PCA Conversations

by Mike Farley

Eucharist contributes to spiritual formation by cultivating virtues that conform us to the image of Christ.  Faithful participation in the Lord’s Supper ought to instill a particular set of dispositions toward God, other people, and the whole created order that reflect God’s purposes for us.

The Supper trains us to be humble.  It does this, first of all, by reminding us that we are creatures.  The very material, multi-sensory experience of eating bread and drinking wine emphasizes—indeed, glories in—our physicality.  And as physical creatures, we are hungry beings who need food to survive.  The Supper is thus a reminder of creaturely finitude and dependence as we come to God simply holding out our hands to receive what we need for our life.  As Susan White (quoting Orthodox liturgist Alexander Schmemann) explains,

As the primary feast of the Christian liturgical life, the Eucharist teaches us that all things come to us as a gift; that we do not create from nothing, that even our work is a working with what has first been given to us. “No one has been ‘worthy’ to receive communion, no one has been prepared for it.  At this point all merits, all righteousness, all devotions disappear and dissolve.  Life comes again to us as gift, a free and divine gift….Adam is again introduced into Paradise, taken out of nothingness, and crowned king of creation.  Everything is free, nothing is due, and yet all is given.  And, therefore, the greatest humility and obedience is to accept the gift, to say ‘yes’ – in joy and gratitude.  There is nothing we can do, yet we become all that God wanted us to be from eternity, when we are Eucharistic.“

The eucharist also encourages humility because it speaks of our sin and not only our creaturehood.  The bread and wine of this meal are signs of Christ’s body given and blood poured out for our forgiveness.  God supplies this meal not only because we are creatures, but because we are sinners who need the grace of forgiveness and new life in Christ.  To partake of this Supper rightly is to confess that one is a sinner in great need.

Second, the Lord’s Supper also cultivates faith by offering us God’s provision for our need, and thus revealing the gracious generosity and trustworthy character of God.  In the Supper, God fills our hands with bread and our cups with wine, and thus He reveals Himself to be the very source and sustenance of our life.  Here our hunger is satisfied, and we see again that it is only in God that we live and move and have our being.  Here the words of David are fulfilled:  “The LORD upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down.  The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.  You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing.” (Psalm 145:14-16).  And this provision of food proves David’s conclusion:  “The LORD is righteous in all his ways and kind in all his works.  The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.  He fulfills the desire of those who fear him; he also hears their cry and saves them.” (Psalm 145:17-19).  The Supper cultivates faith by allowing us to experience most tangibly the righteousness and kindness of God in his faithfulness to his covenant promises.

God encourages our faith and exalts His faithfulness and trustworthy character even more highly by providing for our redemption.  While our coming to the Lord’s table is (or ought to be) a confession of our sinfulness, it is (or ought to be) also an expression of faith that finds tangible confirmation and support in the grace of forgiveness and life offered in Christ and by the Spirit in and through the act of eating and drinking.  Faith comes by hearing the gospel (Rom. 10:14), and since the eucharist is a visible and edible word, a concrete proclamation of the Lord’s death (1 Cor. 11:26) as God’s perfect provision for our sinful condition, it has an important role in building up the faith of God’s people.

By pointing us to the past and revealing God’s faithfulness in the passion and resurrection of Jesus, the Lord’s Supper also encourages hope for the future.  The eucharist not only cultivates trust in God’s grace in the present, but also faith in God’s future grace, which is another way of saying that the eucharist cultivates hope.  First, it leads us to hope by demonstrating the way that God has already acted to fulfill the hopes and longings of His people in history.  When Jesus identified the wine as the “cup of the new covenant” in his blood (Luke 22:20), He declared that the long-awaited fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy was finally at hand in his death and resurrection.  All the prophetic hopes of the Old Testament can be summed up in the words “new covenant,” and though Christ has definitively established that new covenant in his first advent, we join past generations in awaiting the fullness of redemption that the prophets promised when the kingdom of God is finally consummated at Jesus’ return.  How wonderful that God has provided a sacrament of hope to sustain us in the meantime, a new covenant meal that celebrates the cross and resurrection as the foundation of the promised new covenant and the earnest that seals to us God’s commitment to fulfill in us all of his promises in Christ!  As we partake of the sacrament of cross and resurrection in the Lord’s Supper, we can confess with Paul in confident hope, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

The Lord’s Supper not only inculcates humility, faith, and hope, but also love.  Christian traditions of spiritual formation universally emphasize the importance of relational encounter with God as the source of all virtue.  The virtues are habits and dispositions of mind and heart that are formed by and for right relationships with God and others.  This is especially true with respect to our ability to love.  We develop the capacity to love only by first being loved ourselves.  “We love because He [God] first loved us.” (1 John 4:19).  The Eucharist then should be incredibly important to those who want to develop ability to love because through it God offers us his love on a regular basis and in a very tangible way.

And it is the very materiality of the Supper that makes it so powerful as an encounter with the love of God.  It is one thing for a husband to tell his wife that he loves her with his words; it is something else for him to embody that love in hugs and kisses and other tangible, physical acts of love.  Just so, the fact that God gave us this sacred meal tells us that we need more than an audible word of love to receive His love and to sustain our love for Him.  We also need His love embodied in other more concrete and participatory ways.  The Lord’s Supper is the embodiment of God’s love in Christ that draws us more deeply into His embrace and fellowship.

Holy communion also cultivates love for other people because it is not merely an individual encounter with God but rather a corporate one, a family meal that unites us not only to God, but to brothers and sisters in God’s family.  God loves all of his children, and as we see this visibly demonstrated when He feeds us in the Supper, we learn to see others more as God sees them.  Remembering that others are equally loved by God is an important basis for learning to love other members of the church, particularly members with whom we have been in conflict.  If we love God, then we will love those whom He loves.  Furthermore, the very ritual of the Supper trains us to love each other in deed as well as in thought as we wait upon one another and serve one another, and resolve differences so that we might come to this sacrament of love with a clean conscience.

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Mike Farley is an adjunct professor of theological studies at Saint Louis University. He is a member of Crossroads Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri, where he has formerly served as worship director.