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Luke 22:18: Jesus said, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes.
When Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper, He was looking forward to a future kingdom and a future feast. That is a central theme of this meal: It is a foretaste, a preview, an early course in the feast of the kingdom, the marriage supper of the lamb. This meal, like the gospel itself, calls us to a future, opens a future, creates a future.
But this meal also, of course, points us back to the past. Jesus said that He would not drink the fruit of the vine with His disciples until the kingdom comes, but He also said that we should do this as a memorial of His death. If the meal looks ahead to the consummation, it also points back to the cross.
Paul puts these two together when he says that whenever we eat bread and drink wine, we are "proclaiming" the Lord's death until He comes. The Lord's death is a past event, accomplished once for all, and in this meal we celebrate that. But this meal proclaims that death in anticipation of His coming again.
This meal, then, offers a clue to the nature of our lives in time. It offers a clue to the character of time and history, and our experience in it. This meal is distended between the past death of Jesus, and the future consummation. This meal hangs on the cross of reality, stretched out between past and future, inner and outer.
As we eat and drink at this table, we too are stretched out on the cross of time, celebrating the conquering death and resurrection of Jesus, the now of the kingdom; and hoping for the consummation of all things.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 31, 2006 at 08:04 AM
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