As I continue slogging away on the book on communion wine I am writing, others do me the favor of pointing out glaring holes in the hull that need addressing before it is seaworthy. It was pointed out to me that while much of my manuscript deals with the philosophy of signs, the history of grape juice, and the escatalogical fervor of the 19th century, I never wrote on what communion actually is. So this would likely be the first chapter. Another will follow regarding the means of grace.
Before we dive into the subject of wine and grape juice in the Lord’s Supper, it is important to get an overview of what the Lord’s Supper is, where it came from, and what it means. Having this foundational knowledge of its centrality to the Christian experience and source of identity, we will then be well provisioned for the journey through the rugged landscape of history and philosophical inquiry necessary to understand the potency of wine and the impotency of the juice.
Origins Of The Supper
The Lord’s Supper as we celebrate it today originates from the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples the night of his betrayal, the day before he would be crucified. During this meal, Jesus was not inventing a new-fangled tradition out of whole cloth, but revealing the true meaning of the Passover celebration that had existed in Jewish tradition for centuries.
All three synoptic Gospels recount the Passover meal Jesus ate with his disciples, which we now call the Last Supper. Here is Luke’s account:
And when the hour came, he reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, “Take this, and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise, the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table. For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed!”
Luke 22:14-22
Passover was an ancient tradition among the Jews, dating back to the cradle of the Jewish nation, when they were still but a mob of slaves under the Egyptian Pharaoh. God saw the oppression of His people and set in motion events to deliver them from slavery and bring them to the land He had promised their forefather Abraham – the land of Canaan. To lead them out from under Pharaoh’s yoke, God raised up Moses to speak to Pharaoh and deliver God’s message to let His people go, a command the stiff-necked Pharaoh refused to obey. Because of this, God sent on Pharaoh and Egypt increasingly troublesome and deadly plagues as an incentive to yield to the Jewish God’s request. Persistently stubborn after nine pestilences, God warned Pharaoh that if he did not relent, the tenth and final plague would bring devastation: all the firstborn in Egypt would be slain in one night, “from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle.” (Ex 11:5)
God exempted the Israelites from the nine previous plagues without any particular action required of them. The tenth plague was different. Their firstborn, too, would be slain by the “Destroyer” unless they obeyed God’s specific instructions to camouflage their homes from this angelic assassin God was about to unleash. To avoid this plague, they were instructed to take an unblemished lamb, slaughter it, and smear the lintels of their doorway with its blood. When the Destroyer came to their door, he would see the blood and “pass over” that house, leaving the firstborn alive. If they failed to do this, their firstborn would suffer the same fate as the rest of Egypt (Exodus 12:23).
After the application of the lamb’s blood, they were to cook and eat to whole lamb together with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, and to do so hastily, because after the carnage of the firstborn slaughter, Pharaoh would vomit them out of the land.
So hard was Pharaoh’s heart that even after the loss of his son, he doubled down on his stubbornness and chased the Jews into a killbox sandwiched between the Red Sea and the mountains. In a final act of deliverance, God parted the Red Sea, allowing the Jews to pass through on dry land, and then drowned Pharaoh’s army just to put an exclamation mark on the whole ordeal.
Once the Jews were freed, God commanded that this salvation from bondage be commemorated annually by celebrating the Passover feast, which was observed for centuries by pious Jews. The meal consisted of the lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs. No drink is explicitly identified as part of the original Passover in the Exodus account; the first mention of wine, or any drink at all, is found in the apocryphal book of Jubilees (Jubilees 49:6) written sometime during the Second Temple era (c. early 500s BC), and became common use by Jesus’ day. The rituals of the Passover meal evolved from the outline provided in Exodus, eventually taking shape into what is now called the Seder meal.
Seder is the commemorative Passover meal celebrated annually by Jews. During this meal, food and drink are shared in a specific order (seder means “order”) to remember Israel’s slavery under Egypt and miraculous redemption by God, and the fulfillment of His promises to His chosen people. Four cups of wine are taken at different times, each one remembering one of God’s promises: The cup of Sanctification, Deliverance, Redemption, and Consummation. Some have imagined Jesus gave the third cup of Redemption to His disciples, signifying the New Covenant, but did not finish the meal with the cup of Consummation, as was traditional, prophesying that He was going to wait to drink it until all things were made new in the Heavenly Kingdom.
If this were the case, it would be spectacular that Jesus not only fulfilled the role of the Passover lamb, but also the messianic expectations of the Jews developed in their extra-Biblical traditions. However, it is unclear if the Last Supper was a seder meal. Some argue it was, other scholars note that the seder as we know it today originated after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, perhaps as late as the third century. We will mosey on by this tempting rabbit trail. Though it may have some tasty nuggets for symbolism of the cups involved in the seder, the scent will not change our quarry or the trajectory of our hunt concerning the importance of the liquid in the cup.
What can be said with certainty is that Jesus equated the bread and the wine with his body and blood in a way that was entirely novel to the disciples, saying they were his blood and flesh – a scandalous and provocative claim. Drinking blood, or eating meat with the blood still in it, was condemned over half a dozen times in the Old Testament, for the reason that “the life is in the blood.” Consuming animal blood was associated with pagan animism and strictly prohibited under penalty of excommunication from the community of Israel. Jesus, knowing this, provoked no small amount of pearl-clutching from the Pharisees by telling them that unless they eat his flesh and drink his blood, they have no life in them (John 6:53).
Certainly, the disciples would have recalled this offensive claim as they put to their lips the cup, as well as the association with drinking the blood of another creature, and the sharing in its life, let alone the blood of another human. But in connection with the Passover meal, Jesus made clear that He was the lamb that is slain and averts the wrath of God. Before, blood was smeared on the lintels of the door- the externals of life; now it goes within to the inner man, where the true corruption lives, and there averts wrath and redeems. The Passover meal harboured a secret for centuries, one that was revealed at last in that upper room: it was all about Jesus, the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8); it was the Lord’s Supper.
Names
After Christ’s ascension and the initial explosion of the church, the apostles’ teaching and “breaking of bread” occupied the believers (Acts 2:42). Commentators wonder if this is to be meant as simply eating any ordinary meal when one gets home from work, or a more formal setup of what we know as the Lord’s Supper. Likely, it was both; their daily bread was the Daily Bread, and the sweetness of their Lord’s nearness was remembered as they satisfied grumbling stomachs after a day’s labor. The phrase “breaking bread” was likely the first name attributed to the Lord’s Supper, followed closely on the heels by Paul referencing the Lord’s Supper in his letter to the Corinthians, penned twenty or so years after Christ’s ascension.
During the first few centuries of the church, as it persevered and grew through intermittent persecution, the Lord’s Supper began to be referred to as the mysterion – the mystery. Why and how this came about is somewhat of a mystery in its own, as mysterion was a word associated with the secret knowledge available only to those initiates of pagan mystery cults. But when we consider how surrounding cults understood mystery and how the Apostle Paul, in his typical Jedi fashion, used the poets and songs of other religions to reveal the truth about God, the connection between the Lord’s Supper and mysterion is bridged.
The Cult of Cybele, the Mithras Cult, and the Eleusian Mysteries are examples of mystery cults busy during the first century and were certainly known to Paul, whose hometown of Tarsus was central to several. Gnosticism underpinned all mystery cults, the idea that there was “secret” knowledge granted only to those who, after being initiated by rituals, purifications, and fasting, and having sworn to secrecy, had the mysteries revealed to them. Freemasonry or Scientology may be modern equivalents. Mystery here then refers to an exclusive secret knowledge revealed only to the chosen.
Pau, who most certainly understood the cult definition of mysterion, used the word twenty times in his epistles to churches that also knew its meaning and lived among these cults, perhaps even being saved out from them through his preaching. Several instances in the book of Acts demonstrate Paul’s deft hijacking of pagan beliefs as evangelistic tools, unveiling Christ hidden in their songs and practices all along (Acts 17). But context shows us that Paul’s definition was different, almost opposite to the cultus exclusion.
The real mysterion, Paul says, was not one that is swank and restrictive, but a revelation of God’s plans, sleeping in the soil for centuries, now sprouting to life. It was the unveiling at long last of God’s redemptive plan, a secret kept hidden in plain sight now shouted from the rooftops. It was the Sixth Sense kind of secret that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. And when you replay history, you can see it plain as day in the light of revelation, causing palms to smack foreheads, incredulous for how anyone could have missed it! If it was a snake, it would have bit ya, as my southern mother-in-law says.
Perhaps it is a mash-up of these definitions that led to mysterion being associated with the Lord’s Supper. It was a ritual available to those initiated through a profession of faith in Christ and who desired to share in oneness with Him. Simultaneously, it was a revelation of God’s salvation, not only of the Jew, but also of the Gentile, through the suffering and death of the Messiah, something no one had expected, not even the principalities of darkness (1 Corinthians 2:8). Believers could participate in the disclosure of God’s secret through the bread and wine, proclaiming Christ’s death and resurrection to the world, inviting all to eat the mystery.
But mysterion may have been too near cultic practice. Tertullian, a church father writing in the early third century, grew concerned that the young church might become crossbred with the gnostic poison associated with using mysterion to reference the Supper, and began to use its Latin equivalent, sacramentum. A sacramentum was a vow a Roman soldier swore to his emperor, pledging fealty, marking a change in purpose, and had both military and religious implications. And, of course, this is where we get our modern reference to the Lord’s Supper as one of the “sacraments”. In a later chapter, we will revisit the mystery and its role in the conference of identity and meaning.
Communion and the Eucharist are other familiar monikers, each demonstrating a facet of the meal’s intent. Koinonia is the Greek New Testament word translated as communion, and carries the meaning of mutual participation and sharing. Eucharist is derived from the Greek word for thanksgiving, illuminating the humble gratitude with which we receive the grace of God.
Thanksgiving, fellowship, mystery, oath, the humble Supper with the most mundane vittles – each name bears to us a different facet of the meal Jesus calls His brothers and sisters to share with him and through it experience the nearness of His presence.
The Whole Transubstantiation Thing
Any introduction to communion would be incomplete without mention of the biggest controversies separating believers in a ritual meant to impart unity, namely, what is the substance of the meal, and how is Christ present in it.
Over the centuries, an idea emerged that Christ was physically present in the meal when believers partook, experienced specifically through the bread and wine. Jesus did say about the bread, “This is my body” after all, and stout-hearted church fathers like Iraeneous and Justin Martyr seemed to confirm as much. In the early 9th century, the suggestion was made that the substance of the meal actually became Christ’s flesh and blood, which eventually was adopted as dogma four centuries later at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Transubstantiation, the belief that the substance of the bread and wine changes into the body and blood of Christ, sounds equally creepy as it does odd to modern ears, but the Catholic church holds to this doctrine today.
We will not dwell on the merits of this belief, only to recognize that it is not baseless voodoo for the sake of being spooky. Though I believe it is clearly in error, the intention was to reconcile the writings of the church fathers, Jesus’s claim that the bread “is” his body, and the belief that the Supper is believed to be a “continually present” sacrifice of Christ’s atoning death. This conclusion was then laundered through Aristotelian philosophy, and the end result was that while the physical matter of the meal (called the accidens) retained the same smell, texture, and taste as regular bread and wine, those items took on the essence (called the substans) of Christ’s physical body. So to be fair, the accusation that the bread becomes Christ’s flesh (as though if we were to test it mid-esophagus, we would find human genetic material) is not well-founded, and can be dismissive of the deeper intention.
Magisterial reformers, like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin, saw this doctrine as scripturally and logically deficient, including the nature of sacraments as one of the chief issues of the Protestant Reformation. However, even among the Reformation class, there was disagreement over what the elements actually were. Luther rejected transubstantiation but held that Christ’s body coexisted alongside the meal in the way water is in a sponge, yet separate from it, a view referred to as consubstantiation. Zwingli thought Luther’s view was still too cozy with Catholic doctrine and rejected the physical presence of Christ in the meal altogether, reducing the meal to bare memorialism. To this day, the separation between Lutherans and the rest of the Reformed tradition is largely over this issue.
John Calvin took a different tack, concluding that it was not so much that Christ came down with His physical presence in the Supper, but that believers were spiritually transported to Christ’s side in the heavens, and there experienced his presence, a belief retrospectively called suprastantiation. “The Spirit raises us to heaven to feed spiritually on Christ, even as we feed physically on the bread and wine…our souls are fed by the flesh and blood of Christ in the same way that bread and wine keep and sustain physical life.” (Institutes, 4.17.10)
Language like Calvin’s of being raised into heaven to “feed on Christ” also lands on modern evangelical ears as colossally weird, largely because the doctrine of soteriology (what it means to be saved and one with Christ) is assumed but unexplored, like driving a car around town unaware of how the engine works. Being heavily draped in Enlightenment ideals causes us to see the spiritual as insubstantial and ethereal, existing in the Platonic realm of ideas, conjured by the imagination. The Bible, however, teaches that the spiritual is more real than the physical, a truth easily absorbed into the worldview of the ancient world and early church.
Evangelicals thus followed suit with Zwingli in his view that the elements are only commemorative, remembering Christ’s atoning sacrifice the way we might remember His resurrection at an Easter sunrise service; only in our minds is He more present in the moment. Followed logically, this begs the question of whether taking the sacrament is necessary at all, since if recalling Christ’s death is all that is intended, it could easily be done by watching a video, say, of someone else taking the meal. Piousness through consciousness.
Combining a general ignorance of church history and an unawareness of these distinctions, we evangelicals tend to minimize the ruckus the nature of the Supper has taken in history. Someone solved the problem for us, though we could not say who this was or how they did it, nor how we justify our view, or on what ground we reject others. Debating a closed issue over words with six or more syllables – transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or suprastantiation – is placed into the category of arguing over silly myths that Paul tells Timothy to avoid. The symbol is a naked memorial, we conclude, and from this conclusion, the reduction of the meal to saltines and grape juice follows. From the extreme of transubstantiation, the pendulum swings to the other extreme of unsubstantiation – the bread and wine are arbitrary, and therefore easily swapped out with abstractions.
In what way the Lord is present with us in the Supper, or we with Him, is a conundrum at the center of the Christian worship experience. Though we have glossed over the issue that has caused major tumult in Christian history, it would be a mistake to think the general lack of interest in the subject reflects its gravity. The manner of Christ’s presence is a subset of a larger quandary bound up in the essence of His nature, and was a hard-won victory of the early church fathers who were constantly assailed by heretical factions attempting to de-humanize his earthly nature in favor of a purely spiritual being, or rob him of His divinity.
But the question stands to this day: in what way is Christ present in the Supper that is different than any other moment in our lives? Is it a bare memorial, or is it conferring something to us that we could not get without it?
Meaning of the Supper
However one views the presence of Christ in the sacrament, it is undeniable that communion is fundamentally an act of remembrance. As Paul states plainly in the quote above, whenever we eat the bread and drink the cup, we are doing it in remembrance of him. The meal is a deliberate act of recollection, affectionately calling to mind His body and blood. In this way, it is a means of grace, a physical medium that preaches to our eyes, mouth, and hands what we read in the Word.
But we are also remembering the myriad facets of the cross and how the radiance of its light refracted in all creation. We are calling to mind the sacrificial atonement of his death on the cross, his blood that was spilled for us, and his body that was rent, opening the way into the presence of God. The breaking of the bread calls to mind the breaking of his body, so that ours need not be; the wine is reminiscent of the blood that poured from his head, his hands, and his side, reminding us of the wrath we are spared from through the forgiveness of our sins. Frequently remembering the death of the Lord refocuses our identities and reminds us of the kind of love with which the Father loves us.
Paul’s statement about the Supper also shows that when we partake of the bread and wine, we are engaging in a trans-temporal proclamation. As often as we eat this bread and drink this cup (in the present), we proclaim the Lord’s death (in the past), till he comes (in the future). It converts a memorial to a prophecy, a forward-looking aspect to a backward-looking ritual. All Scripture of the Old Testament looked forward to Christ; all history from the cross is Christ’s kingdom marching forward until His glorious return. The timeline of History pivots around Calvary. Eating and drinking the Supper is a public summary of the point and purpose of all Creation. It is the edible Gospel, a ‘visible sign best adapted to our small capacity’, as John Calvin said. And since all history itself is nothing if not the story of the coming Kingdom of God, then the Lord’s Supper is history made bite-sized.
By remembering His cross, we are also declaring all the other victories won through it. Through the cross, Jesus made a public display of the principalities of darkness, stripping them of their arms and parading them in a train as spoils of war. “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in it [the cross] (Colossians 2:15). Celebrating the Lord’s Supper, as somber and meekly as we may nibble and sip, is a taunt to defeated foes that they have been defanged, dethroned, and will soon be defeated. Even the sourest wine and the stalest bread on the humblest table is a declaration of war.
Communion is a celebration of oneness. The Gospel of God levels all dividing walls of ethnicity, gender, and class, bringing all to the same table by the same means to share in the same meal. There is now Jew or Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ (Galatians 3:28). God has made one new man out of an ancient division between Jew and Gentile, tearing down the wall of hostility between them (Ephesians 2:15), both now coming as reconciled brothers to the bread and wine, one biological the other adopted, to eat with their Father. God is one, and the Supper recalls the oneness of all believers. It is displacing this oneness that caused the suspicious deaths of the Corinthians, who did not “consider the body”, and subsequently fell ill or died (1 Corinthians 11:30).
Declaring unity through Communion is also why the sacraments are withheld from disobedient or unrepentant church members. One of the practical consequences of an individual acting like he is not one with Christ is being banned from the Lord’s Table – a declaration of unity – until such a time as he repents. In 2019, President Biden, a self-proclaimed Catholic, was denied the Eucharist by a South Carolina church for his support of abortion. Indeed, withholding of the sacraments from openly hypocritical princes has a long and storied tradition in world history.
Consequently, this is also the reason unbelievers are instructed not to partake in communion. Not only do they receive no benefit, but, like any covenantal activity, there are attendant blessings and curses. Faithless eaters, including believers partaking while living in unrepentant sin, eat and drink covenant curses upon themselves, for they have profaned the mystery by trampling underfoot the pledge of sacred union with God, which they ought to have received by faith. This doesn’t mean that if they touch the cup to their lips, they will rapidly age and die like that villain in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but the context of this injunction suggests this can manifest physically (1 Corinthians 11). Certainly, we can imagine this may aggravate the eternal doom of those who continue to resist the Spirit. Historically, this is the reason why the elements of the Supper were fenced off with a banister during worship services, a barrier that some churches are beginning to erect again.
Future unity is also glimpsed through the Supper. Paul tells us that Jesus is in the process of making all His enemies into a footstool (which would include former enemies like believers) through the proclamation of the cross. When this has happened, He will then take the whole of the unity of creation and submit it to the Father, so that God may be all in all. “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). History is ever sharpening to a single point where the diversity of God’s glorious fallen creation and the shards scattered by sin will be reforged under the unity of His headship. Oneness is the destiny of Creation.
The Lord’s Supper is a menagerie of remembrance. His sacrificial death on our behalf and adoption into the family of God, through it we remember the identity of belonging, the future hope of past fulfillment, it is a declaration of war and a sign of unity, bulldozing all walls erected by human biology and consequence, and a participation in the one-ification of all reality.
MealTimes
The frequency of observing the Lord’s Supper differs substantially depending on the denomination and pastoral leadership. Growing up, my church saved the meal for only special occasions like Easter or Christmas. Catholic and many reformed churches partake weekly. John Calvin said twice in his Institutes that it should be observed at least once a week. No clear prescription of frequency is provided by scripture, so there is presumably some freedom here. As such, I will channel Socrates and answer a question with a question. How often should we partake of the meal? Well, how often does our spirit grumble and ache to remember oneness with our Lord, the victory over death, the finality of our belonging, and the liberation from sin? Does the infrequency of our eating belie the lack of hunger for the meal? And how much does our shallowness of understanding the Meal contribute to hungerlessness and consequent spiritual anorexia? Being perpetually underwhelmed by the Supper may be due to being served cold cuts when a Thanksgiving dinner is intended.
With this cursory overview of communion basics, we are prepared to take on a more challenging subject in the next chapter and move deeper into the mystery of what the Supper is and what it is doing to us when we partake. Historically, the sacraments have been understood as a “means of grace”. What this means and how grace is administered through them is tied to what exactly is happening with the elements of bread, water, and wine. It is vital to understand what this “means” means for us to properly honor the gravity of this sacrament and the necessity of getting it right.
Thought Butter 