THE LORD'S SUPPER
THE LORD’S SUPPER
It is evident that the truth of the Lord’s supper was brought out correctively in 1 Corinthians 11, the Lord’s death having ceased to hold the hearts of the saints as gathered together. So that there was a disunited state of things and the saints were not unified; there was not a collective calling of the Lord to mind. Now it is in the absence of the Lord that He is to be called to mind, and this is necessarily as the One who had passed through death. The assembly knows Him thus. The whole truth of His devotion to the assembly has come out, and the whole truth of God’s relations to His people on earth. For one aspect of the assembly is that those who compose it are set in blessing of new covenant character. They are born anew and cleansed morally by the knowledge of God, and their sins and lawlessnesses are remembered no more. But they have come to this great blessing as brought into the value of the blood of the Lord Jesus. The houses of Israel and Judah have not come into new covenant blessing yet, but the saints of the assembly have; they are in it as a people on earth. His death has brought it about, and the memorials speak of His death, but they are partaken of for the calling of Him to mind. But the One we call to mind is known to us as living. We should not be together in assembly at all if we did not know that He was living at the right hand of God and had thus received the promise of the Holy Spirit and poured out the Spirit on His own down here.
The “me” that is called to mind is the absent One now in heaven, or gone to the Father, but known now as He could not be known in the days of His flesh. His love and what He is for the assembly has been expressed in death but He lives in all the strength of it. He is called to mind as the perpetuation of that love, though absent and risen.
[p. 97] The assembly is not to think of Him collectively in any smaller measure of love than was set forth in His death, and it can never think of Him in a greater measure, but the love that is thought of is a present love, a living love. He says, as it were, ‘The love expressed in My death was Myself and it is living in Me now’. He will never express that love in the same way again but it will never be less than it was then. The “me” is unchanged. It is not one Person in death and another as with the Father; the “me” is the permanent Lover of the assembly.
But His death is employed in the Supper because the assembly begins at that point, and also because of the deep moral exercises which are bound up with the Lord’s body and His blood. It is the public announcement of His death until He come. It is a great reality! The Lord has died here. If what we do is the setting forth of that, how can we do it unworthily? It must be done in deepest reverence, with subdued hearts, as in presence of the fact that the Lord, the righteous One, died here. If one does not regard the emblems with reverence, one is guilty in respect of the body and the blood of the Lord. They are that symbolically and representatively. There is no change in the elements, but they have been consecrated by the Lord to represent His body and His blood, so that they are not ordinary bread and wine to be treated merely as such. The Lord’s words have consecrated them, and he who disregards them becomes guilty.
“But let a man prove himself” (verse 28). Are the bread and the cup really to me symbolically the body and the blood of the Lord? Do they really mean that to me? Then I am welcome to eat and to drink. But if I do not distinguish His body I am trifling with a holy institution and I shall come under judgment. They were not distinguishing the body at Corinth. The Lord’s supper had become just like a common meal, and the Lord was dealing with them on account of this.
[p. 98] In the act of eating and drinking the assembly announces the Lord’s death. The act has a public voice; it does not speak of His life in flesh, or of His risen life, it speaks of His death. Then it must be done worthily. This refers to the manner of doing it, not to the worthiness of the persons who do it. It refers to what can be seen. If one did it unworthily he would certainly have no part in calling the Lord to mind; he does not regard the bread and the cup as representing the body and blood of the Lord, but they do in the Lord’s account. They have that place in the assembly; the assembly gives them that place. So that to eat and drink carelessly is a most serious matter; it makes one guilty in respect of the body and blood of the Lord. Therefore a man is to prove himself as to whether the bread and the cup really represent to him the body and the blood of the Lord.
It is not examining his own spiritual state, or reviewing his own history, that is meant by this; it is not even a question of seeing whether I have judged everything that I ought to have judged. These things are all necessary in their place but they are not what the apostle has in mind here.
Do the loaf and the cup really represent to me the body and blood of the Lord? If they do, there would be no doubt about my partaking worthily. But if one does not distinguish the body, one eats and drinks judgment to oneself. That is, it is essential to separate that bread from all other bread, to see the unique place the Lord has given it as representing His body. It comes before us on every occasion invested with the special and holy character given to it by the Lord’s own words.