A FEW YEARS AGO I WAS APPOINTED TO PASTOR A small church while I was in graduate school. The congregation had been served by a lay speaker for several years prior to my arrival. He was a true saint of a man—every bit the minister I was and more. But since he was not ordained, he didn’t administer the Lord’s Supper during worship. When I arrived I spoke to the congregation about moving to a monthly practice of Holy Communion, and everyone was eager to do that.
On the first Communion Sunday, I led the church through the liturgy. In my tradition, that always includes Jesus’ words of institution: “This is my body, this is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me.” As I spoke these words before the congregation, I held up the bread and the cup of wine so the congregation could see them. Once our prayers were finished and the invitation to come forward was given, the people began to leave their pews and file forward. My wife, Emily, ended up behind a family with a nine-year-old girl. This family was at church every Sunday, but most of the girl’s life she had not been able to experience the Lord’s Supper. As the line moved forward, my wife saw the girl tug on her mother’s sleeve and look up at her. “Is it really blood, Mama?” she asked with wide eyes.
I smile every time I think back on that story. The sense of awe and mystery that my little nine-year-old church member felt approaching the altar was exactly right. The sacrament itself goes by a number of names: Holy Communion, Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper. All of them refer to the most central act of worship in which Christians partake. John Wesley taught that Jesus Christ gave the Lord’s Supper to the early church as “the grand channel whereby the grace of his Spirit was conveyed to the souls of all the children of God.”1
Along with baptism, we call the Lord’s Supper by a special term: sacrament. It’s a word that refers to something that is holy. And indeed, the Lord’s Supper is a holy meal. It is a meal that constitutes the church, in a certain sense. It provides us with the most vivid image of what God calls the church to be: the fellowship of Jesus’ disciples gathered together around a table in his name, celebrating his sacrifice, and receiving the sustenance of his grace. As much as anything we can do, the Lord’s Supper is a true means of grace.
If we want to understand the power and meaning of the Lord’s Supper, we have to start by going back to the Old Testament. Before the twelve tribes of Israel settled the land of Canaan, their ancestors lived as slaves in Egypt. Pharaoh was a cruel master, and he eventually conspired to kill all Hebrew boys at birth. Then God called a man named Moses to be his prophet and liberate the Hebrews from slavery. Through Moses, God showed his power to Pharaoh by bringing about ten terrible plagues upon Egypt. The worst of these was the last—the Lord would sweep over the land and kill all the firstborn in Egypt.
The Hebrew people were told how to avoid this plague. They were to sacrifice a lamb and spread its blood on their doorposts. Then God would see that sign and pass over the homes of the Hebrews, sparing their own firstborn. It was this terrible judgment by God that finally convinced Pharaoh to allow the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt. Since that time, the people of Israel have remembered and celebrated God’s deliverance through the Passover meal.
It was this same Passover meal that caused Jesus to call together his disciples on the night of his betrayal. He wanted to celebrate the Passover with them, but he wanted to add something more to it. Following the meal on that night in the upper room, Jesus took a loaf of bread and cup of wine and prepared to give a gift to the church.
Now, let’s pause just a moment. I think we have to remember how significant Jesus’ actions were on that night. He knew his time was at hand. He knew he had one last shot with the disciples. He could have done anything with them—taught them anything he wanted, given them particular instructions. What he chose to do was to gather them together for the Passover meal in the upper room. And he chose to give his closest companions a gift that was meant for the church in all the generations to follow.
As the Bible tells it, after the Passover meal had been eaten Jesus took a loaf of bread. Then he broke the bread and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat, this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” After they had received the bread, Jesus took a cup of wine. “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood,” he said (see Luke 22:19–20). And then he shared the cup of wine with them as well. All of this happened just hours before Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot and handed over to be interrogated, beaten, condemned, and finally crucified.
The lamb that Hebrew families sacrificed on the night of the tenth plague foreshadows the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He is the one that Revelation identifies as the Lamb that has been slaughtered and yet now sits upon the throne of heaven. This Lamb, Revelation tells us, will be our shepherd. He will guide us to the springs of the water of life, and he will wipe every tear from our eyes (v. 7:17). At the Last Supper, the disciples— all of them Jews—would have been reminded of the sacrificial lambs in Egypt when they ate the Passover meal with Jesus that night. Through his teaching to them, he prepared them to remember his own sacrifice on the cross that was still to come. Even so, Jesus wants us to think about the sacrifice of himself when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper now.
“For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
—1 Corinthians 5:7b–8 NKJV
When we see John Wesley calling the Lord’s Supper the grand channel of God’s grace to us, he is emphasizing the deep importance it has in uniting the Christian faith with the faith of Israel. Jesus chose a very particular moment to share the gift of Holy Communion—both to show its connection to the Passover meal and to show the disciples how central it ought to be to the practice of the Christian faith. Through the Lord’s Supper, Jesus tells us that his story is the culmination of Israel’s story. And he gives us a place in that story by sharing the holy meal with us and commanding us to share it with others forever after. It is the symbol of his saving death, the most powerful expression of God’s love for us.
Earlier we saw how Wesley does not say that the Bible itself is a means of grace. Instead, he says “searching the Scriptures” is the means of grace. He focuses on the activity of searching rather than the object itself because it is in the process of engaging God’s word with our minds and hearts that we encounter the Holy Spirit.
With that in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Wesley does not typically say, “The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace.” If he were to do that, it might lead us to focus too much on the physical objects: bread and wine. So Wesley favors action verbs in his teaching on the Lord’s Supper. He talks about “partaking of the Lord’s Supper” and “receiving the Lord’s Supper.”2 He wants us to think about encountering the power of the Holy Spirit in the midst of worship, in other words. Without God’s presence through the power of the Spirit, the bread and wine remain just bread and wine. But with the Spirit, they become the body and blood of Christ for us.
There’s a little bit of a disconnect between the way that Wesley viewed Holy Communion and the way it has been viewed by many Wesleyans and Methodists in subsequent generations. After the Methodist movement crossed the Atlantic Ocean and ended up as a separate church following the American Revolution, the sacramental focus of Wesley’s teaching was largely lost. Eventually, most Methodist churches were celebrating the Lord’s Supper quarterly (four times per year). There were reasons for this development—the spread-out, frontier character of early America (with too few ordained ministers) not least among them. Nevertheless, it was still a far cry from Wesley’s counsel that “every Christian should receive the Lord’s Supper as often as he can.”3 He taught that we should celebrate Holy Communion at every opportunity.
Why so often? Wesley believed that the rationale for celebrating Holy Communion as often as possible comes from two points of biblical teaching. The first point is the command from Jesus when he says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The idea here is that his command is ongoing. We don’t just “do this” one time and consider that to be the end of the matter. Instead, Jesus expects us to “do this” over and over again, and this is supported in Scripture by the frequency that the Lord’s Supper is celebrated in the Acts of the Apostles. It is also supported by the way the apostle Paul teaches about the Lord’s Supper in his writings. So if we want to be faithful to the command of Christ Jesus, we will receive the Lord’s Supper as often as possible.
The second point that helps us understand why we should celebrate often comes from the effects upon us of receiving the Lord’s Supper. It’s here that the real power of Communion as a means of grace can be seen. It makes Jesus Christ’s forgiveness of our sins real to us—for it is out of forgiving love, after all, that he says, “This is my body, given for you.” The Lord’s Supper is also intended, Wesley says, for the “strengthening and refreshing of our souls.” His description of the sacrament’s power on this point is remarkable. Bread and wine are food that we can eat to nourish our bodies. But this bread and wine—the bread and wine of the sacrament—is meant to be “the food of our souls.” They give us the “strength to believe, to love and obey God.” His language is vivid, and it is all meant to convey an understanding of how Holy Communion really is a means of grace to us.4
There are a number of ways that we can understand how the Lord’s Supper acts as a means of grace. These ways are reflected in the words of the liturgy for Holy Communion: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” The first of these has to do with the way that Communion gives us the memory of all that Jesus Christ was and did. That’s the most direct meaning of Jesus’ words to “Do this in remembrance of me.” We remember that God became incarnate in the person of Jesus. We remember his teaching, his preaching, and his healing. We especially remember his sacrifice upon the cross for our sins. As we eat and drink from the bread and the cup, we remember that his body and blood were given for us.
Yet even though we know that Christ has died, we also know that Christ is risen. He was raised from the dead, and he will be alive forevermore. So the second way that the Lord’s Supper is a means of grace to us is in the way that it conveys the power of his grace to us now. When Wesley describes the Lord’s Supper as the food for our souls, he is saying that it offers us something real in the here and now. In my own experience I can testify that the Lord’s Supper does indeed convey a spiritual power unlike any other.
When I attended my first summer youth program as a junior high–schooler, I was mostly excited about spending a few nights away from home and having fun. We had plenty of fun that summer, but I also encountered the power of the Holy Spirit in a way I never had before in my life. At the end of an evening worship service, we received Holy Communion and gathered on an outdoor patio to sing quiet songs of praise to Jesus Christ. I had been partaking of the Lord’s Supper for as long as I could remember, but something was different about that night. Something entered my heart and soul unlike anything I had ever known as I went forward to receive the bread and the cup. During our time in quiet song afterward, this power overwhelmed me and I felt as if I were melting from the inside out. Tears flowed down my cheeks. The inward experience was one of indescribable joy. I had heard Jesus Christ preached and taught for my entire life in church. At that moment, though, I knew that Jesus Christ was real through his grace given to me. It’s an experience that has remained with me every day since, and the means by which it was given was the sacrament of Holy Communion.
The final confession in the liturgy is that Christ will come again. This points us to the third way that the Lord’s Supper acts as a means of grace for us. This is because the Lord’s Supper stands as a sign of God’s promise. And that promise is that Christ will return in ultimate victory at the end of days. When Wesley wants to emphasize this aspect of the sacrament, he cites the apostle Paul’s teaching, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). Thus, we can understand Holy Communion “refreshing our souls . . . with the hope of glory.”5 It is a continual reminder of God’s promise that Christ is coming back to us to bring all things to completion. In other words, the practice of the Lord’s Supper is nothing less than a foretaste of the kingdom to come.6
When we were looking at prayer and searching the Scriptures, we were looking at examples of the means of grace that can be practiced either alone or in the context of a community. The Lord’s Supper is different in that respect. Celebrating the Lord’s Supper is the essence of the whole church’s worship. We all receive the bread and the cup individually, but none of us receives it alone. Just as Christ Jesus called the twelve disciples together at the Last Supper so, too, does he call his church together around the altar for Holy Communion now.
When you think about what is happening at Holy Communion, it’s like the sacrament is drawing us back in time so that we are, in a sense, joining the twelve disciples around that table in the upper room with Jesus. He is sharing his table with us, and he is including us in the company of his friends. He is offering us himself and in doing that he is making us a part of himself. As Jesus does that, he also shows us that we can share him with those others who are around the table with us. Stanley Hauerwas reminded us, “In this meal we are made part of God’s life and thus share our lives with one another.”7
This element of what Holy Communion means tells us something crucially important about the church itself. The church is, in a sense, the community of those who gather with Jesus around his table to share in the meal he gives us. We want to belong at that table, and of course Jesus tells us that we do. But everyone else gathered there belongs as well—they, too, are the ones to whom Jesus says, “No longer do I call you servants . . . but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). All who partake of his body are now a part of his body, and that body is made up of those whom Jesus has given the command, “Love one another: just as I have loved you” (John 13:34). That is the test of true discipleship, Jesus says. We will be known as his disciples when we learn to love one another the same way he has loved us. The implications of this teaching are far-reaching indeed. What the Eucharist invites us to experience is a new form of life where the old ways of the world are replaced by a new community of holy love.
Celebrating the Lord’s Supper is the essence of the church’s worship. We all receive the bread and the cup individually, but none of us receives it alone. It is the shared meal of Jesus’ friends.
As a seminary professor, I often encouraged my students to focus the entire worship service on the sacrament of Holy Communion whenever it is to be celebrated. That means choosing Communion hymns or praise songs to sing. It means offering up prayers that center on Eucharistic themes. And it means preaching a Holy Communion sermon if that is at all possible. It can be tragic when a congregation starts to see the Lord’s Supper as nothing more than a ritual, practiced once a month, that lengthens the worship service by an extra (and unwanted) ten minutes. When that happens, I think it is usually because the congregation has been allowed to think of Holy Communion as nothing more than a duty. Its power has been quenched, usually for lack of good teaching within the worship setting itself.
If we think about the Lord’s Supper as the central act of worship Jesus has given us, then it reframes our practice of it entirely. Here I like to think back about that passage in the Acts of the Apostles that was so important to John Wesley’s understanding of the means of grace. Through their practices of worship and devotion—including the “breaking of bread”—the early Christians experienced a whole new kind of life. The Bible even says that “awe came upon every soul” and that through these means “the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved” (see Acts 2:42–47). That doesn’t give you a mathematical formula for how grace works, but it does offer a testimony of its power. Follow the commands of Jesus Christ, and we can be assured that grace will follow us. For Wesley, it is impossible to think that we could partake of the holy meal that Jesus gives us without grace being at the center of it. He puts it this way:
Is not the eating of that bread, and the drinking of that cup, the outward, visible means whereby God conveys into our souls all that spiritual grace, that righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, which were purchased by the body of Christ once broken and the blood of Christ once shed for us? Let all, therefore, who truly desire the grace of God, eat of that bread and drink of that cup.8
So do we want to experience something new? Do we want to embrace fully the life that Jesus offers us? If so, we must embrace his gift of Holy Communion. Charles Wesley, the great hymn writer and John’s younger brother, once wrote, “O the depth of love divine, the unfathomable grace! Who shall say how bread and wine God into us conveys! How the bread his flesh imparts, how the wine transmits his blood, fills his faithful people’s hearts with all the life of God!”9 I like to think of those words as a reminder of the power contained in the gift God is trying to give us. In the Lord’s Supper, that is the gift of himself.