Luminescence, Volume 2. C. K. Barrett
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to think that we are taking the Lord’s Supper. It is our own supper that we eat. The Supper is not Christ’s because it does not give glory to Him. It uses Him as a convenience. We are saying—“What can I get out of Christ?” instead of simply giving him all the glory for what he is, and does, and gives.
This is the Lord’s Supper—a Christ-centered fellowship which seeks his glory rather than our own edification. I do not wish to use a back-handed argument, but it is simply the truth that if you are always thinking about yourself and what you can get out of communion, you will get nothing. If you forget yourself, and come here simply to render to Christ the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, to give all the glory to God alone, then indeed you may find out what a means of grace can be. This leads immediately to a second point.
CARELESS OR CAREFUL OF OTHER’S NEEDS
The Corinthian Christians come to the supper thinking of what they can get to eat and to drink. That his brother went hungry was no concern of his. He could look after himself. We who are so much better brought up than the gluttonous Corinthians, can and do act in precisely the same manner. We come to the supper as an act of private and personal piety, thinking about our own souls, cosseting our own faith, nourishing our precious experiences, so busy with our religion and our virtue, that we have no time to think of our hungry brother or sister. Come to supper that way and you may make it a very nice religious occasion of it, you may have a real religious banquet, but it will be your supper, not the Lord’s that you enjoy. Come to this table forgetful of the needs of your fellow Christians, and you would do better to stay away.
On the other hand, if you set Christ in the midst of his own supper, if forgetful of yourself you come here to sup with him and to glorify him; you will not forget, you will not be able to forget his brothers and sisters. How can you really eat and drink with Christ—not in pious metaphor but in fact? Remember his own words—“come ye blessed of my Father, I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. . . . But Lord we never did, we were never among the lucky few who had the privilege. And the King shall say, ‘Verily, I say unto you inasmuch as you did it unto one of these my brothers and sisters, even the least of these, you did it unto me.’” It is true that this supper is one of the focal points of the social Gospel. Let it really be the Lord’s Supper, and you can’t be narrow in your affections. This again leads to another point: exclusiveness and inclusiveness.
EXCLUSIVENESS AND INCLUSIVENESS
Self-centeredness always leads to arrogance and exclusiveness. It was so at Corinth. “When you come together in assembly,” says Paul, “I hear that divisions exist among you.” Naturally, if you are setting out to have your own supper, you can always have a better time if you can get together with your old cronies and keep yourselves to yourselves, shutting all the rest out and letting them go your way. On one level you will get together with people who like to eat and drink what you like to eat and drink, who share the same social customs, and the same jokes. On another level, you will get together with those who have the same religious and ecclesiastical tastes as yourself. Whenever this happens, whenever there is a closed shop with some excluded it is our supper and not the Lord’s which we celebrate.
Let us for a moment be practical about this. We Free Church people have nothing to boast about, but there is something here we should be thankful for. No servant of Jesus Christ is excluded from this table. Whatever his ecclesiastical label if he is a repentant sinner, trusting in the mercy of Christ for salvation, he is welcome here at Christ’s table. It is not for us to be censorious of others, but it is right to say, that if these doors were shut against any of Christ’s people, it would be no Lord’s Supper we should hold in holy isolation. It would be our own supper, and much good might it do us.
It is not simply that a true Lord’s Supper is not exclusive. It is all-inclusive. Whenever we meet at Christ’s table we should not only hear his voice bidding us come to feast with him, we should also hear him saying, “go out quickly into the highways and hedges, and constrain them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Precisely because it is Christ’s Supper and not ours, we are not only his guests, but his messengers, his apostles, his evangelists sent forth from the table to go into all the world and in his name gather people into his family, that his house may be full. What are the issues of the contrast which we have studied?
DEATH AND LIFE
Our chapter in 1 Corinthians concludes with some of the most mysterious verses in the whole New Testament. “A person who eats and drinks wrongly,” says Paul, “eats and drinking judgment to himself, for this cause many of you are weak and sickly and not a few have fallen asleep.” This is not the time for a full critical investigation of what Paul means, and whether he refers to spiritual sickness and death, or physical sickness and death or both. Behind what he says there lies a principle, which is certainly true. The self-centeredness which perverts the Lord’s Supper, turning it into our supper can only issue in death. We do not have the springs of everlasting life locked up in our own bosom, and if we turn in upon ourselves, we shut ourselves away from life, and die. Even a camel can’t live on its own resources forever, though it consume its own hump, and neither can you.
The odd thing is that the Lord’s Supper also means death. It is all about death. The bread we eat is a broken body. The wine we drink is shed blood. “As often as we eat the Lord’s Body and drink his Blood, we proclaim the Lord’s death.” Certainly the Lord’s Supper means death, it signifies the Lord’s death, but it signifies ours also, the death of self, not merely the sharing of our supper but the giving of ourselves utterly for our fellows.
But this is death with a future. “He that loves his life shall lose it, but he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.” The future is pledged in the resurrection of Jesus, and realized, day by day, in the future to which we look—until He comes.
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“BREAD AND CUP”—1 Corinthians 11.26
[Preached five times from 7/25/93 at North Road to 5/20/02 at Coxhoe]
When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, many years ago, I bought a notebook at Woolworth’s and began to use it as a commonplace book, copying into it striking passages from books that I read. I thought I still had this book, but looking for it this last week, as I wrote this sermon, I could not find it. That means that I must depend on my memory for words that I have never quoted in the pulpit, but have never forgotten. The book must be fifty years out of print; I do not remember the title; a number of authors contributed to it; I never owned a copy but read it in the University library. I shall not quote, I fear, with verbal accuracy, but this is the sense: Christian history would have been very different if Christians had not ceased to continue their distinctive practices with their sacraments and prayer meetings.
For they did continue them. I have in mind the passage from which this text is taken. There are others but I shall be reading this one to you later. In the church at Corinth they did not advertise of course “next Sunday at 10.30 there will be a service of Holy Communion.” It would have done no good anyway; people would have been at work. Everyone, except Jews who had their Sabbath, worked a seven-day week, and thought it silly to have a day off. So they said, “See you at supper, 8.30 Saturday night.” And they brought their own food along in their own bait boxes, and shared out—a fish supper we should call it; and as they ate they talked, and the talk came around to the business, the very difficult business, of being a Christian in heathen Corinth. You can pick out from their letter the sort of question they had to discuss. Most of them were very practical questions.
“The Nicanor family here invited us to supper next Wednesday. Do you think we ought to go? They are a bit free aren’t they? If they can get their meat cheap at the Isis temple, they do; and there is no knowing what there will be to drink. Perhaps we should not go, though they are such nice people.” Or this, “Do you think I ought to marry Persephone? I do want to. I love her very much, but wouldn’t it take my mind off of being a Christian? I mean marriage, it isn’t very spiritual is it? Perhaps we could live together without, you know what I mean, without going to be together.” Or this “Did you know that old Mr. Pericles died last week? He was a wonderful chap, where do you think he is now? Is there a life after death? Do you think