The Body Of Christ
Nathanael Szobody on For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
These words are Jesus’ last will and testament here on this earth. He is about to leave his disciples and these are the words and actions he chose to lay down his will and leave them with the legacy that he desired and would sustain by his own death and resurrection.
We celebrate the Lord’s supper on a regular basis in church and have some idea as to its purpose. We know that we are to remember the death of Jesus for our sins, just as Paul says: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” We also feel that there are spiritual benefits in doing this as it brings us closer to God in our own personal lives to remember what he has given by his grace. But these thoughts are not very concrete; they are ideas that we pick up in the words of Christ, but probably even more from the way the actual observance of the the Lord’s supper is carried out in our churches.
What was Jesus’ purpose in giving this ritual to the disciples and to us? What does it mean that “this is my body”? And how should I approach it to get what I am supposed to?
If you want to know what you’re getting into, here’s a tentative summary:
The body of Christ is the physical invested with the spirit of God. We are his body just as the bread at the Lord’s supper is his body, for we are real literal bodies invested with his spirit, just as the bread is a real literal body invested with his promise of life–which only comes through his spirit. To investigate the nature of the bread and cup is to come to a deeper faith in who we are as the body of Christ in a practical, physical, sacrificial manner.
Now in many more words:
The Lord’s supper did not fall out of heaven with thunder and lightening; it was given at a strategic point in the life of Christ with a world of context surrounding it. Let’s take a look.
The meal is a Passover meal. It is in memory of the day when God passed over the house holds of all those who were covered by the blood of the sacrificed lamb on their door posts. It was a community celebration of when God had saved them from the slavery of Egypt
Comments ( 8 )
I feel like you are mixing up to many good ideas into one pot to come up with another good idea of your own cooking.
I also kinda bristle at the "last will and testament" - I don't tend to think Christ left a will behind, but if He did I see it in Acts 1:6-9
"you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth." - this is the last thing He said and points me steadily toward my goal as a Christian.
I also get caught up on your insistance the as the Holy Spirit dwells within me I am called to "be Christ" rather than to "be like Christ". Maybe I misread that, but it smacks of a self grandification that I'm not prepared to bite into at the moment.
All in all, it certainly left me with more to consider than I had previously.
Self grandification? Read my previous post. :)
That leaves us with Consubstantiation, or The Lutheran View: "In, With, and Under" and The Rest of Protestantism: A Symbolic and Spiritual Presence of Christ".
So I am quite obviously of the Symbolic and Spiritual Presence crowd - where are you Consubstantiation, Symbolic and Spiritual, or something in between - because I'm still failing to grasp your post in this matter.
Personally I hold to the Lutheran position reiterated Here.
-The bread is Christ's body and the cup is the cup of the new covenant.
-The bread and the cup are both a real communion with the body and blood of Christ.
-The bread and the cup remain simple bread and simple wine.
These are statements are said to be true because of the plain words of Jesus and the Apostle Paul. How exactly the bread can be real bread and Christ's body simultaneously is not explained in scripture and therefore a mystery. Neither do we feel a need to explain the exact scientific meaning of the word "body", only that it need not be explained away as symbolic.
Personally, I agree with you that the focus of our study should be on the purpose of the supper and it's application to the Christian life, not necessarily the exact degree to which Christ's body is present.
However, as I come to understand the purpose of all creation as the physical means by which Christ establishes his communion of sacrificial love with man, I also realize that the teaching of Lord's supper is not a discontinuous set of propositions to be stated in a systematic, but rather pivotal moment where Christ makes his gift of life all the more real in the body of believers as a new creation.
Within this context I realize how crucial it has been to refrain from trying to explain the sacraments as mere representations even when I didn't like the idea of leaving Christ's words stand for what they are even when I don't understand them. For only now I feel I am beginning to catch a glimpse of their larger meaning--which would be far less biblically encompassing if I did not have first of all a healthy respect for mystery. ;)
Heaven! Now that is a fun topic! I'm going to go focus in that direction for a bit.
/me wanders of mumbling about how many times the phrase "heaven is like" can be found in the bible and how that is not indicative of the .....