Feed by faith, not works

by Archbishop Peter Jensen

One of the motions agreed to at the Synod in 2004 called upon Bishops and other ministers to teach about this gospel sacrament. To help fulfil that request, let me offer these thoughts.

One of my great joys as a Christian is participating in the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. As we celebrate together, we are linked in an unbroken chain through history back to the Lord’s Last Supper.

The service passed on to us by our Protestant Reformers is a wonderful setting forth of the gospel message and an opportunity to strengthen our union in Christ and with one another by faith and love.

Two great controversies have marked and marred the church’s thinking about this. The first is to do with the sacrifice of Christ, and the second is to do with his presence.

In the Lord’s Supper we jointly ‘proclaim of the death of Christ until he comes’ (1 Cor 11:26). The scriptural teaching on the death of Jesus includes the fact that his death was a sacrifice for sin, once for all, and completely efficacious in taking away all our sins. Unfortunately, human beings have an innate tendency to want to save themselves, to add their own worship to what Christ has done. 

Historically this unfortunate tendency has affected the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. For some people, it has become something we offer to God, and so add our good works to Christ’s sacrifice. The best way to see the Holy Communion is as a verbal and acted proclamation of what God has done for us in Christ, and the sufficiency of what he has done. We receive God’s word by faith. Likewise, it is only by faith, and by faith alone, that we benefit from the Lord’s Supper.

The second controversy is about the nature of Christ’s presence with us.  As we know, he is present with us always, but his presence is also especially experienced in the assembly of his people. But this presence of the Lord, whether in two or three gathered together to pray, or in the Lord’s Supper, is mediated by His Spirit. It is not physical in any sense, but spiritual. The physical act of eating and drinking assures us of our union with Christ and symbolises our reliance on his death for our salvation.

Our Prayer Book says, ‘the natural Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ’s natural body to be at one time in more places than one’.

It thus guards against any notion that the bread and wine we use in the Holy Communion become the body and blood of Christ. That is why the Prayer Book and Articles of Religion have no space for such practices as the reservation or devotional adoration of the sacraments.

Indeed, there is a common misunderstanding here. Because of our human tendency towards confusing the spiritual and the material, we sometimes think of the consecration prayer as being the high point of the Holy Communion service. But the consecration prayer is the setting apart of bread and wine for a special use.

That use is to signify to us the death of Jesus, our union with him and our union with one another in eating together. It is the eating ‘in remembrance of him’ by which we ‘feed on him in our hearts by faith’ which is the great moment of our Prayer Book service. We do not bring Christ down to earth, but we ‘lift up our hearts to the Lord’.

I can understand some of the fears which concern us about the abuse of the Lord’s Supper. But it is a grave mistake to allow these abuses to rob us of the joy of hearing God’s word in this way. It should neither be neglected nor conducted in an irreverent manner, but received with thankfulness to God, as we feed by faith on the one who called himself ‘the Bread of Life.’

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