The practice has truly changed my life and I'm grateful to the North American Lutheran Church, the Navigators, and Living Water Lutheran Church, the congregation I serve, for opening up this wonderful road to intimacy with God to me and the members of our church. (If you'd like to know how I spend my quiet time with God, it's explained here.)
Below is today's journal entry for my quiet time. If it can, as my Navigators coach Bill Mowry says, "prime the pump" for your own relationship with God, that's great. But there is no substitute for spending time in God's Word each day yourself. To soak up His Word is to get to know our awesome, amazing God better. And knowing God better is the deepest yearning of every human being, whether they know it or not: Everyone longs to know the One in Whose image they were created!
Look: “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.” (1 Corinthians 11:29, ESV)
The discussion in 1 Corinthians 11, of headwear by women and men is so obviously time-bound and tied to Jewish worship customs and Paul’s contextual plea for Gentile-Christians to have consideration of Jewish-Christian sensibilities, that I pass over it.
The discussion of Holy Communion in the chapter, though, clearly has application for Christians beyond the first century, even though it addresses it within the context of the agape meal, which isn't how Christians ordinarily celebrate Holy Communion these days.
I’m especially struck by this verse, which I’ve never taken the time to consider before. Paul seems to be saying that if a person doesn’t perceive the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament, they bring judgment on themselves. In fact, I believe that it is what he is saying.
The pivotal word is the verb, discerning. The word in Greek, the language in which Paul and all of the New Testament writers composed their work, is διακρίνων (diakrinōn). That’s the passive, plural, nominative form of διακρίνω (diakrinó). It’s a compound word and a literal rendering might read to judge through. In other words, to see something in an object, person, or situation beyond its surface presentation, to see it for what it is in its entirety.
As it relates to Holy Communion then, Paul appears to be saying that when we receive the bread and wine of Holy Communion, the eyes of faith see that it is more than just bread and wine. In the sacrament, Christ gives His very self--body, blood, His all--to us.
This echoes Jesus’ words when He institutes the Sacrament. In Matthew 26:26-28, it says:
“Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
“This is my body,” Jesus says. And, “This is my blood.”
Failing to trust the promise that Christ gives here to be in, with, and under the bread and the wine is, Paul says, to bring judgment on ourselves.
Listen: Why does God’s Word insist on the importance of discerning Jesus’ actual body in the sacrament?
One reason may be is that He wants us to accept what it is that Jesus says. Jesus expects us to believe that He knows what the meaning of is is.
When He said, “This is my body, this is my blood,” He didn’t mean, “This represents my body, this represents my blood.”
He calls (He commands) us to accept the reality that, through the blessing of His Word, bread and wine become simultaneously His body and blood.
In the Sacrament, He re-enacts the miracle of God’s incarnation in Christ. Christ incarnates Himself in, with, and under the bread and the wine and fills us with Himself. Just as Christ was and is both truly God and truly human, in the Sacrament, believers are presented with what is both truly earthly food and truly Jesus Himself.
Failing to discern this by faith, in turn, means that we fail to receive what Christ offers in the Sacrament. Christ gives us His blood in Holy Communion to bring about, as He says, “the forgiveness of sins.”
If this promise isn’t met by faith, both in the Giver and in the gift He gives, there is no forgiveness.
To view the Sacrament as a symbolic religious act is to not receive what Jesus seeks to give.
To receive it as an act of Jesus, God-in-the-flesh, with trust--or, what is most possible for us merely from a human point of view, the willingness to trust, since we are incapable of believing in Christ or His promises apart from the faith-creating work of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:3)--is to receive exactly what Christ intends to give through it. To trust in Christ's presence in, with, and under the bread and the wine is nothing more and nothing less than believing in, or trusting in, Jesus (John 3:16-18).[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]
I think that receiving it with trust doesn’t mean we have to understand it. Who has the mind to understand it fully? This isn’t a philosophical proposition to be understood, but a mysterious act of love to be accepted...or spurned.
Martin Luther puts it well in The Small Catechism: “It is not the eating and drinking [of Holy Communion] alone [that brings forgiveness of sin, life, and salvation], but also the words that accompany it, ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’
“These words, together with the eating and drinking, are the chief thing in the Sacrament, and those who believe them have what they say and declare, namely, the forgiveness of sins.”
Response: Help me always, Lord, to reverence the gift of Yourself You give in the Sacrament of Holy Communion. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen
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