A Twilight Musing

In the Lord’s Supper, both the bread and the wine represent the suffering of Jesus, but perhaps it is instructive to see the bread as focusing on His suffering in the flesh and the wine as focusing on His suffering in spirit.

Jesus’ physical suffering on the last day of His life was no different from the suffering endured by the two thieves crucified along with Him. Had only His physical body died, the eternal purpose of redeeming humanity would not have been fulfilled, even though He died in innocence and not because His body was forfeit to death because of sin. Jesus had to go beyond merely having His heart stop beating and His lungs cease functioning. It was man’s spirit that was doomed to die because of sin, and Jesus’ sacrificial death had to embrace that alienation from the Father expressed in the cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” By the time He died, however, He was able to say, “Into Your hands I commit my spirit.” Jesus gave back to God the Father that part of Him that had most profoundly died, the death that satisfied the penalty of death in the spirit. It appears that while Jesus’ mangled body lay in the tomb for three days, the core of His life—the part that was capable of redemptive sacrifice--was with the Father, awaiting the First Day of the Week to descend once more into the Incarnate Son’s uncorrupted frame and transform it into a body that was imperishable, the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (I Cor. 15:20).

So as we partake of the bread, we can concentrate on the fact that in His physical body Jesus suffered in all points as we do in the flesh, experiencing rejection, misunderstanding, persecution, slander, betrayal, and finally horrible torture and the shame and pain of the cross, wrapping up in Himself the physical suffering of all mankind. But the drinking of the wine in communion can call our attention to the fact that the cup that Jesus was called on to drink (in spite of beseeching the Father that it might not be so) was an indescribable suffering at the core of His soul. God laid down the principle that the life of a person or an animal is in its blood (Lev. 17:14); and as we drink the symbolic wine, we imbibe the process by which the bitter cup of alienation from God is transformed into the cup of eternal life.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

More from this series