By Neil Earle
When Allied bombers pounded the city of Hamburg, Germany into rubble in 1943, 80,000 people died. They included all the classmates of a young man named Jurgen Moltmann who had been conscripted to man an anti-aircraft battery. Only Moltmann survived.
But that was the beginning, not the end, of his story.
“In 1945 I was imprisoned in a wretched prisoner-of-war camp in Belgium,” Moltmann wrote later. “I felt abandoned by God and human beings and the hopes of my youth died. I couldn’t see any future ahead of me. In this situation an American chaplain put a Bible into my hand, and I began to read it.”
He soon fixed on Jesus’ death cry in Matthew 27:46. “I knew: this is the one who understands you and is beside you when everyone else abandons you. ‘My God, why have you forsaken me.’ I began to understand the suffering, assailed and God-forsaken Jesus, because I felt that he understood me. And I grasped that this Jesus is the divine Brother in our distress. He is the one that delivers us from the guilt that weighs us down and robs us of every kind of future.”
Romans 5:10 hit home as well: “We shall be saved by his life.”
“I then also came to understand the earthly Jesus too: the one who brings God’s kingdom to the poor, heals the sick, accepts the despised, calls people to discipleship, and wins for us a life with his hopes and his tasks.”
He wrote Theology of Hope in 1964. “The Gospels tell us about the sufferings and death of Christ. The self-giving of God’s son for the reconciliation of the world is communicated to us in the Eucharist in the form of bread and wine.” His body is made life for us (John 6:53-54) and that bubbling life inside us impels and empowers us to struggle against the forces of death and despair, knowing the final victory is sure. Jurgen Moltmann, called by some the greatest living Protestant theologian, is still alive, writing and teaching the death and resurrection of Christ is a call to discipleship.
The great American holiday season that stretches from Thanksgiving to Christmas, can, if we let IT, ignite hope and joy in our salvation, the kind of hope and joy Moltmann found in the Living Christ after the destruction of his friends, his city and his youthful dreams. The word “Eucharist” he used for the Christian ceremony of breaking bread and wine is from the Greek word “eucharisteas” which appears in Luke 22:19 when Jesus “gave thanks” at his Last Supper. The service is also called “Communion” and that too has biblical warrant from Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 10:16, “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ.”
I grew up calling it Holy Communion and there is deep meaning in that word as there is in such other Biblical terms as “the Lord’s Supper,” “the breaking of the bread,” “the table of the Lord,”
But why do Christians do this ceremony so often?
The 1600s commentator Matthew Henry hinted toward four reasons which we can elaborate upon in a way I don’t think he’d mind.
First, seeing the bread and wine laid out before us can remind us and the world of Jesus’ astonishing claims. In John 6 we see Jesus confronting his home town folks in a strong argument revolving around him explaining his real identity, that his origins were indeed from heaven, that he was, in effect, the Bread of Life. “Your forefathers ate the manna in the wilderness yet they died,” Jesus testified, “But here is the Bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. I am the living Bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this Bread he will live forever. This Bread is my flesh which I will give for the light of the world” (John 6:50-51).
Wow!
As various Christian writers have observed across the centuries, no sane man ever spoke the way Jesus Christ talked. Muhammed did not claim to be the Bread of life. The Buddha didn’t talk that way. Confucius didn’t even allude to such things. But Jesus did. He even took it further: “Just as the living Father sent me and I live by the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me” (verse 57).
Most of Jesus’ so-called disciples walked out on him at that moment. Only the Twelve remained. Perhaps we’d have left too, not knowing the rest of the story. You know – the resurrection, empty tomb, ascension, and all that. But seeing bread and wine placed before them on a table quite regularly reminds Christians of the actual physical presence of Jesus on this earth – Son of Man as well as Son of God, walking and teaching near the Sea of Galilee, of his being offered up to brutal death in Jerusalem.
But it brings to mind something else as well, as the great theologian John Calvin reminds us:
“The Lord intended by calling Himself the Bread of Life to teach not only that salvation for us rests in His death and resurrection but also that by true partaking of Him, His life passes into us and is made ours.”
The undefeated yet humble Messiah is the life inside us that enables Christians to meet the challenges he lays down for us. “Without me you can do nothing,” Jesus taught.
Secondly, Jesus taken into our spiritual self is our source of nourishment for all true spiritual growth and progress. Biblically speaking, bread strengthens men’s heart; it’s usually bread you miss most when you go on a diet (Psalms 104:15). With the true Bread to draw upon for strength and nourishment we can “grow up” to Christ’s example, just as well-fed children grow noticeably before their parents (Ephesians 3:19). “Maturity” is a state Christians are challenged to grow into and there are so many examples of that in Scripture and around us today.
A third reason for taking Communion at this and any time of year lies in the very real experience Christians have of dwelling more fully in the embrace of the Triune God. Habakkuk, one of the prophet’s names meant, very roughly, “love’s embrace” and Jesus was the ultimate fulfillment of the prophets.
When the apostle Paul was near shipwreck on the fateful journey to Rome he experienced a dream/vision from the Lord saying all would be well. Paul “took some bread and gave thanks to God in front of them all. Then he broke it and began to eat. They were all encouraged and ate some food themselves” (Acts 27:35-36).
Paul thus showed that Christian hope of salvation and even physical deliverances were very clearly linked. The weary crew followed his example. Paul also showed we could do communion any where at any time and that Jesus was near even in a howling windstorm with the boat they were on about to be shattered upon the rocks. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin even took communion on the moon. Unusual things happen sometimes when the church begins to gather to break the bread and drink the wine. There is a deeper sense of God’s strengthening presence.
“Even though it seems unbelievable that Christ’s flesh, separated from us by so great distance, penetrates to us so that it becomes our food,” wrote Calvin, “let us remember how far the secret power of the Holy Spirit towers above our senses, and how foolish it is to measure Him by our measure.”
Paul and other Christians took comfort in Jesus’ parting words, “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” One way the presence of Christ is experienced among us is through the regular reaffirmation in the Communion service. Five years ago our church gathered for a Jewish-style reenactment of Communion. One young man wanted to take a piece of hard Jewish bread – matzo – but had suffered a violent sore throat all week. “Should he take it?” he asked himself. When he heard the pastor recite that “people have been healed right at the Eucharist” he took courage and ate. He felt fine and has not suffered sore throat to this day.
Coincidence? An accident? Perhaps, but don't try telling that to this parishioner.
We’ve seen that Communion bread and wine is linked to salvation, to strength for the journey, to experiencing Jesus more fully. As that famous Rembrandt painting showed, Jesus started the formal gathering of the saints around bread and wine the night before he died and the early Church got the point. They met together often to break bread and be spiritually renewed (Acts 2:42). The people on Paul's doomed ship were all saved physically because Paul “had friends in high places" to whom he publically gave thanks through breaking bread. Altogether Luke record ten events tied in to the bread/salvation connection. But there is something else as well. The mystical meaning of the Communion intrudes itself.
In Luke’s Gospel Jesus is listed as eating ten meals with his disciples and other people. Some of those events are linked to evangelism – to making Jesus known. In the breaking of bread at Bethsaida, the disciples collect twelve baskets of overflow food after the miracle of the loaves and pickled sardines (Luke 9:10-17). These baskets signify their part in the Great harvest Jesus would unleash after his resurrection. And it is after his resurrection that both Luke and John record Jesus eating and drinking with his disciples after coming back from the dead (Luke 24:41; John 21:12).
Can you believe it?
Here was not only a “dead man walking” such as they saw in prolonged close-ups with the risen Lord, here was a divine personage now eating among them. At the last Supper Jesus linked the breaking of bread and drinking wine with life in the Kingdom of God (Matthew 26:29). But now here it is being carried out during the “interregnum” between Jesus coming back from the dead and his final ascension to heaven.
By this strange phenomenon the Bible writers intend to signal to us the mystical meaning of the Communion. Participation in the Eucharist has the potential to draw us closer than almost anything else to the wonder of the life beyond. When those two disciples on the Emmaus Road experienced Jesus in the breaking of the bread they immediately bolted back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples they had been with the risen Lord, had eaten a meal with him (Luke 24:28-35).
Jesus used the eating of food both to emphasize his tangible resurrected presence and to underscore that he was no mere apparition. How strange that men should eat and drink with a man back from the dead. That is, unless...unless he was indeed the risen Lord as he said.
And thus the Communion service has the potential to project us into the Kingdom of Heaven already. How? Let’s listen to John Calvin one last time:
“Paul graced that intimate fellowship in which we are joined with his flesh when he said, 'we are members of his body, of his bones, of his flesh’ (Ephesians 5:30). To witness to this thing greater than all words, the Apostle ends his discourse with an exclamation, ‘This is a great mystery’ (Ephesians 5:32).
Paul, says Calvin, prefers to marvel at all this rather than explain it. So should we. Enough happens during Communion sometimes to make us all exclaim “My Lord and my God.”