Chapters 8 to 9 - Christ’s Teachings and Today’s Christianity

- 50 - Paul further exhorts his hearers to search their souls before receiving Communion, in order to determine whether their convictions are similar to the Saviour’s. ‘Let everyone examine themselves first, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For whoever eats and drinks will through this eating and drinking incur God’s punishment if he does not accord the body of the Lord proper respect.’ Anyone who treats bread and wine, when they are symbols of the greatest and holiest act of love in all Creation, with indifference or contempt, anyone who partakes of them while drunk or in some other equally objectionable state, must be punished by God. Even human beings will resent the slighting of a gift they have given as a remembrance. Lack of respect for the symbols of Christ's death and of his love includes above all an unworthy frame of mind in a participant in Communion. • At a rite held in commemoration of love, it is eminently unfitting that the hearts of the participants be filled w i t h f e e l i n g s o f a n o p p o s i t e k i n d. When the heart is full of quarrelsomeness, enmity, bitterness and other sins against the love of one’s neighbour, one cannot partake of the meal of Love. On this score also, the Corinthians had sinned heavily, for Paul gives as the primary reason why Communion brought them not blessings but spiritual harm the fact that divisiveness and dispute abounded among them, indicating that they had sinned against the precept of neighbourly love. “Where the Lord’s Supper was held in such an unworthy manner, both outwardly and inwardly, as in the congregation in Corinth, it is no wonder that the Apostle characterized many of the participants as ‘weak and sickly’, and found that some of them had already succumbed to the worst, namely the spiritual sleep of indifference towards God. • As you see, nothing in Paul’s epistles indicates that he regarded bread and wine in any other light than as symbols of Christ’s body and blood. Had the bread ceased to be bread, as you teach, and had it been changed into the body of Christ, Paul would have said so very clearly. How much more emphatically would this fiery disciple have addressed the Corinthians, if the bread of Communion were Christ himself. Already in an earlier part of the same epistle, Paul had mentioned Christian Communion in connection with his discussion of idolatrous festivals. In that passage he compares these with the Christian observance of the Communion rite. The sense of his words is as follows: • By eating the flesh of beasts sacrificed to the idols, the heathens commune with the evil spirits. The sacrificial meat itself is nothing out of the ordinary; it is meat, and remains meat, like any other meat. But the conviction with which it is offered and eaten by the heathens is the factor that allows them to hold communion with the evil spirits. • Christians enter into communion with Christ by receiving bread and wine, which do not change their nature by virtue of this rite, but remain bread and wine. It is only the conviction with which they partake of the consecrated bread and wine that enables them to commune with Christ.

RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjI1MzY3