PCA Conversations

by Mike Farley

The Eucharist contributes to spiritual formation not only by nurturing the growth of virtues but also by embodying practices that train us in the ways of Christ and conform us to His image.  It is ritualized practice of life in the kingdom of God.

In their works on spiritual disciplines, Dallas Willard and Richard Foster include the practice of celebration.  It is surprising to some readers to think of celebration as a discipline, and it is probably doubly surprising to think of the Lord’s Supper as a celebration given the funereal way that many evangelicals observe the Supper: with an eyes-closed, head-down posture for the purpose of repentance, mourning, and grief over sin (either in total silence or accompanied by songs about the death of Christ played quietly in a minor key).  However, the Lord’s Supper in fact is (or ought to be) a prime example of the discipline of celebration.  The fact that the Eucharist “proclaims the Lord’s death” (1 Cor. 11:26) does not entail a tone of sadness but rather supreme joy for, as Philip Pfatteicher rightly notes, “we can proclaim his death only if we know the rest of the story, the resurrection.  No one would ‘proclaim’ the death of a friend or hero; but Christ’s death was not the end of his story, and so it is proclaimed boldly and gladly by the church as the victory over all the forces arrayed against God” (emphasis mine).

The proper metaphor is not funeral but feast, and the Lord’s Supper is the feast that gives true meaning to all feasts.  In the Bible, eating with God is always a joyful affair, and God commands that those meals be joyful (e.g., the sacrificial meals at the tabernacle [Deut. 12, 14], Jesus’ own table fellowship, or the eschatological visions of feasting in the fullness of the kingdom come [Is. 25; Rev. 19]).  At the Lord’s Table we are not re-creating the Last Supper but rather looking at the Lord’s cross from this side of the resurrection, and from this vantage point we now see that the cross was the victory of God.  Jesus is present in communion not merely as a crucified memory from the past but rather as the resurrected, glorified, and exalted King seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.  At the king’s victory feast, what can we do but rejoice?  Thus, Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann rightly says that “For the Church both the source and the fulfillment of joy, the very sacrament of joy” is the Eucharist.   And “the Eucharist is the entrance of the Church into the joy of its Lord.  And to enter into that joy, so as to be a witness to it in the world, is indeed the very calling of the Church, its essential leitourgia, the sacrament by which it ‘becomes what it is.’”   By observing the Supper in a joyful manner, perhaps with vigorous & triumphant music & singing, we are trained in the discipline of celebration, which strengthens us to walk by faith and to fear no evil when God prepares a table before us even in the midst of our enemies in the valley of the shadow of death.

In addition to joyful singing, the joy of the Eucharist ought to be expressed in exuberant thanksgiving.  Though it is often neglected in evangelical practice, the practice of a “great” thanksgiving before communion has been at the heart of the church’s celebration of the Lord’s Supper since the earliest centuries.   That the sacrament came to be called “Eucharist,” signifies the centrality of the prayer of thanks offered over the bread and wine, a practice which follows the example of Jesus at the Last Supper where the Eucharist was established.  We need this as a corporate and individual discipline because, according to Paul in Romans 1:18ff., ingratitude is a fundamental sin from which follows a sad descent into idolatry and moral license.  The whole Christian life is to be one of “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20), and giving thanks at the Lord’s table is a discipline that models and trains us for a Eucharistic life.  When giving thanks at communion, man is restored to his unique role as the priest of creation called to lead the creation in blessing and thanking God for the blessings of life received from God’s hand.  As Alexander Schmemann explains, “Eucharist (thanksgiving) is the state of perfect man.  Eucharist is the life of paradise.  Eucharist is the only full and real response of man to God’s creation, redemption and gift of heaven….For Eucharist—thanksgiving and praise—is the very form and content of the new life that God granted us when in Christ He reconciled us with Himself.” Thus the Eucharist trains us to adopt the posture of gratitude as a renewed kingdom of priests in union with our great High Priest.

While the Supper is a grateful celebration of triumph, it is simultaneously a direct challenge to all pieties, eschatologies, and agendas for cultural transformation that minimize or ignore the role of suffering service.  Although the Eucharist is fundamentally a celebration of resurrection, it simultaneously reveals that there is no resurrection without the cross first.  By feeding us with the Lord’s broken body and shed blood, the Lord’s Supper ought to shape a cruciform vision of our vocation in the world.  This is simply a continuation of our baptismal vocation.  Having been baptized into Christ’s death, we take up our own cross to follow Christ.  When we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we identify ourselves afresh with his death, receiving into us his sacrifice so that we in turn might offer ourselves to serve the world in union with Christ.  Don Saliers observes, in his Worship and Spirituality, that in the Supper, “the ordinary means of receiving God’s offer of love is thus itself to be the pattern of our own lives together with God and with neighbor: offered, made holy, broken open, and lavished upon a hungry world….The [Eucharistic] pattern is far more than empty ritual.  The pattern gives us the very shape of the life God calls us to live responsibly in this world.” For the Christian, the shape of that life is a cruciform one.

Part of this suffering involves a holy discontent that becomes more acute in light of the promise and foretaste of future grace embodied in the Supper.  This discontent arises because “authentic worship trains us for the reign of God yet to come in a society of justice and peace” (Saliers).  Yet, “this symbol is given in the midst of suffering and injustice.”   Therefore, “our foretaste of what God intends for the whole creation is also a recognition that the Kingdom has not yet come in fullness….so baptism and eucharist point toward that which we must live toward.”  Although “Jesus is already present in our prayer and our service, making God known through the Holy Spirit in which we dwell,” still “at the same time he is absent: absent in the way we all know in our suffering.  In this way all Christian praying,…all celebrations of Word and the Lord’s Supper tell us about the future.  The discontent is not a failure of faith but a sign of it!  Even more, authentic faith already anticipates God’s future by living in the tension of relating to God and neighbor in a world not yet ready.  We live in a world still fully bent on its own deathly kingdoms” (quotes from Saliers).

It is possible to endure the discontent and tension of the eschatological “not yet” because we walk the journey toward the future of the kingdom in fellowship with the people of God.  The Eucharist is an intrinsically corporate reality, a meal not simply for individuals but for the gathered community of the church, and thus the practice of the Lord’s Supper links our Christian identity and vocation to our membership in this community.  Because we all eat the one loaf, we are one body joined not only to Christ the head but also to one another as mutual members (1 Cor. 10:17).  This identity calls us to a life of suffering service within this body, a life of sacrificial love in which we use our gifts to build and promote the shalom of this community.

A eucharistic ecclesiology emphasizes especially the importance of peace-making.  In the Supper, we eat and drink together, and all division and mutual hostility must cease, lest the very integrity of the Supper be forfeited.  Paul claims that the Corinthians were not really receiving the Lord’s Supper precisely because their manner of eating and drinking did not promote the peace and unity of the body but rather perpetuated the social division and conflict of their culture (1 Cor. 11:20-22).  Thus, the early church insisted that reconciliation was a necessary pre-requisite for worthy participation in this meal: “On the Lord’s own day, gather together and break bread and give thanks,….But let no one who has a quarrel with a companion join you until they have been reconciled, so that your sacrifice may be pure.”

The concrete expression of a life of sacrifice and peace-making is hospitality.  One of the most basic acts of hospitality is the serving and sharing a common meal, and in the Lord’s Supper, God models hospitality for us by inviting us to His house for dinner.  In the Old Testament, this was clearly seen in the very architecture and furniture of the tabernacle and temple.  In that sanctuary of the old covenant, God pitched his tent (or built his house) in the midst of His people, and at the center of the ministry of tabernacle and temple was the altar, which was a table where God offered and shared a sacrificial meal with His people (Lev. 7).  To go to the tabernacle or temple to sacrifice was to become a guest in God’s home and a recipient of divine hospitality.  The church is the house of God (Eph. 2:19-22, 1 Peter 2:5), and that same hospitality is demonstrated when God spreads his Eucharistic table before us and invites us to eat and drink with Him.  If the Christian life is becoming like God, then the only reasonable response to receiving God’s hospitality at His table is to imitate this practice in our lives outside the liturgy, welcoming others generously and gladly to our own tables in our own homes.

The ethical implications of the Lord’s Supper also extend beyond the boundaries of the church community.  The Eucharist not only embodies right covenantal relationships with other people but also a right covenantal relationship to the rest of the created order.  Inherent in the practice of the Lord’s Supper is a call to man’s stewardship & dominion over creation.

The very elements used in communion affirm the goodness of human culture.  Bread and wine are not merely products of nature that humans harvest; rather, they require human cultivation and technology to produce.  Leon Kass describes the cultural conditions that bread-making presupposes:

Man must be willing to settle down and remain attached to a particular place, and an open and exposed place at that.  Their natural indolence and their desire for prompt satisfaction of need must be overcome.  Men must be able to plan for and anticipate the future, and be willing to defer gratification, in order to accept as a regular way of life laboring today for a goal far in the future….With agriculture a new human relationship to nature and to fellow man emerges….There is the nascent idea of ownership, of property in nature, perhaps tied to the admixture of one’s own labor, first to the agricultural produce and then to the soil. The idea of appropriation eventually makes necessary rules of justice, governing what is mine and thine, and points to new and more complex social arrangements…A transformer of nature, a practitioner of art, a restrainer of his own appetites, a settled social creature soon with laws and rules of justice, poised proudly yet apprehensively between the earth and the cosmic powers—man becomes human with the eating of bread.

Therefore, Leithart concludes:

Mankind is given the creation not only to use its products in their natural state but also to transform them for the enrichment of human life; he is not only guardian of what is but is creator of what is not yet; mankind is not only to eat but to bake.  The breadmaker is the creature who builds cities, sends probes to the edges of the galaxy, transforms sand into silicon chips.  Bread-making [and wine-making] humanity is scientific and technological humanity….  If Jesus made use of the product of these [cultural] structures, then He can hardly have rejected them in principle.

Far from rejecting them, the Eucharist involves an offering of human cultural labor to God and the grateful recognition that God graciously uses and transforms this labor into a means by which we know communion with Him.

Thus, an examination of the Eucharist with a view toward its role in spiritual formation reveals numerous ways that Eucharistic liturgy establishes normative patterns of Christian discipleship.   The practice of the Lord’s Supper embodies important virtues and practices that train us for a life of godliness in the kingdom.  A truly evangelical, gospel-centered spirituality, therefore, must be a liturgical spirituality that has the Eucharist at its heart.

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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.