A Twilight Musing

          Part of the legend of King Arthur, early king of Britain, is that he was the “once and future king”; that is, he both existed as a historical person and will return to save England from a time of great peril in the future.  Those who believe in both the historical Jesus and His return someday to gather His people to Himself and render final judgment on the earth will see the similarity between the presentation of the legend and the matter of faith about Jesus Christ.  I think there is also an application of the “once and future” idea to the experience of the Lord’s Supper.

          When we partake of the bread of the Communion, we are said to be ingesting the body of Christ, recalling that He existed and walked in the flesh among mankind, the incarnate Son of God.  In doing so He presented the perfect form of God’s original creation of humans, without sin or any kind of blemish.  He also died and was resurrected in the body, and every eye will see Him (Rev 1:7) when He returns to transform and call to Himself all who have been redeemed in faith.  What we celebrate in the bread of the supper is the “ongoingness” of the Gospel message: As Jesus  Christ existed and walked on the earth in human form, so He calls and enables us to live our lives on earth in His image.  But just as He succumbed to death, giving up that perishable body and receiving a new, imperishable one, so we take His body within us with the promise that we shall overcome death as He did.  In the bread of Communion, we express the assurance that our life in Christ is a both “once and future” reality.

          In the wine, however, is a different aspect of our salvation and redemption, for in partaking spiritually of the blood of Christ, we are to contemplate an action of our Lord that was “once for all” (Heb. 9:24-28), the shedding of His blood to implement the New Covenant.  Accordingly, when He instituted the Lord’s Supper, He said that the wine was “my blood of the covenant” (Mark 14:24).  So when we partake of the wine, we focus on the unique event in history that fixed and secured our salvation. Before that pivotal event, blood sacrifice was effective only as a foreshadowing of the final and eternally sufficient offering of the perfect Lamb of God.

          Our participation in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ through the Lord’s Supper enables us to be divinely reassured that though we continue to battle the vicissitudes of life in these perishable bodies, through the power of our resurrected Lord these mortal bodies have a future, even after being returned temporarily to the dust from which they were created.  For in Christ we have a Covenant sealed by the Father through His Son’s once-for-all spilling of blood for us.  Let us rejoice in these gifts of bread and wine to renew our assurance of completing the cycle of enduring life in the flesh, being planted as seed in the grave, and being raised to bear the fruit of unchangeable life with God.  Thereby, we are united anew with the One Who is truly “the once and future King.”

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.