Community and Communion, Part 2
I’ve recently (in the last few years) come to realize something about the Lord’s Supper: it’s meant to be celebrated with other people. More specifically, it’s a meal for the church. While you would think this should be obvious to me, until recently I would so focus on considering my personal relationship with Jesus and how he had died for me that I would try to block out any awareness of what other people were doing. To me, it seemed like this was a very private moment.
But, as we noted last week, Scripture strongly emphasizes that communion is a family meal. It offers us a greater joy than simply the knowledge of personal forgiveness: Jesus is telling us that that he also died for those people who are right beside us. As we share in the Lord’s Supper, we are celebrating a bond, a unity deeper than any blood ties or shared experiences. For this reason Augustine calls it “the bond of love,” and John Calvin writes that the Lord’s Supper declares that “we cannot love Christ without loving him in the brethren.”
This means that when we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we are not only to consider where we stand with Christ, but also where we stand with the members of his body. When we eat and drink, we are declaring our commitment to love and forgive each other. This is why before we partake I mention the need to be in good standing with a local church. If we stand outside of loving fellowship with a local church – perhaps because we are relationally distant from any congregation, or because we are under church discipline, or because we refuse to forgive a fellow believer – we are being hypocritical by sharing in Christ’s family meal of unity. There is no room for individualism at the Lord’s table.
