Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ,
We are a Reformed Church. That means we trace our roots back to the Reformation of the 16th century. The Reformation was the time when God raised up various people who tried to reform or change the Roman Catholic Church. But because the Roman Catholic Church was unwilling to reform and because those people were forced out of the RCC, churches like ours came into existence.
Well, Bertrand le Blas died in 1555. That means he died during the Reformation. le Blas was a velvet manufacturer in the town of Tournay, in France. One day, after praying with his wife and children about what he was going to do, he hurried to the Cathedral in the centre of town and found a place near the altar. At the moment when the priest held high the consecrated host – the bread, le Blas snatched it from his hand, broke it into bits, and yelled out, “Misguided men, do ye take this thing to be Jesus Christ, your Lord and Master?” With these words, he threw the fragments on the ground and trampled them underfoot. And rather than run out and try and escape, le Blas chose to stay and face the consequences. And the consequences for him were torture and a slow death that is just too awful to describe.
Now, we will come back to the point he was trying to make later on, but I trust that what he did and what happened to him gives you an idea of how huge the whole matter of the Lord’s Supper was during the Reformation. Many people died in Europe and Britain because of their views of the Lord’s Supper. And probably the key reason why there were soon Lutheran and Reformed churches is in large part because of disagreement about the Lord’s Supper. And this explains why the Heidelberg Catechism devotes EIGHT long and detailed questions and answers to the Lord’s Supper.
Well, thankfully, people are no longer being killed for their views on the Lord’s Supper. But even today, ask any group of professing Christians, What is the meaning of the Lord Supper? Does anything actually happen at the Lord’s Supper?, and you will get a variety of answers. If the Session were to announce that we were not going to have the Lord’s Supper any more, would you care? Would we really miss out on something important?
Well, what we are going to see today is that two things are vital to a proper understanding of the Lord’s Supper: faith and the Holy Spirit. And I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the Lord’s Supper. It is about the work of the Lord Jesus on the cross; it is about His broken body and poured out blood. But in terms of what His work on the cross means for us and does to us as we partake of this Supper, faith and the Holy Spirit are vital. So our sermon theme this morning is this: At the Lord’s Supper, believers are nourished with Christ and more and more united with Christ, by the Holy Spirit. And we shall see this as we consider the origins of the Lord’s Supper from Mark 14, and the meaning of the Lord’s Supper from 1 Corinthians 11 and John 6.
- So please turn firstly to Mark 14:22-24 (p. 1064). Here we have the Origins of the Lord’s Supper. “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to His disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.” Then He took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” He said to them.”
- We have recently seen that the OT, one-time sacrament of identification was circumcision, and that is was replaced by baptism in the NT. Well, the OT, regular or repeated sacrament of nourishment was Passover. And it is at this moment in the life of Jesus that He explains that the Lord’s Supper will replace the Passover as the NT sacrament of nourishment.
- I am sure you boys and girls remember the Passover. Jews – slaves in Egypt/Angel of death will kill all the firstborn/kill a lamb and paint its blood on the doorposts so the angel of death passes over that house. So each year as they celebrated Passover, the OT people of God were remembering a past event in order to be spiritually nourished today. But they were also being taught that one day there would come a greater sacrificial lamb, whose blood would truly take away sin.
- Well, here in Mark 14, Jesus was eating the Passover with His disciples. And in those days, there were four small glasses of wine for each participant of the Passover feast, unleavened bread, lamb, and other foods. Throughout the supper, the four glasses of wine would be drunk after certain prayers were prayed and certain Psalms were sung. After the third cup of wine was drunk, the last of the unleavened bread wafers were blessed, broken, and eaten. And it is probably at this time that Jesus said and did what we read in vv22-23.
- Now, we know from our Gospel of John studies that Jesus has been described as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world; Jesus is what the Passover lamb pointed forward to. And as we shall read in John 6 in a few moments, Jesus has already said to the disciples that He is the bread of life and that this bread is His flesh, and that whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life. Right now though, Jesus’ words would have been very confusing for the disciples. What is he saying? But of course, after Jesus died and rose again and the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples, they remembered this occasion and understood that Jesus was establishing the NT, regular sacrament of nourishment. No longer were God’s people to look back to and be nourished by the work of the slaughtered Passover lamb, now they are to look back to and be nourished by the work of Jesus, the Lamb of God, who was slaughtered on the cross.
- Well, those are the origins of the Lord’s Supper. So let’s now think about the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. Please turn to 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 (p.1202). Here we see that the Apostles had taken what Jesus said in Mark 14 as the instruction for the NT church to regularly celebrate the Lord’s Supper. And through the Holy Spirit, this is the instruction of the Lord for us today. We read, “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night 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, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
- Now, the phrase we want to focus on from these verses is v24, where we read, “This do in remembrance of me.”
- And to understand these words, we have to go back, again, to the Passover. When God commanded the people of Israel to celebrate Passover, He said, “When your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when He struck down the Egyptians.’” The OT people of God were to remember that God spared them from the Angel of death. So let’s think about that for a moment. What was the difference between the people of Israel and the Egyptians? Why did God spare the Jews? Did they deserve to be delivered? They, like the Egyptians, were wicked sinners who deserved to die. The only difference between them and the Egyptians was the blood of a lamb that substituted for them. The lamb died in their place. The lamb was slaughtered instead of them. And to keep them from forgetting that they were sinners who deserved to die, and that they were spared by the blood of the lamb, He commanded them to remember this event, regularly.
- And today, we are to do this (point to the table) in remembrance of Jesus. In and of ourselves, we are no better than the rest of humanity; we are all wicked sinners who deserve death and hell. Because God is perfect, it only takes one lustful thought, one angry or gossipy word, one selfish act, to make us deserving of an eternity in the fire and pain and misery and loneliness of hell. And the truth is that there is a mountain of sinful thoughts and words and actions in our lives that we add to every day. We all deserve to die and be condemned to hell. The only difference between us in here and those out in the world is the broken body and poured out blood of Jesus. All those who believe that Jesus died on the cross for the forgiveness of their sins are delivered, are rescued, are saved, are washed clean of their sin and guilt. To them God promises eternal life. And this is what we are to remember, regularly!
- This is why we said at the beginning that faith is one of the two things that are vital for a proper understanding the Lords’ Supper! A76 of the Catechism says that eating the body of Christ and drinking His blood “means to accept with a believing heart the entire suffering and death of Christ and by believing to receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life.” This Supper is only a blessing to those who believe that Jesus is the Lamb of God who died in their place.
- Now, if we were to stop there, we would still only have a remembrance meal. We still could not say that anything actually happens at the Supper. And that is why we must turn, lastly, to John 6:35 (p.1117). Jesus has just fed a vast crowd by miraculously multiplying a small amount of bread. And as you can imagine, this reminded the Jews of the miraculous bread that God fed the people of Israel when they were in the wilderness. What was that bread called, boys and girls? So the people ask Jesus to do another miracle. But look at what Jesus says in v35: “Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.” And drop down next to vv47-58: “I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever.””
- It probably will not surprise you to learn that in the early days of the NT church, one of the things that Christians were accused of was cannibalism. And you can see why as you read these words! We are to eat flesh and drink blood!
- Well, let’s focus on vv55-56 as a summary of everything Jesus is saying here: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.” And remember also that when Jesus gave the bread and wine to His disciples, He said, “This is my body … this is my blood.” So is it the case, then, as our Roman Catholic and Lutheran friends believe, that the way to understand what Jesus is saying here is in a physical sense? Do we receive eternal life and remain in Christ by the act chewing the bread and drinking the wine, which somehow changes into or is joined to His body and blood? Is that what happens at this table?
- Well this, congregation, is the point that Bertrand le Blas was trying to make with his protest in 1555. You see, if this bread becomes the physical body of Jesus and the wine becomes His blood, then we ought to worship the bread and wine. And anyone, believer or not, only has to eat a crumb of this bread and a drip of this wine and they get eternal life, because Jesus said, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” So this would mean that if you are sitting there and you have any doubts about your eternal destiny, just charge up and grab some of the flesh of Jesus, and Hey Presto, you are in! But that cannot be so for then faith is irrelevant and unnecessary.
- So how are we to understand Jesus’ words? And we don’t want to strip His words of their plain intent; we must truly partake of the body and blood of Jesus in order to have eternal life and to be united with Him more and more. Well, the answer, brothers and sisters, young people, and boys and girls, is the Holy Spirit.
- We are physically here on earth. Jesus is physically in heaven. Our union with Him is by the Holy Spirit. 1 Corinthians 12:13 says, “For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body– whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free– and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” It is the Holy Spirit who unites us with the body and blood of Jesus as we eat the bread and drink the wine.
- This here is bread and this here is wine. But we can speak of these as the body of Jesus and the wine as the blood of Jesus because of the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit. It is because of the Holy Spirit that the sign is attached to the thing it signifies.
- Let me give you a human illustration. At a wedding, the man and woman place a ring on each other’s finger, and say, “With this ring, I thee wed.” So is the ring the thing? Does the ring make the marriage? The ring is a sign or symbol of love and commitment. But the sign and the thing it signifies are so united, we speak of the ring as the thing.
- And so it is with the bread and wine: we speak of the bread and wine as the body and blood of Jesus, because they are united by the Holy Spirit. So as the teeth chew the bread, the soul of the believer is nourished with and united more and more to the body of Jesus, by the Holy Spirit.
- And that, congregation, is what happens at the Lord’s Supper table. If we may continue with the wedding analogies, in the same way that a husband and wife have their union deepened through regular sexual intimacy, so our union with the Lord Jesus is deepened through the regular partaking of this Supper. But this happens not by dragging the body and blood of Jesus down into the bread and wine, but as the Holy Spirit lifts us up to Christ in heaven, by faith. And this is why the Lord’s Supper should be very precious and important for believers! Is it precious and important to you?
- Well, by way of summary then, the Lord’s Supper is a reminder of the forgiveness of sins in Christ. In Psalm 51:3, King David said, “My sin is always before me.” Do you know what he meant? Do you feel the constant weight of guilt because of your sins? Well, the Lord Jesus says, Come to my table and remember that in me you have the “complete forgiveness of all your sins.”
- And at this Supper, we believers are “nourished and refreshed for eternal life” and “united more and more to Christ’s blessed body,” by the work of the Holy Spirit.
- And when you understand that this is what the Lord’s Supper means, that this is what happens at this table, it will affect your daily life at home, or in the office, or in the class room, or on the jobsite, or in the factory or wherever you find yourself. As the Spirit fills your heart with a bursting love for the Lord Jesus and all that He has done and is doing for you, you will want to talk and think and behave more and more like your Saviour. You will be eager to display more of the fruit of the Spirit. And you will want to tell others about Jesus the Saviour of sinners.
- And I hope that if you are not yet a professing member of a church that this will fill you with an eagerness to become one so that you too may come to the Lord’s Supper.
Pray for right preparation.