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.
I have spoken to you often on the subject of the Eucharist; I must speak to you of it again. I wish that we might connect it with all the words which go forth from the pulpit on Sundays, with all the acts of our week-day life. Then, I believe, the disputes about it, which every year and month renews, which appear in every corner of the Church, will be more distressing, more intolerable to us, than they have ever been, but that they will cause us less despair. We shall find the root of them in ourselves; we shall understand why they have been so serious, why they have been so frivolous; we shall know why no clever men, no arrangements, no decrees, can settle them. We shall learn how and by Whom they must be and shall be terminated at last.
I have taken some words out of that chapter in the Epistle to the Corinthians which is the classical one on this topic. I do not say that they tell us all we want to know respecting the Lord’s Supper. They present it in one aspect. Let us consider it carefully and earnestly in that aspect; other sides of it will come out more and more clearly as we need them. If we try to embrace the whole doctrine of this Sacrament at once, if we will refer it to some thought or notion in our minds, we must contract it, we must turn it into a topic of controversy, we must lose the practical blessing of it. If we are content to follow the Apostle’s hints as they offer themselves, one by one, to compare them with our own wants and experiences, to see how they interpret the wants and experiences of mankind, as history makes them known to us, our reverence for the profound and infinite meaning of the Festival will grow, as we come to wonder more at its divine simplicity.
I. This simplicity is, perhaps, what we envy most in St. Paul’s discourse. “As often,” he says, “as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup.” There is nothing about the way of receiving, the thing received, the organ which receives. All such questions may be latent; they may force themselves upon us in due time. But we are not called by our teacher to engage in them now. He says merely, “Here is bread, the common food of men; here is wine, which speaks to all of life and exhilaration.” We need not mount into any speculations yet; thus far, at all events, we are on plain ground. And the words, “as often,” keep us on that ground. He is addressing a Society. He assumes that that Society meets at certain times, to partake of that bread and that cup. He assumes the absence of all rarity in that which is eaten and drunk to be a necessary characteristic of the feast. He assumes the meeting of poor and rich—of all who want food, who want life,—to be a necessary characteristic of it. The Corinthians had misapprehended its nature. They had followed the old custom of feasts. Each had brought his own contribution; it had been turned into an occasion for bodily indulgence. St. Paul had denounced them in this chapter for both perversions. He speaks of their gluttony and drunkenness; he speaks of their shaming the poor. They had made it a common feast, in so far as “common” implies that which is animal in opposition to that which is spiritual. They had scorned to make it common in the other sense; it was separate and exclusive. The two apparently opposite temptations are really in close alliance. At Corinth and everywhere else, in one century and another, we find them reappearing in different forms, and never far asunder. They were esteeming the sign, not the thing signified. They were 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,” which would have seemed the more obvious one. But should we have expected either word? Are we not speaking of a Communion, of a participation in something? Can an Ordinance which possesses that character be described as showing, announcing, declaring? I must repeat what I said before. It is safer to let the Apostle explain himself, than to insist that he shall follow a course which we have prescribed for him. I believe he will tell us hereafter more about Communion and Participation than we should ever find out for ourselves; but I doubt whether we shall profit by his teaching, if we stumble at this phrase and wish to get rid of it. Do you think that any ordinance of Christ can have reference merely to the advantage or enjoyment of those who submit to it? Did He come from heaven to enjoy or to suffer; to be ministered unto or to minister? If the eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine imports any communion with Him, any sympathy with Him, can this point of communion and sympathy be wanting? Did He not come to show forth or declare a truth to men which only some would enter into? If we are not willing in all our acts and services to make this a primary object,—if we are thinking of some selfish end as above this,—can we be like Him? Let us grasp this thought steadfastly. If this feast does not show forth or declare something to the world,—if we only seek in it for some benefit to ourselves,—it cannot be a communion in the body or in the mind of Jesus Christ.
I am very anxious to press this truth upon you, my brethren. I believe the forgetfulness of it has been a principal cause of the confusions which both Romanists and Protestants have fallen into respecting this Divine Feast. The Romanist has dwelt on the idea of the Eucharist as a Mystery. A dreadful secrecy belongs to its nature; the priest must hide from the vulgar the solemn incantations by which it acquires its grandeur and power; the cup must not be touched by lay lips. But he has had a feeling that in some way or other it must be a message to the world. The Host is therefore lifted on high; it is an object of reverence and worship to the most sensual. The Protestant rightly declares that what is meant for the spirit, is thus degraded into an object for the eye; that the Second Commandment is trifled with; that it cannot be trifled with, as Moses declared, by any people, 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 forth or declares anything to mankind. He is impatient when it is called a Mystery; yet he confines its whole force to the faithful few. And so he is involved in wearisome and perpetual controversies, whether anything is actually bestowed by the Sacrament, or whether the receiver makes it what it is by the belief which he brings with him.
III. But what is it that is shown forth? St. Paul says, The Lord’s death. If he had not said so, if this expression, The Lord, did not stand written in his Epistle, there are many who would have called it hard and cold. “The Saviour,” they would have said; “the divine Bridegroom, the ineffable Sacrifice that is offered to us in this feast. How can you speak of ‘the Lord’ like some writer of the Old Testament?” I fancy that the Hebrew of the Hebrews used that Hebrew phrase because he deemed it not to be obsolete for any—because he knew that it was not obsolete for him. He wanted sympathy and fellowship. He wanted also to be guided and governed. The Incarnation had not lessened, but deepened his reverence for the unseen Guide of his heart and reins. His belief in a brother of Man did not make him remember less or rejoice less that He is the Lord of men. There were times when he delighted to call Him our Lord. There were occasions when the Lord expressed more fully the universality of His dominion. This was one of them. He is speaking of the bread and wine as testifying, not to him or to his brethren, but to all men, of One whose kingdom was in the midst of them,—of One who had proved Himself to be the King and Shepherd, by dying for them.
IV. For it is the Lord’s death which we show forth, as often as we eat this bread and drink this wine. It is a common opinion among those who frequent our churches, that the preacher exists to remind them of their own mortality. You go to the scientific lecturer or the artist to hear of the wealth of life and beauty which is scattered through the universe. During the week you are in the midst of civil stir and business. Everything speaks to you of continuous action. The Sunday schoolmaster, you suppose, is to counteract the impressions which you have received from all your other teachers. He is to talk of the wearing out of all physical powers; of the transitoriness and emptiness of all ordinary duties and occupations. It may be a monotonous chant, a drowsy requiem. But the sounds which quicken and inspirit, you expect elsewhere. At all events, if any such notes are heard from us, they must be prophetical of some enjoyment after death. Treasures in heaven we may sing of; treasures upon earth we are only to proclaim as the prey of the thief and the moth.
There are one or two reasons why we cannot acquiesce in this assignment of our parts, equitable as it may seem. The first is, that we are actually in the midst of this world and of all its countless powers and energies, physical and moral, just as you are. They are acting upon us at every moment, as they are acting upon you. If we pretend that they are not, we choose the time when we are speaking as ambassadors of the God of Truth, to utter a falsehood. If they are acting upon us, and we know that they are acting upon us, how can we exhort others to forget them? How can we fancy that we are serving the God who created the world, by persuading any man to shut his eyes to the sights and doings of the world?
And, secondly, we cannot submit to be merely preachers about the decay and extinction of life, because we cannot find from the Bible that any such commission has been given by God to His ministers. The seers of the Old Testament did not complain of the earnest interest which their countrymen took in the events that were passing around them, but of their dullness and stupidity, of their incapacity to recognize the movements of a living God in the affairs of living men, in the movements of 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 were soon to be suspended, that the shadows of death were over all and would soon envelop all? Can you read a single parable of our Lord, and think this? Is He not awakening the thoughts of His hearers to notice the common life of things and men, that He may lead them to acknowledge a still deeper life below that? Are sowers, husbandmen, shepherds, kings, fathers, marriages, indifferent to Him, or only spoken of that we may be reminded how soon all such persons and things and relations are to vanish away? Are they not spoken of as signs and intimations of that Kingdom of God which is with us now, and will be fully revealed hereafter? Are not those treasures which the thief and moth destroy, selfish treasures, possessions which we lay up for ourselves? Does not our Lord point us to the common blessings which earth and sky present to the beggar and the prince as pledges of other deeper, nearer blessings, which are hidden for all in God’s own eternal love.
But, thirdly, we cannot be for ever telling men to think of their own deaths, because we are sent to bear witness of another death;—a death which does not tear men from each other, but which unites them to each other; a death for all men, for the whole world. The city of Corinth was full of activity, of speculation, of corruption. Men died there as they die here. They had poets, orators, sophists of all kinds, to tell them that death was a terrible fact. They asked the same questions as we ask, about the state of which it is the termination, and the state of which it is the beginning. St. Paul did not go among them to tell them what they knew as well as he did. He went to tell them what they wanted to know. He spoke to them of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. He did not say, “None of you Corinthians can expect to exceed threescore years and ten;” but 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.” This was the message with which he believed God had entrusted him; this was the message which he desired that all the Corinthians, Jews or Greeks, that all men everywhere should hear. Therefore he rejoiced that it was one which had not been entrusted only or chiefly to mortal lips. Therefore he gave thanks that when Christ took bread and blessed it, He was consecrating a perpetual testimony of this truth to all nations. Wherever any men met together to keep that feast in remembrance of Him, there was a voice going forth which could not be limited to the two or three who might know His name, who might receive His tokens. When any one asked them then, or should ask their sons in the time to come, “Wherefore do ye this?” the answer would be, “Because the Son of God, Whom we confess as the Head and Lord of all men, has died that death which you and we die, that death which severs us from each other, that death which seems to sever us from God. He has died this death. He has come out of it. He claimed God as His Father. God, by raising Him again, has owned Him as His Son.”
And if the inquirer went on to object that such a service as this could not be of any great worth, nay, that it was a false service, because sorrow and misery and disease and death remained in spite of it, and because those who ate of this feast were as much subject to them as any others, nay, often were called to endure greater sufferings, and to die more violent deaths than other men, the answer would be something like this:—“If men did not die, if all men did not, there would be no reality, no meaning in Christ’s death. He has died because He would have no privilege distinct from that of us whom He calls His brethren. And God forbid that we should wish for any such privilege! God forbid that we should ask to be taken out of the condition of men, when He refused to be so! God forbid that if He bore the worst and most shameful death of all, we should count any kind of death a hardship and not a gift to us! We are not witnesses for ourselves, but witnesses for Mankind, witnesses for Him, the Lord and Brother of men. What we are afraid of is the setting up of ourselves, the wishing to be separate from our fellow-creatures, which makes us separate from Him. To be shut up in himself was the guilt of the traitor when Satan, the spirit of selfishness, entered into him, when he abjured his Master, and made light of the pledges of His love and forgiveness. That is death indeed, that is damnation, that is what we ask Him to deliver us from, when we come to eat this common bread and drink this common cup. And we are sure that He is faithful, and that the witnesses of His death are not lying but true witnesses, and that He has died for you and for all, and that His love is stronger to bind men and to bind the universe together, than all the powers in earth and hell are to tear them in pieces.”
A mighty testimony,—and one that has lasted on for all these generations,—against those who would teach men to fear death, and not to rise above the fear of it, trusting in the Conqueror of it. A mighty testimony, too, against us, when we present the Death of Christ to men in another form than that in which St. Paul presented it; when we speak of it as an arrangement to avert the consequences of man’s sin, and 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 which He has made, and of which He wishes us to be partakers, that we may present our bodies as willing and acceptable sacrifices to Him. Thanks be to God, He has set up a preacher which does not twist or invert His Truth, but which declares what His character is, what His work has been, what His purpose, to His whole creation.
V. I say so, in the full recollection that this feast has been converted into a greater occasion of disagreement and hostility than all other institutions, human or divine. I say so, in the full recollection that it has been converted into a greater excuse for idolatry than all other institutions, human or divine. If it had not been such a witness for unity as it is, it would have provoked no strifes. If it had not been such a witness that God is a spirit as it is, there would have been no effort to turn it into a minister of carnality. If it had not risen so high above all theories and speculations as it does,—if it had not been such a gospel to the wayfarers and the sufferers,—theorists and speculators would not have spent their strength in bringing it under their petty rules and definitions. All the dark elements in the heart of man, whatever is most grovelling, whatever is proudest, the fearful ambition of the priest, the subtlety of the doctor, the sin-sick imagination of the devotee, have all worked that sinful men might not come as little children to eat the bread and drink the cup; so to show forth, as no words can show it forth, 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 which we cannot measure, but which we shall know one day. For it contains a promise which may sustain us when its influence appears to be weakest, when the Church appears to be most rent by the factions against which it is bearing its silent, awful protest. It is written, that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we do show forth the Lord’s Death till He come. The Incarnation and Death and Resurrection of the Son of God were the fulfilments of all that men in the Old Dispensation were able to long for. The manifestation of Christ in the glory of His Father and of the Holy Angels is the highest object which we in this Dispensation are able to long for. It includes every craving for righteous government, for a perfect Society, for the adoption of our spirits, for the perfection of the faculties of our souls, for the full redemption of our bodies. It includes the fulfilment of every relationship, of all loving intercourse, which has been most imperfectly realized here, but which has been raised and sanctified by a diviner Communion. It includes the accomplishment of all earthly discipline and sorrow, fellowship with those whose faces we miss, but whose love must be far warmer than ever it was, because it is in more immediate contact with the perfect Love. It includes the apprehension of the order and beauty of God’s creatures, when the veil of death which covers them has been taken away. It includes the ever deepening sense of the meaning and force of that Death which revealed the whole mind of God, which was the perfect Atonement for Man. Of this manifestation of Jesus Christ, the Lord’s Supper is the perpetual prophecy and assurance. It is a remembrance of the past, of an act done once, never to be repeated. It is a witness of that which is—of His presence, Who has said, “Lo! I am with you alway.” It testifies of an eternal Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Spirit, which is about us now, and into which we may enter. But it would not recall to us the past acts of the Son of Man for His brethren,—it would not make known His care for them now—if it did not contain also the promise and pledge that nothing which has been begun shall be left incomplete, that the curse which He bore shall be wholly taken away, that Death and Hell shall be cast into the lake of fire. Let those who will, idolize the elements; let those who will, identify the signs of the Sacrament with that which they signify;—they cannot, by all their contrivances, invest it with a glory like that which it possesses, when we take in St. Paul’s sentence in the length and the breadth of it: “As often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till He come.”