Lord’s Supper Meditation: Not Merely a Teacher
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Christ with the Eucharist, Vicente Juan Masip, 16th century.
A Twilight Musing
Perhaps nowhere is the difficulty of a purely humanistic allegiance to Christ more clearly felt than in a sincere attempt to participate meaningfully in the Lord’s Supper. Acknowledgment of Jesus as a great teacher and moral philosopher who is worthy of our admiration and imitation is certainly better than rejecting Him outright, but such an attitude was not what He expected from His disciples. When He ate the Last Supper with them, His object was not simply to institute a reminder that humans should treat one another humanely, but to perpetuate the truth that they could serve Him only by allowing Him to be, not just an influence, but the very power of action within them. Jesus was not one whose words they could merely choose to accept or refuse, along with all the other human ideas, any more than food was something they could eat or leave alone, as they preferred.
Neither they nor we were meant to partake of the Lord’s Supper without being powerfully reminded each time of the demand—and the promise—that He makes to every person. As we take the bread and the wine, we should hear our Lord saying, in effect, “By eating my body and drinking my blood, you are admitting your inability to eradicate the spiritual disease within you and within the world, and you are renewing your faith—not in your ability to apply my teaching through your own power, but in God’s ability to make you a new person through my death for you.” The price of communing with Christ is allowing Him to completely make us over.
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.
