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ORIENTATION

He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and say to him, ‘The Teacher says, My time is at hand. I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.’ ”

Matthew 26:18 ESV

WE DO NOT PRESUME TO COME TO THIS YOUR TABLE, MERCIFUL LORD, TRUSTING IN OUR OWN MERITS, BUT IN YOUR MANIFOLD AND GREAT MERCIES

This is a handbook on the Lord’s Supper. It aims to lead its readers to full participation in the Lord’s Supper as a holy meal, a meal that Christ established for the benefit of his disciples in their journey from earth to heaven. It is, if you like, a menu for a lavish, tasty dinner rather than an analysis of its origin, its composition, and the nutritional value of the food it supplies.

Yet even that is a daunting task. While it is, superficially, a simple symbolic meal that consists of a piece of bread and a sip of wine, in reality it is much more than that. In fact most of it is hidden from human sight, such as its location, its host, its guests, and its food. Its location is not just in the place where a congregation of people has assembled, but also in the presence of God in heaven together with all his angels and all the saints who have gone before us. The risen Lord Jesus is its host and God’s holy people on earth are its guests. Its food is the body and blood of Jesus.

It is no wonder then that the Lord’s Supper has always frustrated all attempts to understand and explain it in rational human terms. It is also no wonder that it has aroused so much disagreement and controversy. It calls into question some of our most widely held assumptions about the nature of the world and our life in it: assumptions about time and space and matter, assumptions about human life and death, as well as our nature and destiny as embodied people. It shows us how limited and one dimensional all these concepts are, and opens us up to appreciate our life on earth as part of a great mystery. Since the Lord’s Supper is itself a mystery, we will be able to appreciate it best, and most fully, if we take it as divine banquet that is hosted by the risen Lord Jesus, locate it within the context of God’s whole history with his people, and use his word to understand it according to his purpose for it.

The struggle to understand the Lord’s Supper goes back to the difficulty that the disciples of Jesus had in naming it. In fact, even Jesus himself did not give it any name but only told his apostles how to celebrate it, and why. So they, and those who came after them, followed his lead and referred to the whole meal by some part of it. Thus Luke calls it “the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35; Acts 2:42). Paul calls it “the Lord’s supper” (1 Cor 11:20) and “the table of the Lord” (1 Cor 10:21). By the end of the first century it was called “the Eucharist,” or “the Thanksgiving,” in an early Christian handbook called the Didache, as well as in the letters of Ignatius.1 Eventually it was also called “the Sacrament,” or “the Blessed Sacrament,” or “the Sacrament of the Altar” to indicate that it was a sacred act, and “Holy Communion,” a name that recalls Paul’s description of i