MAY 2ND, 1944

MAY 2ND, 1944

BELOVED BROTHER, — The Lord’s supper is ever a matter of deepest interest to those who love Him. I desire more and more that it may be to me what it was in His mind when He instituted it. There is not, so far as I see, in the institution, nor in the emblems employed, nor in Paul’s references to it, any allusion to the Lord as risen or ascended. His body and blood, His death, are emphasised. No doubt this led Mr. Darby to stress that it was “a dead Christ” who was recalled in the Supper. Though we do not recall His death merely as a fact; we recall the Person who died; it is “for the calling Me to mind”. He would be remembered in the way that would most deeply affect the hearts of those who love Him. But the fellowship is of His blood and of His body, and in eating and drinking we announce the Lord’s death, and those who do so unworthily are guilty in respect of the body and of the blood of the Lord.

The remembrance of Him as having been in death for us liberates and unifies us, and brings about that He is the one Object before all our hearts. If that were truly so He would not leave us orphans; He would come to us. And it is evident that if He comes to us the thought of remembrance or memorial gives place to His realised presence. Hence, as we have been learning for many years, the Lord’s supper has its place at the beginning of the assembly service. If He presents Himself to us as living we are clearly not remembering Him; we have entered a new and further phase of the service. And so with association with Him before His Father and God. The Person whom we call to mind is living, but is not the whole point of the institution that He should be remembered as having been in death for the saints of the assembly? That was His point of contact with us, and of ours with Him. And while here in the place where He died we are in the fellowship of His body and His blood, and give expression to it in eating the bread and drinking the cup together. And our understanding of this, and affectionate identification with Him in it, is preparatory to our realising what it is to live with Him as out of death. The steps in assembly service must be taken in their due order; if we are weak in what the Supper presents we shall be weak in all that follows.

The Lord did not institute His Supper as risen or as in heaven. In the institution He viewed His death anticipatively as already accomplished and set before them in emblems ^[p. 332] which He selected for the purpose — emblems which would never suffer them to forget, as assembled, His body and His blood. These things were the voice of His love as expressed here, never to be heard again in the same way, but perpetuated as the rallying point of the assembly until He come.

It is to be noted that when our apostle refers to this he does not touch on association with Christ in spiritual privilege (I suppose the Corinthians were not at all ready for this). He dwells on the fellowship and the remembrance in their intensely moral and practical bearing. If we participate in the fellowship of the Lord’s body and blood it must condemn every unholy association here. If we announce the death of the Lord the very way in which we eat and drink must be in moral keeping with that death. In principle this would reach out to every detail in our responsible life.

We must bear in mind that the Lord’s supper is the first thing in the assembly service, though we must admit that we came very slowly to the apprehension of this. It is what the assembly takes up as in the wilderness position. As we take up affectionately the remembrance or memorial side, with its far-reaching moral effect, we get liberty for spiritual privilege. And I think it must be borne in mind that the Lord, in putting His Supper first in the assembly service was thinking of all His own; He would have babes and fathers to start together all unified in calling Him to mind, and first of all in relation to His body and His blood. There would probably be more liberty if we did not attempt to bring into the service of the Supper what really has its place after the Supper.

May 2nd, 1944.