Jeremiah 31:31-34, Mark 14:22-25

When the Christian story began there were small groups of Aramaic speaking and Greek speaking Christians in Jerusalem and in Galilee. They were trying to digest their newly found identity as they began to shape their faith in Christ.

At first they still went to Temple and Synagogue for worship. The evangelist Luke in his story of the emerging church says that the Jewish-Christians in Jerusalem met "every day in the temple and at home" (Acts 5:42, also 2:46). Christians also participated in services at various synagogues (Acts 9:20; 13:14-42; 14:1; 17:1-4,17; 18:5-7, 16; 19:8). For them Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah, and they proclaimed that conviction in temple and synagogue.

Nevertheless, soon the tension between their newly found faith "in Christ" and the traditional Jewish worship practice probably led to a retreat from temple and synagogue to their houses.

The reasons for that change of venue has to do with what we are doing when we celebrate the Lord's Supper:

• The temple worship entailed several sacrificial practices, while Christians began to believe that Jesus meant the end of a system in which you try to please God with the offering of sacrifices. Jesus, they said, was the sacrifice "once for all". They confessed that "Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins." Their sins are therefore forgiven, and "where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin." (Hebrews 10:11-31) This is one reason why any intimation of a repeated sacrifice in the Christian worship service must be vigorously resisted.
  
• A second reason why Christians left Temple and Synagogue is that Jesus had left for his disciples the regular practice of a common meal. This common meal became the major focus of the emerging Christian worship services in the various house churches.

What I would like to do this morning, is to distil the major themes, the major emphases of that common meal, which we have come to celebrate as the "Lord's Supper" or "Holy Communion" or the "Eucharist". What do we have to know, what do we have to look for, if we want to celebrate the Lord's Supper in a worthy manner?

The first thing is a reality that was close to Jesus' heart. Joy. God and joy belonged together for him.

You have probably heard the word "eschatological". "Eschatos" refers to the end. "Eschatological" refers to what is finally true and real. What finally remains when the curtains of history are drawn.

When the early Christians celebrated their faith in Christ, they did so with hearts filled with eschatological joy. They recalled the words of Jesus:

"Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." (Mk 14:25)

Their joy of faith now was fed from the future. It anticipates the future when God will be God. Hardships, difficulties, even injustices and persecutions could be sustained, and indeed were sustained in the anticipated joy that the day will come when every tear and every pain and every injustice will be removed.

With that hope, that expectation in their hearts, the early Christians cried out: "Maranatha" – "Our Lord, come!"

That is the first ingredient of every Lord's Supper: eschatological joy. Living in anticipation of an end that will be good!

The second characteristic is related to the present. We are involved in a covenant meal.

The Lord who holds the future in his hands and who promises that God's YES, and therefore joy, will determine the end, is already sitting down with his friends to celebrate the covenant that God will not break.

Covenant and covenant meals have a long history. God made many covenants with his people and indeed with all of creation. And such covenants are sealed and celebrated with a covenant meal. The hope for a new covenant was alive in Israel:

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. (Jer 31:31-34)

That hope had become a present experience in the Covenant celebrations of the early Church. With Jesus, God had fleshed out his "Yes" – and that calls for celebration.

In the covenant meal fellowship with God and communion with each other is celebrated. Where two or three meet together Christ promises to be in their midst.

That is the second point. The first point was that we live in anticipation of a future of joy. The second point is that we celebrate the present of communion with God and with each other.

What is the ground for the eschatological joy which anticipates the future of faith? What is the basis for believing that Christ is present in the celebration of the covenant over a meal?

The Lord's Supper texts now direct our attention from the future and the present to the past.

… when Jesus had given thanks, he broke the bread and said, "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

In the same way he took the cup also … saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." (1 Cor 11:24f.)

"For you" and "in my blood".

The joy and fellowship of Christians and their faith in Christ is grounded. It does not hang in the air. It is not a psychological trick or a psychological illusion. Our joy and our covenant is grounded in what God has done for us. God's action for us precedes our faith, indeed creates our faith.

It is solidly grounded in Jesus. His life, death and resurrection.

And Jesus' being is designated as a being for others.

Now, we have to understand that this was first formulated in a cultural context where a relationship to God was understood mainly in terms of sacrifice. People brought sacrifices to their gods. A Covenant was sealed with a meal and a covenant sacrifice.

The language of sacrifice is used here, but the meaning is different. Jesus' sacrifice is not in the category of sacrificing a goat or sheep or dove.

Jesus sacrificed his life in a different way. He did not have to do it, and God certainly did not need it. But Jesus wanted to live for God and for others and when people opposed him for that vision and that passion, then he stuck to it. And as we know, he was opposed, arrested and killed. He became the victim of selfishness and greed. But God stood by him. God accepted Jesus' life. Indeed, by raising Jesus from the dead, God declared what we celebrate – that nothing, not even death, can separate us from God's love.

So here we are, my friends, celebrating the Lord's Supper, joining a table that reaches back 2000 years to Jesus, winds itself around the world, and anticipates the coming of God, when God and love will be all in all.

How can we respond?

Enjoy it.
Celebrate it.
And then get up, committed to echo God's love in a needy world.

Thorwald Lorenzen
01/08/2004