Faith & Writing
Faith · The Sacraments

The Lord's Table

More than a memorial: real presence, received by faith

Is communion only a symbol, a memorial of something long past? Most of the churches many of us grew up in say exactly that: bare memory, nothing more. But the New Testament, and the entire church before the modern era, treats the Lord's Table as something real, a genuine feeding on Christ, and part of what it means to abide in Him. The historic view is neither of the modern extremes. It is not transubstantiation, the bread physically becoming flesh, and it is not the bare reminder. It is a real spiritual presence: Christ truly given and truly received at His table, by faith.

John 6: the hard saying

Jesus says it, and keeps saying it, until it costs Him a crowd:

John 6:53-56 · KJV

Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you… For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

It is so hard that "many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him" (John 6:66). A familiar sermon points at that verse and compares anyone who believes in a real presence to those deserters. But the comparison runs backward. The disciples left precisely because they could not accept that Jesus meant something real; they wanted it to be only a figure of speech, and He would not soften it. The ones who stayed, like Peter, accepted the hard saying without fully understanding it. A memorial-only reading is the one that, like the crowd that walked away, cannot bear for anything real to be happening here.

"This is my body"

At the Last Supper Jesus does not say "this represents my body." He says:

Luke 22:19-20 · KJV

This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me… This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.

There is remembrance in it, yes, "this do in remembrance of me," but remembrance is not the whole of it. Paul makes that unmistakable.

Paul treats it as real

To the Corinthians Paul calls the cup and the bread a participation in Christ:

1 Corinthians 10:16 · KJV

The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?

"Communion" there is koinonia, a real sharing in. And Paul says taking it wrongly has real consequences: whoever eats and drinks unworthily is "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord… not discerning the Lord's body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep" (1 Corinthians 11:27-30), that is, some had become ill and even died. If the elements were a bare symbol, that consequence makes no sense. The believer who discerns the Lord's body is genuinely fed; the one who does not is genuinely endangered. The text treats the Table as having real spiritual reality.

It is part of abiding

Notice the words Jesus used back in John 6: "He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him" (John 6:56). That is the exact language of the vine: "Abide in me, and I in you" (John 15:4). The Table is one of the ways we abide, where the branch feeds on the vine and draws its life. Communion is not a ceremony performed near an absent Christ; it is a meal with a present one, part of the living connection by which we stay in Him. (See The Vine.)

What the church always held

This is not a novelty; the bare-memorial view is. Ignatius of Antioch, around 110 AD and a hearer of the apostles, called the Eucharist "the medicine of immortality" (To the Ephesians 20) and warned of those who "abstain from the Eucharist… because they confess not that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ" (To the Smyrnaeans 7). The fathers, the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and even Calvin in the Reformed tradition all held the sacrament to be more than a symbol. Calvin's own view, the one held by C.S. Lewis as an Anglican, is that Christ is truly present to the believer in the supper through the working of the Holy Spirit, even if not physically in the elements. Lewis put the right posture simply: "the command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand" (Letters to Malcolm). For roughly fifteen centuries no one taught that the Table was merely a reminder.

This is also where the modern Baptist memorial view has drifted even from its own confession. The 1689 London Baptist Confession, the historic Reformed Baptist standard, says worthy receivers "do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually, receive and feed upon Christ crucified… the body and blood of Christ being then… spiritually present to the faith of believers." A real spiritual feeding, not a bare memory. So a congregation that flattens the Table into a symbol and nothing more has wandered not only from the early church and from John 6, but from the 1689 itself. (See Even From Their Own Confessions.)

And baptism too

The same pattern shows up at the font. Paul does not describe baptism as a bare symbol of a decision already made, but as a real participation in Christ's death and resurrection: we are "buried with him by baptism into death… that… we also should walk in newness of life" (Romans 6:3-4), "buried with him… risen with him through the faith of the operation of God" (Colossians 2:11-12). Sacrament, in the historic sense, simply means a physical sign God actually uses to give what it signifies. The Table and the font are not empty pictures; they are means of grace.

Where this lands

The Lord's Table is not a funeral held for an absent Christ. It is a meal with a present one, where the branch feeds on the vine. You need not claim the bread changes its substance to take Jesus and Paul at their word that something real is given and received here. The merely-symbolic view, well-meant as it is, emptied the sacrament of what Scripture says it actually is. Come to the Table expecting to meet Him, because He said you would.

Study the passages

Read them in context. Links go to BibleHub.

Scripture quotations from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. Ignatius of Antioch, To the Ephesians 20 and To the Smyrnaeans 7 (c. 110 AD); John Calvin on the spiritual presence; C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm. Greek koinonia ("communion, participation") noted. See also Baptism, the church's other ordinance.