Lord’s Supper Meditation – Ambivalence of the Cross as Symbol

A Twilight Musing

Do you wear a cross around your neck or have one on display elsewhere on your person?  If so, is it simple or elaborate, and what is your purpose in wearing it?  How many crosses might you see during the course of a day?  Most churches we pass have a cross somewhere on the building, most likely at the top of a spire, perhaps on the sign out front, and very probably at one or more spots inside the building.  If there are paintings inside, Jesus on the cross will be given prominence as a subject.   The very shape of many older churches is what is called “cruciform.” All this should cause us to ask, “What kind of religious purpose prompts its adherents to give such ubiquitous attention to an instrument of torture and utter humiliation?  Do we realize the strangeness of honoring such an image and wearing it as jewelry and giving it prominence in our art and architecture?

As we participate in the Lord’s Supper, we do well to consider whether we have appropriately assessed the cross of Christ.  Jesus regarded it as something to be taken up and borne, a token of self-denial, not only for Himself but for His disciples (see Matt. 15:24-25).  He set the example of embracing his cross, humbling Himself and “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8).   It is no light matter to be associated with the cross on which the Son of God died.  Paul considers the cross of Christ to be the instrument by which he “has been crucified . . . to the world” and the world to him.  In other words, the cross represents his sharing in the death of Christ, and thus it is to be to us.  It is a symbol of our willingness to radically forsake the supposed wisdom of the fallen world around us and to identify with “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (I Cor. 1:23).

In making these remarks, I am reminded of a poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi.”  It depicts the Wise Men making their arduous pilgrimage to see and pay homage to the newborn Messiah.  As they encounter bad weather, disloyal servants, and villages that gouge them with high prices, they wondered if “this was all folly.”  They finally come to the end of their journey and see the Christ child, but that epiphany is tempered by a concomitant vision of “three trees on the low sky” (i.e., the crosses on Calvary), leading the speaker of the poem to wonder,

Were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

This is an appropriate presentation, I think, of the ambiguity of the Cross of Christ; it reminds us of the Divine Man whose very birth had death as its purpose, and it ought to remind us that we, like the Magi, can no longer be “at ease here, in the old dispensation.”  Also like them, we “should be glad of another death,” by which we are dead to the world but alive in the Christ who alone brought glory to the cross.      

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Commonality and Individuality

A Twilight Musing

Paul’s comments on the Lord’s Supper in I Cor. 11:17-34 are meaningfully followed by a chapter on the importance of communal and harmonious life together in the Body of Christ.  The abuses of the Lord’s Supper in chapter 11 are related to the absence of any sense of commonality in the church at Corinth, so that some poor members were being contemptuously ignored by those who were wealthy.  Chapter 12 of I Corinthians emphasizes the need of all members of the Body to appreciate and value each other, obscuring the superficial differences between them and embracing the lowly and the exalted with equal fervor.  Chapter 13 then goes on to assert “a still more excellent way,” the bonding of all members of the Body into a symphony of love.  The appropriate frame of mind in our partaking of the Lord’s Supper is that God cherishes and reaffirms both our individual gifts in the Body and our identity as one organism, with common purpose and mutual affection for one another.

As we commune together, we need to recognize that Jesus died for His Church, but also for each of us who constitute the Church.  “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (I Cor. 12:27).  Our Western culture cries out for individualism of a sort that gives us license to define who we are; but that identification is God’s prerogative.  Saul of Tarsus was seeking to establish his own identity as one who, by persecuting Christians and casting them in prison, would be regarded as “extremely zealous . . . for the traditions of [his] fathers” (Gal. 1:14).  But God stopped him in his tracks and called him to a radically new identity, in which he was to preach to both Jews and Gentiles “the faith he once tried to destroy” (see Gal. 1:13-24).  Consequently, he could say after he had accepted God’s definition for him that he had been “crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20).

How are we to know who we are in the eyes of God?  First of all, we must be still enough to let Him assign us our place: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (I Pet. 5:6).  This exaltation includes being called “children of God” (I Jn. 3:1), a privilege that can be attributed only to the undeserved love of God.  However, our individual identities as children of God feed into our relationships with each other in the Body of Christ; as children of God, we are “joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:16-17).  If we are siblings in the Body of Christ, we find our full identity in serving one another, as Jesus did.  He could have claimed special status as the only “natural” Son of God, but He “did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil. 2:6-7).  Only as we serve one another do we fulfill our identity in Christ.  The only place for “competition” is in “[outdoing] one another in showing honor” (Rom. 12:10).  But this sort of holy abnegation is leading us to an eternal relationship to God that is the ultimate individualized identity: “To the one who conquers I [Christ] will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.”  In the heavenly state, we will see God face to face and will rejoice in knowing Him as He knows us (see I Cor. 13:12).

In the meantime, “until He comes” to take us to Himself, we rejoice in being defined by where He has placed us in the Body that He inhabits and directs.  As we commune together in the Lord’s Supper, we affirm the worth that He imparts to us as units of His own Body.

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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.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Blood of Christ—Blood of Abel

Gustave Doré - Doré's English Bible

A Twilight Musing

The writer of Hebrews observes at one point that, in both contrast and similarity to hearing the terrifying voice of God at Sinai, we who hear the message of God through Christ have come to “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:23-24, ESV). 

Eugene Peterson’s translation of this passage throws light on this odd comparison: “You've come to Jesus, who presents us with a new covenant, a fresh charter from God. He is the Mediator of this covenant. The murder of Jesus, unlike Abel's—a homicide that cried out for vengeance—became a proclamation of grace” (Heb. 12:23-24, The Message).  This presentation of the blood of Christ as a “proclamation of grace,” in contrast to the blood of Abel, which “cried out for vengeance,” provides a meaningful contrast that is relevant to our observance of the Lord’s Supper.

In the Genesis narrative about Cain and Abel, after Cain had killed his brother, God appears to him and says, “What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand” (Gen. 4:10-11, ESV).  Abel, said the writer of Hebrews, was “commended by God as righteous” (Heb. 11:4, ESV), so he was an innocent victim; but he was not, like Jesus, absolutely righteous and innocent.  The only response God could make to Abel’s murder was wrath and vengeance toward the murderer; but God could and did use the innocent death of Jesus as an avenue to show grace and forgiveness to all humankind.  Even on the cross Jesus asked His Father not to count His murder against those who carried it out: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34, ESV).

The wrongful death of Abel and the response of God to it shows us that no normal human in the fallen world, however righteous in his life, could, by his death, provide a remedy for inherited sin.  Justice could be done, at best, only by God’s wrath being visited on the murderer in response to the cry of the blood of the victim.  But the wrongful death of Jesus and the innocent blood He shed had the power to set aside God’s wrath and to deliver not only those who put Jesus to death, but all of humankind from the just consequences of their sins.

So as in the Eucharist we offer up to death our fleshly, sin-stained bodies and are symbolically infused with the New Covenant blood of Christ, we go beyond the innocent blood that can cry out only for God’s vengeance, and we rejoice in the shed blood of the absolutely innocent Lamb of God that cries out for the forgiveness of all sinners.

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation - The Ever-Renewing Legacy

A Twilight Musing

Recently, our daughter received an unexpected legacy through the will of a deceased friend of the family.  She was of course delighted to receive it and considered herself blessed by God through our friend.  But the pleasure was tempered by the fact that the gift came as a result of our friend’s death.  Her response reminded me of a passage in the book of Hebrews that speaks of Christ’s death activating a kind of will that bequeaths certain benefits to His disciples.

Therefore [Christ] is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. (Heb. 9:15-17)

 Accordingly, when we partake of the Lord’s Supper, which commemorates the death of Christ, we also remember that we are receiving the benefits, or the legacy of His death.

The chief and most overarching of these benefits is, as the writer of Hebrews notes, deliverance from our transgressions and the cleansing of our consciences “from dead works to serve the living God” (Heb. 9:14). We are thus enabled to “work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord [we] will receive the inheritance as [our] reward” (Eph 3:23-24).  The beauty of the bequest spoken of here is that we will inherit, not as bondservants, but as children, having “received the Spirit of adoption as sons [and daughters], by whom we cry, ’Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:15-17).

Another bequest coming to us as a result of Jesus’ death and resurrection is the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus said to His disciples, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you,” and He “will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:7, 13).  In addition, the Spirit will intercede for us with the Father (Rom. 8:26), and “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in [us], he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to [our] mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in [us]” (Rom. 8:11).  Moreover, the Spirit seals us for salvation and is “the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it” (Eph. 1:13-14).

Also, as we inherited from the First Adam the penalty of death because of our sin, so through the death of the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, we have received “the free gift of righteousness” and are thereby “reconciled to God” (Rom. 5:17, 10; see whole passage, vv. 8-21).  How glorious that our inheritance through Christ supersedes our inheritance from the fallen Adam!

Finally, our legacy from Christ gives us citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven, for God has “delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col. 1:12-14).  Like Abraham, we recognize that we are pilgrims on this earth and long for “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16).  We share with Jesus a kingdom not of this world (see John 18:36), and through Him we have become “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession” (I Pet. 2:9).

So let us partake of the Lord’s Supper with appropriate understanding of the gifts bequeathed to us by His death.  We are privileged legatees of the Son of God.

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Siblings of the High Priest

Melchisedech, Jacques Bergé

A Twilight Musing

The book of Hebrews presents us with a profound treatment of Jesus Christ as our High Priest under the New Covenant, and the truth embodied therein is relevant to our observance of the Lord’s Supper.  Unlike any high priest under the Old Covenant (the Law of Moses), Jesus was appointed High Priest apart from any qualifications of lineage, in the image of the Old Testament character, Melchizedek, priest and king of Salem.  The writer of Hebrews (see especially chapters 5-7) goes to some length to describe and establish the relationship between this mysterious figure and the Messiah. We may see in our observance of the Lord’s Supper a reflection of this unique priesthood of our Lord Jesus, as well as an affirmation that we are privileged to participate in that priesthood.

It seems presumptuous to speak of our participating in the priesthood of Christ, but Jesus paved the way for us to be identified with Him in that way by entering into and participating in the realm of our suffering.  The writer of Hebrews presents it thus:

Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.  (Heb. 2:17-18)

It was God’s will that the Incarnate Son should be made “perfect through suffering,” so that “he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified [would] all have one source”; and “That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers” (Heb. 2:10-11).  Therefore, having a high priest who “has been tempted as we are, yet without sin, let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:15-16).  Yea, even as Jesus the perfect High Priest entered the Holy of Holies “as a forerunner on our behalf” (Heb. 6:20) to offer Himself as the unblemished and eternally sufficient sacrifice, we “have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain” (Heb. 10:19-20)

Thus it is that, in the likeness of Melchizedek and our Lord Jesus, we are identified as priests in the Kingdom of God, not by any right of lineage or other qualifications, but entirely by the grace and appointment of God.  Through Jesus, we “like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet 2:5).  As we partake of the elements of bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, we identify with Jesus being both priest and sacrifice, accepting the admonition of Paul in Rom. 12:1 to present our bodies “as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Sure-Fire Investment

A Twilight Musing

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is common-sense advice that most financial advisors would give to their clients. “Diversify,” they would say, so that if one kind of investment fails, others could compensate.  That makes sense in the world of finance, but God invites us to do just the opposite in our approach to serving Him.  Just as Jesus sacrificed everything to fulfill God’s purposes, we His followers are invited to invest all that we have in His promise of eternal life.  The Lord’s Supper is an appropriate place to reaffirm that our commitment to God is total, even reckless in human terms, holding nothing back.

Jesus illustrates this principle of being “all in” for the Kingdom of God with two little parables.

 The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matt. 13:44-46)

God’s Kingdom is depicted here as a treasure of such transcendent value as to warrant giving all one has to possess it.  In another place, Jesus seems extreme in His expectations of those who intend to follow Him:

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt. 10:37-39)

But Jesus did not shrink from exemplifying what he asked of His disciples.  Paul gives us a beautiful summary of how Jesus,

though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Phil. 2:5-8)

In his turn, Paul describes how he followed the example of his Master.  Though he had a brilliant career ahead of him as a leading Pharisee when he was called by Jesus, he “suffered the loss of all things” and counted them “as rubbish, in order that [he might] gain Christ and . . . know him and the power of His resurrection” (Phil. 3:8-10).  Indeed, his commitment to Christ was so complete that his personality was merged with that of his Savior: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

That is the radical challenge we meet in the Lord’s Supper.  Jesus calls us to invest recklessly in giving all that we have and are, to be fellow heirs with Him of the Kingdom of God.  Therein lies the power of symbolically sharing in the body and blood of Christ.

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – The Lamb of God

Agnus Dei c. 1635–1640, by Francisco de Zurbarán, Prado Museum

A Twilight Musing

As a part of John the Baptist’s heralding the ministry of Jesus, he twice refers to Him as “the Lamb of God” (see Jn. 1:29-37).  Although John was the first to use that appellation, it echoes a reference to the Messiah in Isaiah 53:7: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”  The relevance of this passage to the message about Jesus is highlighted by the Apostle Philip’s being called by the Holy Spirit to preach to an Ethiopian court official (Acts 8:26ff).  As the man rode in a chariot in the desert, he was reading from Isaiah 53.  After he hitches a ride with the Ethiopian and discovers what he is reading, we are told that Philip “opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35).  Later on in the New Testament, Paul refers to Christ as “our Passover lamb” (I Cor. 5;7), reminding us that the Lord’s Supper was instituted in the midst of a Passover feast (Lk. 22:14ff), in which a sacrificial lamb is eaten.  So as we partake of the Body of Christ in the Communion, it is appropriate to consider the implications of Jesus being presented as “the Lamb of God.”

The lamb image applied to Jesus necessarily denotes a sacrificial lamb, a substitute for the death of someone.  In the original Passover, the blood of the slain lamb was put on the doorposts as an indication that the angel of death should “pass over” the members of that household (see Ex. 12:1-13).  We appropriate that kind of protecting blood in drinking of the cup of the Communion, “the new covenant in my blood” (Lk. 22:20) as Jesus describes it.  And as the participants in the Passover ate the flesh of the lamb that had been sacrificed, so those who ingest the bread of the Lord’s Supper are receiving Christ’s sacrificed body to their spiritual benefit.

Jesus as the Lamb of God figures prominently in the book of Revelation.  The image occurs first in chapter 5, verse 6, where we see “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain,” and only He is found worthy to break the seals on the book of God’s judgments on the wicked world.  The living creatures around God’s throne then sing a hymn of praise (v. 9ff):

“Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”

Jesus is the ultimate sacrificial Lamb, and His death is efficacious not for just a household or a family, but for “every tribe and language and people.”  Moreover, it is “once for all” (Heb. 7:27), effective for all time as well as for all people.

Finally, we see the Lamb of God taking His place with God the Father as His servants are represented as His bride (Rev. 21:1-4), with whom He and the Father will dwell forever in an existence lighted by the presence of the “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22).  So in participating in the Lord’s Supper, we are invited not only to remember that the Lamb of God was slain for our deliverance, but to look ahead to fulfillment of the promise that we will be eternally with the Lamb in His glory.

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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.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Participating in Eucharist

a Twilight Musing

Evangelicals tend to avoid the term “Eucharist” to refer to the Lord’s Supper because they associate it with Catholics and their view of the Mass, which is that the bread and the wine in the Communion literally become the body and blood of Christ.  However, “Eucharist” can be used merely as a general term for the Lord’s Supper based on its meaning in Greek, “thanksgiving.”  One could with some justification refer to our late November national holiday as “Eucharist Day.”  The use of the word at least can prompt us to ask, “In what sense is the Lord’s Supper a ceremony of thanksgiving?”

In instituting the Lord’s Supper, Jesus Himself set the tone of thanksgiving for the feast when He gave thanks for both the bread and the cup of wine (see Lk. 22:14ff) before He gave them to the disciples.  Moreover, our remembrance of the Supreme Sacrifice of Christ prompts us to be thankful that it enables us to be called God’s sons and daughters, children of God, siblings of Christ Himself.

 It is also worth noting that the context of Paul’s account of the origin of the Lord’s Supper is his condemnation of the Corinthians’ gorging themselves while humiliating “those who have nothing.”  In so doing, they were failing to appreciate the value of their brothers and sisters in the fellowship of Christ, as well as being in no frame of mind to be thankful for the Sacrifice they were called on to celebrate.

Finally, we can see a eucharistic attitude as one of two complementary purposes of the Holy Communion.  On the one hand, we engage in remembrance of the cost of what Jesus did for us, a rather somber act of looking back.  But on the other hand, we rejoice and contemplate blessings yet to come when we are thankful for the salvation He wrought for us.  The next time we encounter a reference to the “Holy Eucharist,” perhaps we can be more comfortable with that description of our regular observance, remembering that it simply means “thanksgiving.”

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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.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – A Perpetual Covenant

A Twilight Musing

One of my fondest boyhood memories is of going with my father to the bakery that employed him to pick up his load of bread and cakes to deliver that day.  The hot ovens inside were baking many loaves to supply the stores in the area, and the smell was divine!  Sometimes an indulgent worker would give me a piece of hot bread to eat, and that was a real treat, simple as it was.  As I look back on this experience, I realize that I would have had no access to this privileged space had I not been with my father.  Thanks to him, I could enjoy “Mead’s Fine Bread, the staff of life” (as the advertising called it) freshly baked. 

That put me to thinking about a comparison between the highly restricted Bread of the Presence (or Showbread) in the Old Testament and the bread of the Lord’s Supper to which Christians have open and regular access under the New Covenant.  Only Aaron and his sons were allowed access to the Showbread in the Holy Place, but through our Heavenly Father, we are ushered repeatedly into the Holy Place where the Lord’s Supper is served.  Perhaps we can gain insight to the Lord’s Supper through consideration of the details of God’s instructions in the Law of Moses concerning the Bread of the Presence (Lev. 24:5-9). 

To appreciate these instructions, we need to picture the layout of the Tabernacle (and later of the Temple in Jerusalem).  There was a forecourt containing the various tables and altars for animal sacrifice, at the back of which was a small tent housing two areas, the Holy Place at the front and the Most Holy Place (or Holy of Holies) at the back, separated by a curtain.  The Holy of Holies housed the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred object in the Tabernacle, and it was entered only once a year, by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.  Thus, the Holy Place served as a vestibule to the Most Holy Place, and in it were placed the twelve loaves of the Bread of the Presence, to be maintained perpetually.  It was specified that these be placed in two stacks of six each on a table made specially to hold them.  Each Sabbath, the loaves of Showbread were to be replaced and the old loaves to be eaten by the High Priest and his sons.

Here, then, are some helpful points of comparison between the rituals of the  Showbread and the Lord’s Supper.     

· The designation of twelve loaves of the Showbread is symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel, the people of His Covenant, and so our partaking of the Lord’s Supper regularly reaffirms that we are also the people of God under the New Covenant through Jesus Christ.   

· Just as the loaves were replaced every Sabbath, so we may appropriately renew our experience with the Bread of Heaven each first day of the week; in the process we are reminded of God’s providing for us with the same faithfulness that He showed in the supply of manna to the Children of Israel. 

· The division of the bread into two piles of six each, with the burning of frankincense on each one, is a daily physical reminder of God’s being constantly with His people.  God’s Presence is as real on weekdays as on the Sabbath, and in the same way, our one-day observance of the Lord’s Supper is to sustain us on the other six days of the week as well.

· The eating of the sacred Bread of the Presence by the High Priest and his sons is a type of the ingestion of the common objects of bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, made holy through God’s spiritual Presence in them.  We are eligible to partake because the people of the New Covenant are a “holy priesthood” (I Pet. 2:5). 

 · As the Bread of the Presence was to be eaten “in a holy place,” so when we take the elements of the Eucharist within us, the whole assembly becomes a Holy Place, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. 

 · As a “perpetual due” to the priests, the eating of the Showbread anticipates our continual observance of the Communion “until the Lord comes.”

There is one more instructive reference to the Showbread, an incident in the Old Testament (I Sam. 21:1-6) referred to by Jesus in the Gospels (see Matt. 12:1-10).  At one point, David was fleeing from King Saul, who was out to kill him.  In desperation for food for him and his little band of militia, he appealed to the High Priest Ahimelech.  The only food the priest had was the bread that had been taken from the table in the Holy Place, but he gave that to David and his men.  Jesus, when responding to the criticism of the Pharisees that His disciples were picking grain to eat on the Sabbath, refers to this exception to the rule that the Bread of the Presence be eaten only by the priests.  The Master took advantage of the situation to establish the principle that God administers His rules with mercy and is not so inflexible as those who wish to act as His enforcers to underline their own power.  We would do well to remember this teaching of Jesus when we participate in the Lord’s Supper, noting that God is more interested in the state of our hearts when we partake than in the technical correctness of the manner in which we do it.

So let us eat of the Holy Feast as those privileged under the Covenant of Christ to have our needy souls nourished and delivered from evil.  We serve a God who clears the way for us to dine at His table, and we rejoice in being served by the Lord of the Sabbath Himself.

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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.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Between Heaven and Earth

A Twilight Musing

Every observance of the Eucharist is a recapitulation of the Incarnation.  That is, it reaffirms the wonder of God’s infusion of physical things with spiritual purposes.  The original manifestation of this divine work was, of course, the creation of the universe (see Gen. chapter 1).  God reached out from His absolute, non-contingent Being to bring the material world into existence.  In doing so, He proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with an undifferentiated mass, “without form and void,” over which the Spirit of God hovered.  He then proceeded to give every segment of His creation its own identity and spiritually determined function, distinguishing each stage from what went before by a process of separation.  He began by separating “the light from the darkness” and “the waters from the waters.” The next few days, He brought dry land out of the waters and generated vegetation “according to their own kinds.”  The sun and moon and stars were to “separate the day from the night.”  Animal life, like plant life, was each “according to their kinds.”    This perfect merger of the physical and the spiritual was culminated in humankind, who, though made of “dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7) received the “breath of life” (i.e., the Spirit) from God.  Humans (the First Adam) were made distinct from all other creatures by being created in the image of God and being given authority over and responsibility for all the rest of creation (Gen 1:26-27).

But the First Adam fell from the perfectly blended state in which he was created and was plunged into a creature of disordered material that had to be reinfused with God’s Spirit in order to live.  God then implemented a long, tortuous process of what might be called “re-creation.” Once again God proceeded from the general state of chaos brought about by sin to bring fallen humankind a renewed awareness of what they had known intuitively in the Garden of Eden, which was the perfect merger between physical and spiritual realities.  In order for that Eden to be restored, God’s process would establish the necessity of physical redemptive sacrifice (going through a death to achieve renewed life), with the ultimate sacrifice being made by the Second Adam, the very Son of God, through Whose death all of God’s original purposes for the world would be realized.

Thus it is appropriate, as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, to contemplate how God over the ages worked a second time to extend an emanation of His absolute, non-contingent Self into the material world in order finally to present the New Adam, God Himself residing in physical human form.  In doing so, He once again proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with the chaos of fallen humanity and revealing more and more of His remedial commands, from the discipling of the Patriarchs, to the Mosaic Law, to the painful process of refining His people in the fires of captivity, and culminating in the merger of heaven and earth in the person of Jesus Christ.  Our ingesting symbolically the substance of our perfect Lord Jesus reaffirms that with Him we stand restored to that perfect balance of material and Spirit that God originally intended for the capstone of His creation.

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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.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Where is the Trinity in the Eucharist?

Old Testament Trinity, Simon Ushakov, Icon painting, 1671

A Twilight Musing

In our observance of the Lord’s Supper, we don’t usually think about or explicitly refer to the Holy Spirit, the Third Member of the Trinity.  That is perhaps understandable in one way, since what is being remembered is the submission of the Incarnate Son to His Father’s plan of redemption.  But it must also be remembered that Jesus had the Holy Spirit “in full measure” (see Jn. 3:34), and that the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will also raise us up in the Last Day (I Cor. 6:14; Eph 1:19).  By the same token, our partaking of the Lord’s Supper, though it focuses on the sacrificed Son, also directs us to be aware of the Father who sent Him and of the Spirit Who is sent by the Father at the Son’s request (Jn. 14:15-18).

Moreover, Jesus tells His disciples that “it is to your advantage that I go away” (Jn. 16:7), because that will trigger the sending of the Holy Spirit (the “Helper”) to them, Who will “guide you into all the truth” (Jn. 16:13).  Morerover, the Spirit “will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jn. 16:13).                              

We are thus enriched by the whole Godhead as we partake of the bread and the wine.  By the words of Jesus, we understand that the whole being and nature of the Son relates back to the Father, and that the Holy Spirit emanates from both the Father and the Son and acts in accordance with their unified will, being God’s Power dwelling in those who believe in Christ.  We rejoice in being reminded that the death and resurrection of Jesus sums up both the loving will of the Father and the powerful Good News articulated to us by the Holy Spirit, whose dwelling in us is the hope of glory implanted in our hearts.  It naturally follows that “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom 8:11).  In communing with Christ, our attention is directed by the Spirit to what the Father has done in and through the Son, to our eternal benefit.

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Suffering with Christ

a Twilight Musing

Partaking of the Lord’s Supper may not always be a pleasant experience.  The events which it recalls, far from being pleasant, were intensely painful and emphasized the capacity for suffering in human life.   There has never been a more anguished cry uttered than that of Christ on the cross: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”  The physical torture that Jesus endured when He was crucified is often graphically described, but it was the torment within His soul which racked His whole being.  He endured a depth of despair which no other human being can ever fathom.  Even the material world around was torn and disrupted by the death of Christ.  Although we believe that in the midst of all this suffering a tremendous redemption was being wrought, the price that was paid is awful to contemplate.

But the Lord’s Supper is not merely contemplation; it is participation as well.  Paul says that we must “suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17).  It is not without significance that Jesus spoke in Gethsemene of His coming ordeal as “this cup.”   Earlier, when James and John requested special favors, Jesus asked if they were able to drink the cup that He was going to drink, and even in the face of their imperfect knowledge of what it was, He assured them that they would indeed share it with Him (Mark 10:32-40). 

Here is the pattern that is reaffirmed every time we drink the cup at the Communion table.  If the Son of God could not accomplish the purposes of the Father without imbibing the bitter cup of suffering, we must not expect our confession of Him to be without the pain of sacrifice.  Only when we have voluntarily acknowledged that His suffering is our suffering can the inescapable pains of life serve to make us mature rather than bitter.

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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.

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Meditation on the Lord's Supper - The Towel of Humility

Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles by Meister des Hausbuches, 1475

A Twilight Musing

By so simple an act as eating and drinking the plainest bread and wine, Christ seeks to draw His disciples together.  It is a time when His servants should be poignantly aware of His lack of pretentiousness and should determine to gird themselves with the towel of humility and (in attitude) wash one another's feet.  And yet how often do we partake of the Lord's Supper in an atmosphere of stuffy self-importance, congratulating ourselves that we have proven our superiority to the rest of the world merely by being in the assembly. 

It is difficult in congregations of a few hundred or more to preserve the intimate fellowship of breaking bread as it was experienced by early Christians meeting from house to house; but the problem is not entirely one of numbers.  In a larger sense, we always gather around a large table, for we share each Communion service with all the saints, past and present, and to fail to recognize this wider fellowship is to be spiritually provincial.  The solution to our isolation from one another is not to make the table smaller, but to make our awareness of the presence of our Lord, the Suffering Servant, large enough and inclusive enough to fill the hearts of all who partake of His feast.  Only thus may we capture the grandeur of His humility which links us together across time.  We can be neither neutral nor antagonistic toward those with whom we sup; the Lord's Supper calls all of us to love and serve each other as He has loved and served us.

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Ongoing and Once for All

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.”

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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.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Symbolism of the Lord’s Supper

A Twilight Musing

A symbol is something to which we react intellectually and emotionally because it evokes certain memories, ideas, and experiences.  The value of a symbol, therefore, lies not only in its appropriateness to the complex of ideas which it is designed to recall, but also in the individual’s experience of those ideas.  In the Lord’s Supper, God has provided for Christians a symbolic feast which is capable of bearing a range and richness of interpretation limited only by the depth and breadth of the communicant’s experience of the Lord Christ. 

Part of the beauty of the Lord’s Supper consists of its ability to unify all the varying degrees of Christian maturity.  One person may see in the bread only an uncomplicated reminder that Christ came in the flesh and suffered for our sake, and no more in the wine than that He shed His blood in sacrifice for all mankind; another may find these symbols arousing within himself a deep surge of spiritual strength and thanksgiving because he associates them with a whole range of personal experiences of the presence of Christ in his or her life.  As in any other act of worship or fellowship we are drawn together not merely by an artificial unanimity of form, nor by intellectual agreement, nor even by the same degree of Christian maturity, but by the Divine Love toward which all our hearts are turned. 

So the symbolism of the Lord’s Supper is just as significant to the infant in Christ as to the spiritually grown man; and yet the purity of its simplicity is as awe-inspiring to the adult as to the infant.  The response that the Communion evokes from us is a measure of our intimacy with God through Christ; but even in the most sophisticated response there is no room for pride, for the symbolism of this feast is larger than us all.

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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.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Renewal of Vows

A Twilight Musing

Some married couples choose, for one reason or another, to renew their marriage vows.  It may be that they have had dissention in their relationship and want to reaffirm the promises they made to each other in the first bloom of their love.  Or maybe they want merely to say to the world, “Join us in celebrating the holiness of marriage vows and the richness of life that can be demonstrated by people being faithful to each other over a long period of time.”

The similarity between marriage and our personal and corporate covenant relationship with Christ is commonplace in Scripture.  Perhaps the most focused instance of this comparison is in Eph. 5:22-33, where Paul speaks of Christ as a husband to his bride, the Church, and the bond between husband and wife as an embodiment of the mystery of union between Christ and His church.  The husband is to cherish and protect his wife as he would his own body, and the wife is to honor and serve her husband as she would Christ Himself.

Based on this analogy, when we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we would do well to see what we are doing as a renewal of our vow at baptism to submit to the Lordship of Christ, and a reaffirmation of trust in God’s promise in Christ to love and protect us, even to the giving up of His own life.  In partaking of the bread and the wine, our life in Christ is renewed, and we rejoice like a bride whose husband has given his life for her but has been resurrected to continue living with her.  We can, to alter an old saying, have our Lord, and consume Him too.

Those who renew their marriage vows usually do so only once in their lifetimes, but we have the opportunity frequently to reaffirm our union with Jesus.  Our earthly marriage to another mortal, however rich it may be, will end someday, while marriage with Christ will last forever (Rev. 19:6-9; 21:2-4, 9).  If we are married people partaking of the Communion, our physical union with our spouses is sanctified by our reaffirmed union with Christ; if we are single, we can find the ultimate intimacy in perceiving Christ as our lover.

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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.

Lord's Supper Meditation - Subjects Together of Christ the King

A Twilight Musing

At most gatherings of human beings, there is a pecking order.  We are seated at concerts, games, and stage shows according to what price we have paid for the ticket.  At social gatherings people tend to gravitate toward those who are more influential because of their wealth or reputation or social standing.  Jesus refers to this human tendency when he speaks of those who go to a dinner and seek out the best and most honorable seat.  James cautions against giving undue deference to people merely because of their apparent prosperity.   

My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don't show favoritism.  Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in.  If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, "Here's a good seat for you," but say to the poor man, "You stand there" or "Sit on the floor by my feet," have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?   Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?  But you have insulted the poor. (James 2:1-6a) 

God rejects this kind of competitive discrimination and calls all sorts of people together into His house, with equal status before Him, to enjoy the feast He has prepared.  As we partake of this table together, we testify to the oneness of the Body of Christ: to the need each part has for all of the others, as well as the need of the whole Body for each part.  We remember that Jesus humbled Himself and took on the role of a servant (Phil. 2:5-8), in order that we might be here sharing in His servanthood, to one another and to the world.   

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Judas Takes the Bread

The Last Supper; Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet, about 1400–10, Unknown. Tempera colors, gold, silver paint, and ink on parchment; 13 3/16 x 9 1/4 in. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 33, fol. 286v

A Twilight Musing

As we learn from the portrayal of Judas in the account of the Last Supper in John 13, there is  spiritual peril in being formally a part of fellowship with Christ without being truly connected with Him.   The very beginning of this chapter (vv. 2-3) highlights Jesus’s acute awareness of Judas’s immanent betrayal: “During supper, when the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him, Jesus, knowing that . . . he had come from God and was going back to God,” arose to wash the disciples’ feet.  We assume that Jesus washed Judas’s feet along with all of the others, but Jesus explicitly excludes Judas from the benefit of being made clean (sanctified): “For he knew who was to betray him; that was why he said, ‘Not all of you are clean’” (Jn. 13:11).  He reinforces this exclusion of His betrayer from the spiritual benefit of the foot washing when He tells them, “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But the Scripture will be fulfilled, ‘He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’”

The point of all of this veiled anticipation is made clear in the account of Judas being identified by receiving a piece of bread from the hand of Jesus. 
         

After saying these things, Jesus was troubled in his spirit, and testified, “Truly, truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of whom he spoke. One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was reclining at table at Jesus' side, so Simon Peter motioned to him to ask Jesus of whom he was speaking. So that disciple, leaning back against Jesus, said to him, “Lord, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is he to whom I will give this morsel of bread when I have dipped it.” So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. Then Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.” Now no one at the table knew why he said this to him. Some thought that, because Judas had the moneybag, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the feast,” or that he should give something to the poor. So, after receiving the morsel of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night.  When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him.”  (Jn. 13:21-31)

There are several observations to be made about this passage.  First, Jesus is “troubled in spirit” concerning the upcoming betrayal, and He shares His concern with the disciples.   Why?  It seems unlikely that He is troubled only about the suffering and death that this act will bring about.  It is plausible that He is also concerned about the impact of the betrayal on both Judas and the rest of the disciples.  Satan’s work has disturbingly infiltrated this close-knit group; Satan has already “put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray” Jesus, and when the Master reveals it, the disciples respond with “Who is it?” and “Is it I?”  Immediately, their ability to assume solidarity in this small, intimate band is compromised.  We are told that the one “whom Jesus loved” (John) was seated next to Jesus, “leaning back against” Him, and therefore was ideally situated to ask the Master, “Lord, who is it?” 

It is symbolically significant that Jesus’ answer to this question is sharing a piece of the Passover bread with Judas.   Judas’s receipt of the bread from Jesus, far from being an act of sharing and communion, marked the point at which “Satan entered into him” and he was completely possessed by the Enemy.  Thus, the bread of communion becomes for him a kind of “Devil’s Mass,” and in taking it from Jesus’ hand he commits self-condemning sacrilege.  One is reminded of the warning of Paul in I Cor. 11:27-29: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.”  The fact that Judas goes out immediately to execute the betrayal, perhaps with the bread still in his hand, indicates how thoroughly under the control of the Enemy he was.

So it is that we can recognize in the portrayal of Judas in this passage the danger of only maintaining appearances when we participate in the intimate fellowship of Communion together with Christ.  May we humbly receive His cleansing and His sharing of Himself in such a way that it is a blessing to our souls and not a curse to a hard heart.

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Two Kinds of Suffering

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.

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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.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Reconciled with One Another

A Twilight Musing

Ideally, the meaning of Holy Communion in the Lord’s Supper is that the love of God, as seen through His Son, has obliterated the petty differences of opinion, the long-held grudges, the clashes of temperament which are so often barriers between even well-meaning Christians.  But since we so seldom live up to this ideal, we may be tempted to throw up our hands in despair because we realize how far short we fall of the standard of mutual charity needed for true communion.   However, we must not forget that it is the Feast which sanctifies us, rather than we who sanctify the Feast.

It behooves us, then, to make each Communion a time at which, because we contemplate meaningfully the reconciliation wrought by our Savior Jesus, we determine to allow His Spirit to break down at least one more obstacle which separates us from those with whom we should be one.  Those matters which divide us cannot long exist in the face of a sincere and prayerful desire that the risen Lord reign in all our lives—but first in our own.  What better place to seek out and destroy our sinful animosities, with God’s help, than the table at which God reminds us that our peace is made with Him by the sacrifice of His Son?

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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.