Last night I visited my friend’s church in Ft. Lauderdale. At the end of the service we celebrated the Lord’s Supper. Everyone was invited to come forward, tear off a piece of bread and then dip it into the wine (yes, wine!). As I placed the moist bread in my mouth as bitter taste took over. I walked back to my seat with the bitterness lingering on.
As I drove home I started thinking back to that moment I ate the sacrament and I thought about Christ in the garden and on the cross. The bitterness of that wine reminded me of the bitterness of what Christ endured in order for me to be able to eat that meal. In the garden Jesus prays to the Father that this cup would pass from him. On the cross he calls out to the Father, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” He endured the bitterness of the cross so that I could be spared. He did it for the remission of my sins.
This was in the bulletin last night:
The Eucharist (i.e. Lord’s Supper) is the definitive action practiced in the Christian community that keeps Jesus Christ before us as the Savior of the world and our Saviour, and ourselves as sinners in need of being saved. The Eucharist is the sacramental act that pulls us into actual material participation with Christ (eating and drinking bread and wine) as he gives his very life for us and for our salvation. Without the Eucharist as focal practice, it is very easy to drift off into imagining Jesus as our Great Example whom we will imitate, or our Great Teacher from whom we will learn, or our Great Hero by whom we will be inspired. And without the Eucharist it is very easy to drift off into a spirituality that is dominated by ideas about Jesus instead of receiving life from Jesus. The Eucharist says a plain ‘no’ to all that. The Eucharist puts Jesus in his place: dying on the cross and giving us that sacrificed life. And it puts us in our place: opening our hands and receiving the remission of our sins, which is our salvation.
Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (emphasis mine)
