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1 John 4:2: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God.
Why do we have this meal? The simple answer is that Jesus commanded it. But why did He command it? After all, aren't we in the New Covenant, which is a Spiritual covenant? Wasn’t the Old Covenant the covenant of flesh? Why do we still have these physical fleshly things, bread and wine, in the new covenant? Why do we continue to have such basic, and base, physical actions as eating and drinking in our worship?
There are a lot of answers to these questions. One is that we are created beings who always receive God's blessings, His Word, His life through created media. When God spoke to Moses, He vibrated the air so that Moses' ears could receive His words. We have the written word of God in Scripture, which comes to us in paper and ink. Teachers bring the word of God through human speech. And we have bread and wine through which the Spirit feeds Christ to us.
Another answer has to do not with creation but with incarnation. We have this meal because we confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. The Son did not come in a spiritual form, but manifested His glory in human flesh, with a human body. He showed His glory in a normal human life, through the limitations and frustrations of fleshly existence. The epiphany, the theophany of the Son comes through hunger and thirst and pain and sorrow.
Each week, we confess all this about Jesus by the mere fact that we eat bread and drink wine. Each week at this table, we confess that the Almighty became weak, that the Creator of all became poor, that the God who is Spirit became flesh. And each week, we confess that He did this all for us, that God is, by His utterly free grace, God for us. Jesus did all this to glorify the Father in the Spirit. But each week at this table, we confess that all of Jesus' fleshliness was also directed to this end, that He might give His flesh to us as our food.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, January 07, 2007 at 08:30 AM
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