to his church. Section 4 of the Westminster Confession gathers these practices together and condemns them with a single sentence and a single reason. Private masses; receiving the sacrament alone; the denial of the cup; the worshipping, lifting, carrying about, and reserving of the elements: all of these, the Confession declares, are contrary to the nature of this sacrament, and to the institution of Christ. The sentence is short because the principle is single. A sacrament has a nature, and an institution, and whatever runs against the two cannot stand. Now you may say that this is ancient history, a quarrel with a church we are not part of, about practices we have never seen. But do not turn away too quickly. Every one of these abuses was born of a plausible instinct: the wish to honour Christ, to handle holy things reverently, to make sure that nothing sacred is profaned. The road to idolatry is paved with reverence that forgot where reverence was due, and the same instincts stir in every believing heart in every age, whenever we begin to treat the means of grace as ends in themselves, to prefer the sign to the Saviour it points to, and to love the ceremony more than the Christ who gave it. What Section 4 protects is not a point of ritual but the gospel itself: that God gives, and we receive, together, by faith, at a table and not at a shrine. The question before us, then, is not academic; it is the question of how the grace of God actually reaches a sinner, and how a church should hold out her hands to receive it. What follows is an exploration of that principle, and a summons to keep the feast as it was given.

Scripture Foundation

The Confession rests its case on two words: nature and institution. Before we ask what the Divines meant by those words, we must watch them in the Scriptures themselves, for the Bible shows us what a feast like this one is meant to be, and what it is not. Consider first what the Lord's Supper is by its very design, and the answer lies in the ordinary way Paul speaks of it. When the Corinthian church fell into disorder at the table, the apostle did not rebuke them for failing to admire the elements or for neglecting some ceremony. He rebuked them for eating apart from one another. "When ye come together therefore into one place," he wrote, "this is not to eat the Lord's supper. For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken." Here is the decisive fact: the Supper is the Lord's, and it is a supper, a shared meal, and the very shape of it is corporate. The Corinthians were erring not because they loved the bread too little but because they loved one another too little, each hurrying through his own portion before the poor and the late arrived. Paul's remedy was not to make the meal more private but to make it more patient: "Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another." The feast assumes a company. The name the church has always given this meal is communion, and its Greek root, koinōnein, means to have a share in common with others; a thing that is shared by its very grammar cannot be received alone. A sacrament eaten alone is not a smaller version of the same thing; it is a contradiction of the thing itself, the way a wedding celebrated without a bride is not a quiet wedding but no wedding at all. The same corporate logic governs the cup. When our Lord reached the cup on the night in which he was betrayed, he did not lift it in silence for the disciples to admire. He "took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it." The command is as plain as any in the New Testament. He did not say, "Behold this cup"; he said, "Drink this cup, and all of you drink it." The noun is potērion, the cup itself, and the command binds the many together: "drink ye all of it." The cup, which he then named the new testament in his blood, was a thing to be received and swallowed, not a thing to be looked at. To withhold it from the people is to stop the Lord's own command at its midpoint, to give half a feast, and to leave the covenant sealed in one hand only. Paul knew nothing of a cup that only one man drank; he warned the Corinthians that "ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils," and spoke of the Lord's table as a thing to which all believers came as partakers. The blood of the covenant belongs to every communicant, not to a priest alone. If the elements are for eating and drinking rather than for gazing, then a second error is exposed the moment we ask what may be worshipped. Paul preached in Athens against a worship that seemed devout but missed God entirely, and his words settle the matter of the elements before the question is even raised. "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things." The God who gives us bread and breath cannot be confined to a piece of bread, and cannot be adored as though he dwelt inside it. To bow before a wafer is to invert the whole economy of grace, as though the Lord who feeds us had shrunk to the size of what he gives. The bread is a gift on the way to the Giver, not a stopping-place where the soul should kneel. When Scripture does command worship, it reserves it for God alone, and the word it uses is telling. Offered the kingdoms of the world on condition of a single act of homage, our Lord answered, "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." The verb is proskuneō, to fall down and worship, and its object in Scripture is never a creature but always the living God. To bow before the consecrated bread is to take the posture of worship and aim it at a thing made by men's hands, and so to break the first and greatest commandment, which reserves the knee and the heart for the Creator alone. The Divines were not being cold when they forbade the adoration of the host; they were insisting that every drop of adoration a soul possesses belongs to Christ and to Christ alone, and that a single bow spent upon the bread is a bow stolen from the Lord who is worthy of it. Nor may the consecrated bread be carried about or locked away as a permanent object of devotion, and for a reason that belongs to the very structure of the gospel. Peter declared to the men of Israel that God had raised up his servant Jesus and exalted him to the heavens, "whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things." Christ is a person, and a person in a place: the right hand of the Majesty on high. He is not distributed piecemeal into boxes and shrines across the earth, to be wheeled through the streets on a feast day or kept behind a little door for the adoration of the devout. The risen Lord has one body, and that body is seated in heaven, and no church may pretend otherwise by keeping a fragment of bread as though it were him. The ascension is the church's protection against every attempt to make the Redeemer manageable, portable, and ultimately absent from the place where he actually is. And this points finally to the end toward which the whole feast is travelling. Our Lord closed the first Supper with a promise that looks past the meal to its fulfilment: "I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom." The Supper is a rehearsal, a foretaste, a meal eaten now in anticipation of a meal to come. Because it looks forward, it must be repeated and received, not deposited and adored. You do not build a shrine around a rehearsal dinner; you keep the table ready and the company gathered, because the Bridegroom has promised to sit down with his people again. All the medieval abuses share a single fault: they try to turn a moving, forward-looking feast into something fixed and finished, and in doing so they lose the very thing the feast was given to teach.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines were not inventing new doctrines when they wrote Section 4. They were sweeping up a long accumulation of practices that had grown over the Supper like ivy over a doorway, and asking one simple question of each: does this belong to what a sacrament is, and did Christ appoint it? The answer, to each practice in turn, was no. The first and most obvious target was the private mass. In the medieval church the priest alone received the sacrament; the congregation, if it communicated at all, did so rarely and always without the cup. The mass itself became a spectacle the laity watched from a distance, the priest standing with his back to the people, speaking in a tongue they did not know, performing an act whose benefit was said to flow to them whether they understood it or not. Against this the Confession insists that receiving the sacrament "by a priest, or any other, alone" is no sacrament at all in its full biblical sense. The word the New Testament uses for the Supper is a communion, and a communion that no one shares is a contradiction in terms. The Divines were not denying that a believer might, in some desperate extremity, long to feed on Christ; they were denying that a solitary eating, detached from the gathered church, is what our Lord appointed. Second, the denial of the cup. For several centuries the laity had received the bread only, on the theory that Christ is received whole under either element and that the full blood might spill or be profaned by careless lips. The Divines answered that this was a human invention set directly against the institution. Christ gave the cup and said, "Drink ye all of it." No church has the right to withhold what the Lord has given, or to treat the church as though it could not be trusted with the very blood by which it was redeemed. The cup is not a privilege of the clergy; it is the portion of every communicant, and a Supper in one kind is half a Supper. Third, the adoration of the elements. Once the doctrine of transubstantiation had taken hold, it seemed only logical to worship what the priest had made. So the consecrated host was elevated for the people to see and adore, and the faithful were taught to fall down before it as before God himself. The Confession answers with a distinction that runs through all Reformed teaching on the sacraments: the sign is not the thing signified, and the elements are means to an end, not the end itself. To worship the bread is to worship a creature in place of the Creator, to stop the soul at the signpost instead of walking the road the signpost points along. The Divines called it "worshiping the elements," and they set it beside the lifting up, the carrying about for adoration, and the reserving for any pretended religious use, because all four are the same error wearing different clothes: treating the Supper as a thing to be looked at and bowed before, rather than a meal to be eaten and shared. The history behind these words is worth a moment's attention, for the practices did not appear at once but grew one upon another across the centuries. The elevation of the host was introduced in the thirteenth century precisely so that the people might look upon the consecrated bread and adore it; the feast of Corpus Christi, instituted in the year 1264, was devised to carry the host in solemn procession through the streets; and the Council of Trent, meeting in the very midst of the Reformation, hardened these devotions into dogma, defining in its thirteenth session the worship of the host with the highest degree of adoration, and in its twenty-first session forbidding the laity the cup. What had begun as a reverent instinct hardened into a system, until what our Lord had given to be eaten had become a thing to be looked at, carried about, and locked away. The Divines were not writing against a straw man; they were writing against a thousand years of accumulated practice, and they answered the whole weight of it with a single sentence and a single reason. Beneath every one of these practices lay a deeper confusion about what grace is and how it comes. The medieval system had gradually made the sacrament into a kind of holy machinery, a thing that worked by its own operation, and the more it was thought to work by itself, the more it had to be kept apart, guarded, and adored. The Confession reverses this. The sacrament works, not by being reserved and worshipped, but by being received by faith in the company of the saints, according to the plain institution of Christ. "Nature" and "institution" are the two words that hold the whole sentence together, and they are meant to be heard together. What a sacrament is, by its nature, is what Christ made it to be by his institution, and no church may subtract from the one or add to the other.

Theological Depth

The Reformers who stood behind the Confession had learned this lesson at great cost, and the voices that echo through this section speak with the weight of men who had watched the abuses at first hand. Calvin is the right place to begin. Throughout his treatment of the sacrament he kept coming back to the fact that the Supper is a feast Christ spread for his whole church, and that the private mass seizes for one man what was given to all. The Lord did not institute the Supper, Calvin insisted, that a priest should mumble it alone in a corner while the people looked on; he set a table at which his family sits down together. And against the adoration of the host Calvin was equally plain: since the body of Christ is in heaven, and since the bread remains bread, there is nothing in the elements to be worshipped, only a promise to be believed and a meal to be received. His language could be severe, but the severity was pastoral. He was not scolding the devout for their reverence; he was rescuing them from a reverence misplaced upon a creature. He reduced the whole matter to a single question: is the Supper a feast at which the family sits down together, or a spectacle at which one man performs while the rest look on? The New Testament, he answered, knows only the former. Turretin, the Genevan scholastic, supplied the careful distinctions the next generation needed. He observed that the sacramental actions are three: consecration, distribution, and reception, and that adoration is nowhere among them. The Supper was not given to be carried about or enclosed, but to be eaten; and a sacrament that is not received is, so far as its purpose goes, no sacrament at all. On the denial of the cup, Turretin marshalled the plain words of institution against the sophistry that Christ could be received whole under one element. Whatever may be said of the whole Christ, he argued, the command was explicit, and obedience is not satisfied by doing less than the Lord has appointed. His whole method is a model for us: he does not argue from reverence or custom or the authority of the church, but from the text, because it is the text that makes a sacrament what it is. A Supper that is only consecrated but never distributed, only shown but never received, has stopped short of its appointed end, and a half-finished sacrament is not a sacrament at all. Robert Shaw, in his exposition of the Confession, walks through Section 4 clause by clause and shows how each condemned practice fails one of the two tests. The private mass fails the test of the Supper's nature as a communion; the withholding of the cup fails the test of Christ's institution; the adoration, elevation, procession, and reservation of the elements fail both at once, because they convert the sign into the thing signified and set it up for a worship that belongs to God alone. Shaw's treatment is useful to us precisely because he keeps the two tests distinct, and so keeps us from a lazy generalised disapproval. It matters whether a practice contradicts what the Supper is, or contradicts what Christ said, because the remedy differs: the first calls us back to fellowship, the second calls us back to obedience. Hodge, in his commentary, presses the same two words and draws out their force. The nature of the sacrament is social and symbolical: social, because it is a feast of a body, and symbolical, because the bread and cup are signs that point beyond themselves. Both are destroyed by the abuses. The private mass destroys the social nature; the adoration destroys the symbolical, by turning the sign into the thing and so leaving nothing to point anywhere at all. Hodge's point is worth lingering over, because it names the irony at the heart of the medieval development: the more the church exalted the sacrament, the more it emptied it. A sign that is worshipped ceases to be a sign, and a feast that is watched ceases to be a feast. One further voice completes the picture. Owen, writing on the sacraments, insisted that the Lord's Supper is a means of real communion with Christ, and that communion is an act of the whole person engaged by faith. This is why every abuse in Section 4 is not merely a ceremonial mistake but a spiritual injury. The believer who is made to watch a priest eat alone is being robbed of the fellowship the Supper exists to give; the believer who is taught to adore bread is being taught to seek Christ where he is not, and to miss him where he is. The errors are not neutral. They starve the very souls they pretend to feed. What all these men saw, and what the Confession enshrines, is a single truth held from every side: the Lord's Supper is a gift to be received, by a people, in faith, according to the command of Christ, and every practice that turns it into a private spectacle, a half-meal, or an object of worship is a step away from the gospel itself. To recover the Supper as a feast is therefore to recover the gospel's own shape, which is grace given and received, never grace manufactured, paraded, or put on display.

Puritan Application

The abuses of Section 4 may feel distant, the relics of a world of tinkling bells and incense and lifted hosts. But the underlying temptations have not left us, and they are worth searching out in our own hearts. First, come to the table as a body, not as an isolated soul. The private mass is dead, but the private religion it embodied is very much alive: the solitary believer who treats communion as a transaction between himself and God alone, who arrives late, slips in and out, and never notices the brother beside him. Paul's "tarry one for another" is a standing command, not a relic. When we gather at the table, we are not a crowd of individuals each doing private business with heaven; we are one body eating one bread, and the feast is for us together. Let the Lord's Supper be the place where we practise what we are: members one of another, waiting for one another, bearing with one another's weakness, rejoicing in one another's strength. Second, take the whole feast, and let the whole feast be a whole gospel. The church that withheld the cup was, in effect, withholding half the promise: the body without the blood, the death without the atonement in which the blood was poured out. We can fall into a subtler version of the same error whenever we shrink the gospel to one of its parts, the love of God without the cost, the resurrection without the cross, the promise without the command. But the table sets both before us, bread and cup together, and summons us to receive the whole Christ in the whole gospel. Do not be content with half the feast. Christ gave all of it, and he gave it all to you. Third, adore Christ, and let the means stay means. The temptation to worship the elements returns in new dress whenever we invest outward things with the honour that belongs to God alone: a style of worship, a manner of music, a beloved minister, a treasured tradition, even a building or a book. These are signs and helps, signposts that point us toward Christ; they are never to be bowed before. The test is simple. Does this outward thing carry my soul to Christ, or does it stop my soul at itself? A signpost is honoured best when it is followed to the destination, and a sacrament is honoured best when it is received in faith and left behind as we press on to the Lord himself. Fourth, receive Christ where he is, and do not look for him where he is not. The error of reservation was to seek a Christ enclosed in an earthly object, and the error persists wherever we try to lock the Lord into a box of our own making, a ritual, a formula, an experience, a place. But Christ is in heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, and he comes to us by his Spirit through his Word and sacraments, to be received by faith. He is not found in the cupboard of our contrivance; he is found at his own table, and in his own Word, and by the secret ministry of his own Spirit. Let us seek him there, and not torment ourselves searching for him in shrines of our own making, however devoutly we have decorated them. The ascended Christ is nearer to us by his Spirit than any box or shrine could ever bring him, and he meets us not where we enclose him but where he has promised to be. Fifth, keep your face toward the coming feast. The Supper looks forward, and a church that forgets the future turns the sacrament into a backward-looking memorial or a present-looking spectacle. Our Lord said he would not drink the fruit of the vine again until he drank it new with his people in the kingdom. Every time we come to this table we are rehearsing for that day: the day when faith gives way to sight, when the sign gives way to the substance, when the gathered church around a little table gives way to the great congregation around the Lamb. Let that hope set the tone of your receiving. Come to the table as one who is on the way home, with the taste of the journey's end already on your lips, and let the remembrance of the past and the fellowship of the present both be carried forward by the brightness of what is to come.

Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, who in the night in which thou wast betrayed didst take bread and the cup and give them to thy disciples, we bless thee for the feast thou hast spread for thy whole church, and for the blood of the covenant poured out for many. We confess that we have too often made little of the meal thou didst make great, receiving it carelessly, coming alone in heart, and loving the outward things more than the Lord they point to. Forgive us, we pray, and teach us to keep this supper as thou didst give it. Keep us from every error that would steal the feast away. Suffer us not to eat alone, but bind us to thy body, that we may tarry one for another and bear one another's burdens. Suffer us not to be content with half a gospel, but give us the whole Christ, body and blood, cross and crown, promise and command. Suffer us not to bow before signs, but lift our hearts to the thing signified, even to thyself, seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high. And because thou art there, O ascended Lord, where the heaven must receive thee until the times of restitution of all things, keep us from seeking thee in any earthly shrine, and draw us to thyself by thy Spirit through thy Word. Make this table a rehearsal of the banquet to come, until that day when thou shalt drink the fruit of the vine anew with us in thy Father's kingdom. Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Amen.