THIS IS MY BODY… THIS CUP IS … MY BLOOD

In the verses we consider today we have set before us ‘the break­ing of bread’ or the Lord’s Supper. The Lord is prominent in this section and His Name occurs seven times. The object of the meeting is to show the Lord’s death and to remember Him. In the participation of this act the saints look back to His death and at the same time look forward to His coming. While we wait we look up and worship Him. This feast was instituted by the Lord Jesus on the same night and at the very time He was being betrayed by Judas. Yet, he takes time to draw aside with His friends and shares a Passover meal with them, and then in this feast intro­duces the New Covenant promised in Jeremiah chapter 31 and explained further in Hebrews chapter 8 verses 10-13. What Paul teaches here he had received by direct revelation from the Lord Himself, v. 23.

First, we are reminded that the Lord Jesus took a loaf, gave thanks, broke it and invited the believers present to eat. He explained that the loaf was a symbol of Christ’s body. His body, of course, refers to His personality, Himself, as well as His physical body. It emphasized that He had taken human form so that He would be able to die and that His body had been given for salvation, or as Paul says ‘for you’. Second, He took the cup and explained that it represented the new agree­ment between God and man which would be sealed and activated when He shed His blood at Calvary. It is interesting to observe that when the feast was instituted the cross was still future so the bread could not be His actual body, or the wine His actual blood. Both actions, breaking the bread and drink­ing the cup, are ‘in remembrance’ of Him and it is our great honour to be able to participate in them.

Verse 26 tells us that ‘as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death till he come’. There is, in this passage, no suggestion as to how often that might be, the emphasis being that every time we do it we are proclaiming His death. Other scriptures indicate that it was apostolic prac­tice to celebrate this feast on the first day of each week. This is a great honour and we should strive to do it worthily, vv. 27, 28.