Hoc est corpum meum

Week beginning 28 August 2005

The communion season has commenced. For the Presbyterian denominations on Lewis and Harris, this is a major liturgical point on the calendar. Congregations, in rote, will arrange periods of intensive preaching and fellowship, all with the focal point on the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

To date we have resisted the temptation to have frequent communion. The twice yearly ritual certainly guards against over familiarity with the Lord's Table, although it also arguably adds an unwarranted mystique to the sacrament. We have come a long way from the simplicity of the upper room, without its preparatory services, question meetings or communion tokens.

Yet the traditional communion season has much to commend it. It allows congregations the opportunity to hear ministers from elsewhere, which can only be a good thing. It stimulates prayer, expectation and desire, and, on a wilderness journey, any stimulus is good. And it has been remarkably blessed over the years as a means of enrichment and revitalising for the church.

Yet, last Sunday, some seven Presbyterian churches in Stornoway held their own communion service. Is there not something farcical about the notion of up to seven gatherings of Christ's followers celebrating communion within a stone's throw of, but excluding, the other six? Paul's question to the Corinthians is apposite: was Christ divided?

Of course not, and to share a common cup and break a common loaf of bread in memory of what the Lord did for us is meant to act as a binding and sealing ordinance, expressing the unity of the church. Our fractured denominationalism seems to argue against the very meaning of the Lord's Supper.

'This' said Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed, 'is my body' -- hoc est corpum meum. With that, he instituted the simplest of all memorials, forever reducing the elaborate ceremony of the Old Testament to the most uncomplicated of rituals.

However, as every student of historical theology knows, the interpretation of the words 'this is my body' was always contentious in the church. Literalists have always argued for a corporeal presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper; on the basis of Christ's words the Council of Trent declared that 'the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ, is truly, really and substantially contained' in the sacrament.

Following which, Roman Catholic dogma has insisted that the substance of the bread has to become the substance of Christ; 'by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord'.

I have great difficulties with this view. For one thing, it makes no sense of the moment of institution itself; was Christ actually holding his physical substance in his hands when he said 'This is my body?' Was he breaking his body in the upper room? Not at all; there is not one Gospel witness to a miracle of transubstantiation having taken place at the first Lord's Supper. Strange, indeed, given the transubstantiation which took place at Cana of Galilee.

Yet even in the Reformed reaction against the dogma of Trent, divisions existed. The Lutheran tradition, while denying that the sacrament was in any way a re-presenting of the sacrifice of Christ to God, nonetheless insisted that at some level Christ was corporeally present in the sacrament. The Lutheran concern was to take the words of institution literally; if Christ said 'this is my body', that's what he must have meant.

Zwingli, on the other hand, argued stoutly against this corporeal presence, claiming that whatever the efficacy of the Lord's Supper, and whatever the meaning of the words of institution, there was no physical presence of Christ in the sacrament. It may be that the view usually ascribed to him -- that the Lord's Supper is no more than a memorial -- is not quite what he meant, but he was certainly opposed to the idea of any change of substance taking place in, through, or around the bread.

Calvin, the theologian par excellence of the Reformed tradition, warned against three errors regarding the sacrament. First, he says, we are not to confound the spiritual blessing with the sign. Second, we are not to seek Christ under earthly elements. And third, we are not to imagine any kind of eating except that which is ours by the drawing of the Spirit, and exercised through faith.

That Calvinian view permeates the Westminster documents, with the Larger Catechism, for example, insisting that 'the body and blood of Christ are not corporally or carnally present in, with or under the bread and wine in the Lord's supper, and yet are spiritually present to the faith of the receiver, no less truly and really than the elements themselves are to their outward senses'.

The statement is magisterial, as is the treatment of the sacrament in the Westminster Confession. These Reformed documents persist in using words like 'truly' and 'really' of the presence of Christ in the Supper; yet also insist that it is possible to have a real presence of Christ in the sacrament without having his flesh literally present.

One of the best treatments and discussions of this theme in recent times is Ligon Duncan's essay on 'True Communion with Christ in the Lord's Supper' in the second volume of The Westminster Confession into the 21st Century (Christian Focus). If you want to examine the issues further, read that essay.

This is not some passing footnote of theological interest which is of peripheral relevance. It is foundational to our understanding of the means Christ has instituted for the strengthening of his church and the faith of his people. When he said 'This is my body' he did not mean that participation in the sacrament was enough to make a person a Christian. Nor did he mean that by some miracle of consecration the elements were changed into something other than themselves.

The bread of the Lord's Supper remains just that. But it is still true that Christ's body is present, present to faith just as the bread is to the senses of taste and touch. Without faith the sacrament is meaningless. Without faith it condemns the participant. Yet for faith, it is an awakening of the mental processes to all that Christ's body means in the gospel, bearing sin to the tree, and laying down his life for his friends.

And that is why the Lord's Table is so carefully hedged in Scripture; the sacrament is for those who live, like Paul, 'by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me'. It is in the intimacy of that relationship that Christ's words of institution come into their own.

iaind@backfreechurch.co.uk