Encore Post: The Lord’ Supper is really very simple. At his last Passover meal, Jesus took bread, broke it, gave it to his disciples and said, “This is my body” and took a cup of wine and said “This is my blood.” When we eat this bread, we also eat his body and when we drink this wine, we drink his blood. From the day the Lord instituted this sacrament until the Reformation, all Christians believed these words do what they say. They also realized this was a mystery that human reason cannot possibly begin to understand.
Because we cannot understand how this can be true, the Reformed and Evangelical traditions believe that Jesus did not mean these words literally, but that the sacrament is a meaningful symbol that reminds us of the death of Jesus on the cross for the forgiveness of sins. They argue that a human body can only be in one place at a time. Since Jesus is now in Heaven, the literal body and blood of Jesus cannot be in the elements of Holy Communion. This way of interpreting the words of Jesus, however, relies not on Holy Scripture, but on our capability of making sense of them.
The problem with this approach is it causes all kinds of other difficulties. Human wisdom is limited because we are creatures and God is our creator and because we are sinful and God is holy. We can never know for sure that we are right when we depend upon our reason. So, Lutherans are content to use our reason to understand what God’s word says and then believe it, even when we cannot put it all together. We let the Bible be the master of our minds and not our minds the master of the Bible. (theologians call these approaches the ministerial and magisterial uses of reason) When we start to alter the meaning of Scripture based on reason, we end up with all kinds of unintended problems. For example, if Christ’s resurrected body can be in only one place at a time, Heaven, then how can he be as he promised “with us always until the end of time.” (my paraphrase of Matthew 28:20)
Since all of the passages which report the institution of the Lord’s Supper are simple reports of the historical events and none of them have poetry, teaching or preaching in them, we take them at face value. They mean exactly what they say. When Jesus says “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” we believe that is exactly what the Lord’s Supper is: Bread together with the body of Christ and Wine together with the blood of Christ. We wonder at the mystery of it all and thank God for the gift of his own flesh and blood to us, uniting us to him now and forever.
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