On the Lord’s Supper

I find the sacramental name Communion to be just a tad ironic. I’ve always been told that, compared to its other names like Lord’s Supper and Eucharist, that Communion conveys to us that the bread and wine are both the means by which we commune with God and the primary reason we gather as a community of saints.

Yet the act itself, the minutes dedicated to the Communion during a service, for almost any denomination, is perhaps one of the most private spans of the service. It involves, at most, the receiving and passing of a tray from two other individuals or the reception of the elements from a singular clergy. Compare this to the moments before, during, and after worship when we turn to greet one another, or to congregational singing when we harmonize our voices with those who surround us. Even listening to a sermon feels like more of a communal act than the private partaking of Communion.

Of course, none of that detracts from the vertical communing with the divine that occurs during that moment, but it does still feel strangely singular in the horizontal. I, as an individual, eat the bread and drink the cup, in remembrance of my Lord. 

Now that could be the point to be made—we ought to recognize this contradiction and seek to remedy it. We should make our Communions more meal-like, emphasizing the horizontal in addition to the vertical. Yet, I think the ubiquity of this mode of Communion, as a deeply private act, ought to remind us—as my friend Kraig Martin recently told me—that the individual remains the fundamental unit. As important as it is that we are brought into the Church, as true as it is that we are saved by our participation in that body, we each remain ultimately private, our minds closed off to everyone besides ourself and the Father who sees all. Our souls are not dissolved in an ocean of divinity, as in eastern religion, but stand in singular relation with Christ and with each other. In this way, our communion with others and our communion with God is always translated through our private experience.

The Churches of Christ pride themselves in their weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper. This is in contrast to groups like Methodists, Baptists, and Non-denoms that might partake once a month, once a quarter, or even once a year. By at least this one metric, Churches of Christ have a very high view of the eucharistic sacrament and its necessity.

Although I didn’t do any research for this post, the reason I had always heard for why other traditions took it less frequently is that by doing so they made the meal more special. But this never made sense to me. Something that occurs rarely may be special (Christmas), but you don’t do something less to artificially make it more special (tell your spouse you love them). 

More interesting, I think, are those traditions that take Communion more frequently. Roman Catholics, for example, offer Mass (and therefore the Eucharist) every day. You can’t have too much of a good thing.

This might raise suspicions if one heeds Paul’s warning, “he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment unto himself.” Granted, Catholics take this very seriously; one ought not participate if they have not gone to confession. Yet the caution still stands. If we take this supper seriously, as more than a celebratory snack during a gathering of friends, that something of deep importance is going on in our partaking, then we ought to approach it with fear and trembling, charged by the power of the event but wary of what it demands of us.

A couple weeks ago at church, someone offered an analogy I had not heard before, to illustrate the trepidation to increase the meal’s frequency. They pointed to Old Testament accounts of the high priest who entered the Holy of Holies only once a year. This practice was surely something exciting and good—something the people of Israel looked forward to throughout the year. But it brought with it a real sense of danger, the possibility of judgement, and I feel confident in guessing that the high priest did not want to increase its frequency.

For the Israelites, the regularity for the Day of Atonement balanced between something to be done as much as possible and something not to be indulged in—and that regularity was annual. For the Lord’s Supper, even as we are brought closer, invited to partake more frequently, the regularity we find in Scripture and the early Church is of something weekly. The New Testament pattern, affirmed by Ignatius and the Didache, brings together the Lord’s people with the Lord’s Supper on the Lord’s day. The Church for much of its history has been of varying opinion on how often this powerful meal ought to be taken—and for that reason, we ought to be generous—but the ideal between fervor and fear seems to be on Sunday.

Considering the power of the Eucharist, I may be coming around on the doctrine of transubstantiation. But, not as it’s normally construed.

Typically transubstantiation is presented as the elements, the bread and the wine, becoming the real body and blood of Christ. To explain this, why it does not taste like flesh and blood, appeal is made to the Aristotelian concepts of substances and accidents, where substance is what is essential or fundamental to a thing (whatever makes me me) and accidents are incidental (having thick brown hair). So, in the process of transubstantiation, the substance of the elements is changed to the real Christ, while the accidents remain those of normal bread and wine. 

It was explained to me by a friend, however, that in Catholic thought, transubstantiation remains a sacred mystery, and while Aristotelian categories may be helpful, they are not a matter of dogma—one does not have to accept the language of substance and accidents. That’s good. Because I don’t.

Still, even without those philosophical details, the idea that Christ is really present in the meal is still uncomfortable for my tradition. The Churches of Christ are deeply influenced by the legacy of Zwingli (who made an appearance on the blog just a few weeks ago) and his view that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial. Drawing on scriptures like Luke 22 and 1 Corinthians 11, he argued that Catholic and other Protestant teachings that claimed that Christ was really present relied on pseudo-philosophy and failed to understand metaphorical language. It would be irrational to claim otherwise.

Without rehearsing the entire history of the argument, let it suffice to say that this is precisely what was at stake in those Reformation debates. The European world had suddenly become, thanks to folks like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, very uncomfortable with the sort of statements the Church was making, especially regarding what is real. It had become much easier to say that Christ is merely symbolically present in the Eucharist.

And if the scientific determines our sense of real, then this seems right. Molecularly speaking, nothing changes in the bread and wine. But this does not seem to capture what was real for the early Church (who had robust conceptions of sign and metaphor). They chose to speak of Christ’s real presence. Nor does it account for Capernaum and the willingness to turn away those who took literally Jesus’s teaching. Rather than a simple correction (“Sorry, you didn’t understand—I was speaking metaphorically”), Christ recognizes that their failure is not in understanding language but in resisting a Messiah who will soon die and not always be with them in his present form. 

More than these reasons, transubstantiation begins to make sense when we recognize that Christ’s presence in the supper is more than the presence of American values in a bald eagle and more than a marriage’s presence in a ring—Christ’s presence is the really real. There is nothing more real than that.