A Twilight Musing

           In the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper are figures of the exchange of natures between Christ and ourselves:  In the bread is seen His assumption of our flawed humanity; in the wine is seen our divinely enabled appropriation of His perfect life.  However, in order to appropriate His action on our behalf we must experience something of the sublime tension created by the merger of Holy Spirit with mortal body.

           Satan’s greatest weapon against mankind has always been the dichotomy between body and spirit brought about through sin.  Moreover, fallen man has developed spiritual antibodies that resist the reintroduction of that divine Presence to which originally Adam and Eve were perfectly adapted.  Consequently, Satan’s first temptation of the Second Adam, Jesus, was the suggestion that He turn the stones into bread, an action which would have fed the body at the expense of the soul and would have reinforced their isolation from each other.  Jesus refused, not because the body of was of no worth, but because, for the time being, it had to be radically denied in order that the Spirit of God might once more flourish there and restore it to its former glory.  In that refusal, Jesus paved the way for us to reject obsession with the body, the too-narrow view of ourselves which keeps us from the life-giving Word of the Father.   But at the same time, if we are to drink the burning cordial of Jesus’ blood, which God desires to pour into us, we must first borrow strength from the body of Jesus’ incarnation, which He sanctified to be a fit vessel for the life from above.

           Thus, partaking of the Lord’s Supper should be a somewhat wrenching experience; for in eating the bread we acknowledge the right and ability of Christ to invade and transform the physical world, and in drinking the wine, we voluntarily accept the elixir by which the composition of our corrupted being is changed.  Our partaking of Christ may—indeed, should—entail the pain of sacrifice, but it is also the pain of fulfillment, conducting us from the futility of the Old Adam to the restored life of the New Adam.

 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.