WITH REGARD TO THE “LORD’S SUPPER” OR “EUCHARIST”
WITH REGARD TO THE “LORD’S SUPPER” OR “EUCHARIST”:
Christians need to analyze Biblical passages in the way exemplified by the parsing diagram below.
Jesus is the one who INVENTED languages and the ability to communicate with words, and like any good communicator, He knew how to say and inspire the writing of what He MEANS to say. He said, “This IS my body…blood.” Since we know that He already well knew how to say, “is LIKE…” – as in “The kingdom of God is LIKE a man…” – when He chooses to say, “This IS my body…blood” only extreme denominational prejudice based upon irrational considerations can FORCE Him to mean “is LIKE” when HE says “IS”.
Then Paul adds even more detail: “Is not the cup of blessing that we bless a SHARING [Greek: ‘koinonia’ / “κοινωνία”) in the blood of Christ? Is not the bread that we break a SHARING in the body of Christ? BECAUSE there is one bread, we who are many are one body, FOR we all share the one bread. Look at the people of Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices PARTNERS (Greek: “koinonos”) in the altar?” (1 Corinthians 10:16-18).
I am not going to spell out all of the significance of these passages here – I have already done so in my “Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament.” But if you really want God to consider that you are a “BIBLE believing Christian” then you will meditate very carefully upon these two passages and reject ANY idea that what Jesus was establishing was a MERE “memorial” of what He had accomplished in His dying and rising for you! You are supposed to be able to “discern” His presence in your midst in your Eucharistic gathering, as we will see below.
Jesus had created majestic and supernatural promises about the intimate union that He was making possible between Himself and each of His individual disciples and His individual communities:
”I will not leave you orphans; I will COME to you” (John 14:18).
“If anyone loves Me, he will follow My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our DWELLING with him” (John 14:23)
“Christ IN you, the hope of glory!” (Colossians 1:27)
“I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are IN Me, and I IN You; that they also may be one IN Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I IN them, and You IN Me;” (John 17:20-23)
But Jesus did not merely toss out such promises and leave it up to YOU to figure out how they will be fulfilled. In His great love and wisdom, He also established specific MEANS by those promises would be fulfilled. And the Lord’s Supper / Holy Communion / Eucharist was one of those “sacraments” by which ALL that He is can become one with all that YOU are: His spirit within your spirit, His soul within your soul, and even His body within YOUR body!
And what is far more important for you, that Eucharistic “eating” was one of those “sacraments” by which all that YOU are can become one with all that HE is: He has made it possible so that YOU can become incorporated into HIS very body in the way that you experience Him individually and experience Him with fellow baptized and Spirit-filled community members:
“For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ … Now you ARE the body of Christ, and members individually” (1 Corinthians 12:12,27)
But it is required that you “DISCERN” Him and His “body”:
“Therefore, whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not DISCERNING the Lord’s body” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29). Most translations available to me translate that word “discern” (Greek: “diakrino”/”διακρίνω”) as “recognize.” You “recognize” someone who is there in front of you, not someone who is merely “UP THERE” somewhere! The Jesus of the apostles literally is “down HERE” through His aggressively present Pentecostal Spirit. But since so much of our Christianity resists EXPERIENCING His Pentecostal Promise in the way that is clearly described within Acts, chapters 2, 8, 10 and 19 – because of that we do not experience what they experienced: OUR version of “glory” is all in the eschatological future – or so we imagine!
It is so sad that the vast majority of supposedly “Bible believing Christians” actually do not believe what that Bible actually says, but rather insist upon watering down the natural and literal sense of what Jesus and Paul clearly said about both the Lord’s promises of union and about one of the means by which He accomplishes that union: His Lord’s Supper! Your Reformation founders were so determined to disconnect you from the Roman Catholic additions to what Jesus and the apostolic Churches had created that they wound up “throwing out the baby along with the dirty bath water”! It is one thing to reject the non-Biblical term “transubstantiation,” but it is quite another to refuse to see the glorified bodily presence of our risen and glorified Jesus in our midst when we break bread, and to not be open to letting Him actual unite all that He is with all that we are through the joining ourselves to Him in the eating of His holy bread and wine! To me that is like a man and woman pledging themselves in matrimonial union but then refusing to “become one flesh” because such bodily activity is supposedly not “spiritual” enough. That kind of mindset sounds more gnostic than Biblical!
The Catholics and Orthodox have things to learn from some versions of those Protestants that they dismiss so easily. But here is where you Protestants, Pentecostals, and Anabaptists have something to learn from them. Even though “transubstantiation” is not a biblical term, it is FAR less destructive to an experiential union with Jesus than to the typical Protestant instinct to merely be thinking about what He did “once upon a time, in a land far, far away”!
He is not only ALIVE – He is willing to be gloriously present here and now, and to let you “discern” / “recognize” Him being literally AMONG all of you corporately, and WITHIN you personally! But you will need to abandon your typical “Protestantism” in favor of “BIBLICAL Christianity”!
Grammatical parsing chart: https://www.facebook.com/reel/899512649684897
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Reed Merino, M.Div.
ReedMerino.com
