Meditation on the Lord’s Supper: Organ Transplant and Blood Transfusion
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Modern medicine has made possible some marvelous operations to mend and heal the body. Knees and hips, and even a heart can be replaced. Perhaps we can make a spiritual application of these wonders by seeing how the Great Physician works in mending and healing His people when they take the Lord’s Supper.
When we take the bread of Communion, we can think of the promised exchange of our mortal, decaying carcass for the perfect, eternal housing manifested by the risen Christ, “who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). As we eat the bread together, we share in the marvel of that total “transplant,” not only as a future event, but as a present renewal of our fleshly being by the power of the Holy Spirit God has placed within us.
In partaking of the wine of Communion, we affirm together that spiritually speaking, the function of the life-blood flowing within us is no longer merely to sustain our mortal bodies. In experiencing the powerful cleansing of the sacrificial blood of Christ, we have undergone (and continue to undergo) the equivalent of a complete transfusion, becoming thereby “new creatures.” Our dominant spiritual genes are now not those of the first Adam that doom us to death, but those carried by the “new blood” of the crucified Jesus in which we have assurance of eternal Life.
Thus we need to come to the Communion table fully aware of our being maintained as meaningful beings only through the continual life supporting treatment of the Master of Health, being continually renewed by His grace so that we can walk in wholeness, to His glory.
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.
