The Strange Power of a Meal: Daily Thoughts from Mark (Mark 14:22-25)

What does it mean when you invite someone into your home for a meal?  What level of relationship is symbolized?  Eating together is a powerful witness to intimacy or at least the desire for intimacy.  You and I sit across from each other and watch each other stuff our faces, a rather intimate thing to witness.  It is an opening of our lives to one another and a sign of mutual trust.

It is not surprising that Jesus, at a meal, established a meal as a ritual to bring us together around the truth.  Here, in his last day before being killed, he eats with his disciples.

And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.” (Mark 14:22-25, ESV) 

The Lord’s Supper (also called Communion = fellowship meal or community meal, the Eucharist = thanksgiving meal) was born out of the Passover meal Jesus celebrated with his disciples.  Passover was a reminder of the deliverance from Egyptian slavery that God performed for His people.  The Lord’s Supper is a reminder of the deliverance from sin that Jesus accomplished for us on the cross.  The lamb eaten at Passover represented the sacrificed animal whose blood caused death to pass over Israel.  The bread and wine represent Jesus’ body and blood sacrificed for us in our place so that we would not have to die, so that God’s judgment would pass over us.

The Lord’s Supper remains a practice until the kingdom comes with Jesus as its ruler on earth, when the meal eaten without Him will become a feast with our King.

Much has been made by our Catholic friends about the bread and wine becoming the literal blood and body of Jesus.  They believe he was being literal when he said, “This is my body.”  Several things militate against this meaning:

(1) When Jesus said it that night the bread was not his body literally.  He was, of course, still in his unresurrected body and it had not yet been given in sacrifice.

(2) Jesus’ body and blood do not have to be “sacrificed” again and again, as Hebrews 9:23-28 reminds us.  Yet that is what the Catholics teach happens each time the Eucharist elements are lifted high and blessed by the priests.

(3) If the bread and wine did, in fact, become Jesus’ body and blood we might expect some evidence of that, but there is no physical evidence to indicate that.  Catholics argue that it is a hidden transformation, a miracle that cannot be substantiated by physical tests.  But it is a useless and therefore pointless miracle if so because there is no need for the elements to become his body and blood and no way to prove a miracle has occurred.

(4) This view of things did not become the accepted teaching of the church until a few centuries into its existence.  It is a later addition to church belief which the Reformers rightly rejected as they sought to recover the true gospel.

(5) It gives unnecessary power to priests, who are the only ones who can bring about this supposed miracle (when they elevate the host) and make the communion a truly sacred meal.  The New Testament knows nothing of this kind of power or special action. 

The real power of the meal is two-fold.  It reminds us of the price Jesus paid to purchase our redemption and that our redemption comes only through his sacrifice.  And it brings us together as a family around the table to remember this sacrifice together in unity.  We need that call to unity around the true gospel over and over.