Fifth Sunday after Trinity
July 4, 1858
“For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till He come.”——1 Corinthians xi. 26.
The passage: Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you show the Lord’s death until he comes.
I have spoken to you often about the Eucharist, and I must speak of it again. I wish we could connect it with everything said from the pulpit on Sundays and with all our weekday acts. Then I believe the disputes about it, which each year and month renews in every corner of the Church, would distress us more than ever, yet make us despair less. We would find the root of them in ourselves. We would understand why they have been so serious and so frivolous, and why no clever men, arrangements, or decrees can settle them. We would learn how, and by Whom, they must and will be ended.
I have taken these words from the chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians that is the classic one on this subject. I do not say they tell us all we want to know about the Lord’s Supper. They show it in one aspect. Let us consider it carefully in that aspect, and other sides will come out as we need them. If we try to take in the whole doctrine of the Sacrament at once, or refer it to some notion in our minds, we must shrink it into a topic of controversy and lose its practical blessing. But suppose we follow the Apostle’s hints one by one, compare them with our own wants and experience, and see how they interpret the wants and experience of mankind as history shows them. Then our reverence for its profound and infinite meaning will grow as we wonder more at its divine simplicity.
I. This simplicity is perhaps what we most envy in St. Paul’s discourse. “As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup,” he says. He says nothing about the way of receiving, the thing received, or the organ that receives. Such questions may be latent and may press on us in due time, but our teacher does not call us to them now. He says only: here is bread, the common food of men; here is wine, which speaks to all of life and exhilaration. So far we are on plain ground, and “as often” keeps us there. He is addressing a Society that meets at certain times to share that bread and cup. He assumes that the food and drink are nothing rare, and that rich and poor, all who want food and life, meet at it. The Corinthians had misunderstood this. They followed the old custom of feasts, each bringing his own contribution, and made it an occasion for bodily indulgence. St. Paul denounces them in this chapter for both perversions: their gluttony and drunkenness, and their shaming of the poor. They made it common in the sense of animal as opposed to spiritual. In the other sense of common, they scorned it, making it separate and exclusive. These two apparently opposite temptations are really allies, and in every century they reappear in new forms, never far apart. The Corinthians were esteeming the sign instead of the thing signified, and making the sign narrow and partial.
II. “As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew.” I cannot tell why our translators preferred this verb to “proclaim” or “announce.” But would we have expected either word? We are speaking of a Communion, a participation. Can an ordinance of that character be described as showing, announcing, declaring? As I said before, it is safer to let the Apostle explain himself than to insist that he follow a course we have prescribed. I believe he will tell us more about Communion and Participation than we would ever find out for ourselves, but I doubt we shall profit if we stumble at this phrase and wish to be rid of it. Do you think any ordinance of Christ can concern only the advantage or enjoyment of those who submit to it? Did He come from heaven to enjoy or to suffer, to be ministered to or to minister? If eating and drinking here means any communion or sympathy with Him, can this point be missing? Did He not come to declare a truth to men which only some would enter into? If in all our acts and services we do not make this a primary object, and put some selfish end above it, can we be like Him? Let us hold this firmly. If this feast shows nothing to the world, and we seek in it only some benefit for ourselves, it cannot be a communion in the body or mind of Jesus Christ.
I am anxious to press this on you, my brethren. I believe forgetting it has been a principal cause of the confusions of both Romanists and Protestants about this Feast. The Romanist has dwelt on the Eucharist as a Mystery. A dreadful secrecy belongs to it: the priest must hide from the vulgar the solemn incantations that give it grandeur and power, and the cup must not touch lay lips. Yet he has felt that somehow it must be a message to the world, so the Host is lifted on high and becomes an object of reverence and worship to the most sensual. The Protestant rightly says that what was meant for the spirit is thus degraded into an object for the eye, and that the Second Commandment is being trifled with. As Moses declared, no people can trifle with it except at the cost of its manliness and freedom. But in his jealousy for the rights of the spirit, he denies that the Sacrament shows or declares anything to mankind. He is impatient when it is called a Mystery, yet he confines its whole force to the faithful few. So he is caught in endless controversies over whether the Sacrament actually bestows anything, or whether the receiver makes it what it is by the belief he brings.
III. But what is it that is shown? St. Paul says, The Lord’s death. Had he not said so, many would have called the phrase hard and cold. “The Saviour,” they would say, “the divine Bridegroom, the ineffable Sacrifice offered to us in this feast. How can you speak of ‘the Lord’ like some Old Testament writer?” I imagine this Hebrew of the Hebrews used the Hebrew phrase because he did not think it obsolete for anyone, and knew it was not obsolete for him. He wanted sympathy and fellowship, and also to be guided and governed. The Incarnation had not lessened but deepened his reverence for the unseen Guide of his heart. Believing in a brother of Man, he did not remember less, or rejoice less, that He is the Lord of men. There were times when he delighted to say our Lord. On other occasions the Lord better expressed the universality of His dominion, and this was one. He is speaking of bread and wine as testifying, not to himself or his brethren, but to all men, of One whose kingdom was in the midst of them, and who had proved Himself King and Shepherd by dying for them.
IV. For it is the Lord’s death that we show forth whenever we eat this bread and drink this wine. Churchgoers commonly think the preacher exists to remind them of their mortality. From the scientific lecturer or the artist you hear of the wealth of life and beauty in the universe. During the week you are in the middle of civil stir and business, and everything speaks of continuous action. The Sunday schoolmaster, you suppose, is to counteract all your other teachers, and talk of the wearing out of physical powers and the transitoriness and emptiness of ordinary duties. It may be a monotonous chant, a drowsy requiem, but you look elsewhere for sounds that quicken and inspirit. At most, if we sound any such notes, they must foretell some enjoyment after death. We may sing of treasures in heaven; treasures on earth we may only proclaim as the prey of the thief and the moth.
There are reasons why we cannot accept this assignment of our parts, fair as it may seem. First, we are in the midst of this world and its countless powers, physical and moral, just as you are. They act on us at every moment. If we pretend they do not, we choose the time when we speak as ambassadors of the God of Truth to utter a falsehood. And if they act on us and we know it, how can we exhort others to forget them? How can we think we serve the God who created the world by persuading anyone to shut his eyes to its sights and doings?
Second, we cannot be merely preachers about the decay and extinction of life, because we cannot find in the Bible that God gave His ministers any such commission. The Old Testament seers did not complain of their countrymen’s earnest interest in passing events, but of their dullness and stupidity, their failure to recognize a living God moving in the affairs of living men and a living world. Is it otherwise in the New Testament? Do we find there no interest in the actual economy of the world, social and natural, only a passionate eagerness to convince men that its operations would soon be suspended and the shadows of death would envelop all? Can you read a single parable of our Lord and think this? Is He not awakening His hearers to notice the common life of things and men, that He may lead them to a deeper life below it? Are sowers, husbandmen, shepherds, kings, fathers, and marriages indifferent to Him, or mentioned only to remind us how soon they will vanish? Are they not spoken of as signs of the Kingdom of God, which is with us now and will be fully revealed hereafter? Are not the treasures that thief and moth destroy selfish treasures, possessions we lay up for ourselves? Does our Lord not point us to the common blessings of earth and sky, open to beggar and prince, as pledges of deeper, nearer blessings hidden for all in God’s eternal love?
Third, we cannot always be telling men to think of their own deaths, because we are sent to witness to another death, one that does not tear men from each other but unites them, a death for all men, for the whole world. Corinth was full of activity, speculation, and corruption. Men died there as they die here. They had poets, orators, and sophists of every kind to tell them death was terrible, and they asked the questions we ask about the state it ends and the state it begins. St. Paul did not go to tell them what they knew as well as he did. He went to tell them what they wanted to know. He spoke of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. He did not say, “None of you Corinthians can expect to exceed threescore years and ten.” He said, “The Son of God, Who liveth for ever and ever, has taken upon Him your flesh, and suffered your death, and has risen from death, because it was not possible that He should be holden of it.” He believed God had entrusted him with this message and wanted all the Corinthians, Jews or Greeks, and all men everywhere, to hear it. So he rejoiced that it had not been entrusted only, or chiefly, to mortal lips. He gave thanks that when Christ took bread and blessed it, He was consecrating a perpetual testimony of this truth to all nations. Wherever men met to keep the feast in remembrance of Him, a voice went out that could not be limited to the two or three who knew His name and received His tokens. When anyone asked them, or their sons later, “Wherefore do ye this?”, the answer would be: “Because the Son of God, Whom we confess as Head and Lord of all men, has died the death you and we die, the death that severs us from each other and seems to sever us from God. He has died this death. He has come out of it. He claimed God as His Father, and God, by raising Him again, has owned Him as His Son.”
Suppose the inquirer went on to object that such a service could be of no great worth, even that it was false, because sorrow, misery, disease, and death remain in spite of it. Those who eat this feast are as subject to them as anyone, and are often called to greater sufferings and more violent deaths. The answer would be something like this: “If men did not die, if all men did not, there would be no reality or meaning in Christ’s death. He died because He would have no privilege apart from us whom He calls His brethren. God forbid that we should wish for one! God forbid that we should ask to be taken out of the condition of men when He refused to be! God forbid that, since He bore the worst and most shameful death of all, we should count any death a hardship rather than a gift! We are not witnesses for ourselves but for Mankind, and for Him, the Lord and Brother of men. What we fear is setting ourselves up, wishing to be separate from our fellow-creatures, which makes us separate from Him. Being shut up in himself was the guilt of the traitor when Satan, the spirit of selfishness, entered him, when he abjured his Master and made light of the pledges of His love and forgiveness. That is death indeed, that is damnation, and that is what we ask Him to deliver us from when we come to eat this common bread and drink this common cup. We are sure that He is faithful, that the witnesses of His death are true witnesses, that He has died for you and for all, and that His love is stronger to bind men and the universe together than all the powers of earth and hell are to tear them apart.”
It is a mighty testimony, lasting through all these generations, against those who would teach men to fear death and not to rise above the fear, trusting in its Conqueror. It is a mighty testimony against us too, when we present Christ’s Death in a different form from St. Paul’s. We do so when we speak of it as an arrangement to avert the consequences of man’s sin, not as a deliverance out of sin; not as the act by which God reconciles the world to Himself; not as the perfectly gracious sacrifice He has made, in which He wishes us to share so that we may present our bodies to Him as willing and acceptable sacrifices. Thanks be to God, He has set up a preacher that does not twist or invert His Truth, but declares His character, His work, and His purpose to the whole creation.
V. I say this in full recollection that this feast has become a greater occasion of disagreement and hostility than any other institution, human or divine, and a greater excuse for idolatry. If it were not such a witness for unity, it would have provoked no strife. If it were not such a witness that God is a spirit, no one would have tried to make it a minister of carnality. If it did not rise so far above theories and speculations, and were not such a gospel to wayfarers and sufferers, theorists would not have spent their strength bringing it under their petty rules and definitions. All the dark elements in man’s heart have worked to keep sinful men from coming as little children to eat the bread and drink the cup: whatever is most grovelling, whatever is proudest, the priest’s fearful ambition, the doctor’s subtlety, the devotee’s sin-sick imagination. Yet by coming so, we show forth, as no words can, a Death out of which flows the freest, fullest, divinest life.
But the Feast has gone on, for it has been God’s and not man’s. It has had a power over Christendom that we cannot measure but shall know one day. It contains a promise that may sustain us when its influence seems weakest, when the Church seems most torn by the factions against which it silently and awfully protests. It is written that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we show the Lord’s Death till He come. The Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of the Son of God fulfilled all that men under the Old Dispensation could long for. The manifestation of Christ in the glory of His Father and the holy Angels is the highest thing we can long for in this Dispensation. It includes every craving for righteous government and a perfect Society, for the adoption of our spirits, the perfecting of our souls’ faculties, and the full redemption of our bodies. It includes the fulfilment of every relationship and loving intercourse, so imperfectly realized here but raised and sanctified by a diviner Communion. It includes the accomplishment of all earthly discipline and sorrow, and fellowship with those whose faces we miss, whose love must be far warmer than ever because it is in more immediate contact with perfect Love. It includes seeing the order and beauty of God’s creatures when the veil of death over them is taken away. It includes an ever deepening sense of the meaning and force of that Death which revealed the whole mind of God and was the perfect Atonement for Man. Of this manifestation of Jesus Christ the Lord’s Supper is the perpetual prophecy and assurance. It remembers the past, an act done once and never to be repeated. It witnesses to what is now, the presence of Him who said, “Lo! I am with you alway.” It testifies of an eternal Kingdom, of the Father, Son, and Spirit, which is about us now and which we may enter. But it would not recall the past acts of the Son of Man for His brethren, nor make known His care for them now, if it did not also carry the promise and pledge that nothing begun shall be left incomplete, that the curse He bore shall be wholly taken away, and that Death and Hell shall be cast into the lake of fire. Let those who will idolize the elements, and identify the signs of the Sacrament with what they signify. By all their contrivances they cannot give it a glory like the one it has when we take in St. Paul’s sentence in its full length and breadth: “As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till He come.”