1 Corinthians 11:26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Until recently, we were a society that could remember the past, with all its flaws and failings, and see the progress we have made. As a culture, we have overcome so many things. We have not completed the learning process, but we have overcome some very large obstacles.
It seems much easier to look back with some certainty than it does to look forward, gazing into the future with eyes unaided by glasses. The past my be difficult to see clearly. One factor is that history is written primarily by the victors. The losers loss means their side of the story rarely gets recorded and preserved.
But attempting to gaze into the future is an impossible task. Our current lens is no match for the unforeseen variables. Who could have predicted the political takeover of private freedoms that happened during the flu season of 2020. Why was this flu worthy of the title “pandemic” and other flu seasons are just flu seasons, even though they also kill hundreds of thousands of people, just like the 2020 flu?
Future gazing is not what our text is about. Paul is instructing the church in the city of Corinth about some of their bad church practices. Their communion services are a mess. Individual families come with their picnic baskets full and don’t even notice those whose baskets are empty. They claimed to be family, but they were acting like island nations, conserving their resources for themselves.
Paul castigates them in no uncertain terms. This wasn’t right. The pot luck suppers in church fellowship halls have an ancient origin. All the food is laid out for everyone to enjoy. Everyone gets to eat equally, except of course the teenage boys who get to the line first! They are teenage boys after all.
But as Paul begins to wrap up his teaching, he tells his readers that there is an additional element to the Lord’s Supper that they have forgotten, or at least downplayed. The Supper is not simply about looking back at the Last Supper, but it is a proclamation of the reality of the future Supper, the one we will enjoy when Christ’s Kingdom is fully established.
The Lord’s Supper is an act of faith, faith in the reality of the past history of God’s intervention in the world, and an act of faith, looking into the future with the same certainty. It is looking back and looking forward, both with the same faith.
Paul writes that the communion itself is a proclamation of Christ’s death and all that that entails. It is about death and life. Christ’s death and His resurrection life, and our death and resurrection life. Both are in focus as we participate in communion.
But there is also a proclamation element that we often forget. We are declaring the central message of the Gospel when we continue to participate in communion, week after week, month after month. We have not lost faith in the historical reality of Jesus’ resurrection. We continue to proclaim it, looking forward into the fuzzy future.
Some things can’t be known. But the coming of Jesus is a sure thing. It is a reality, just as much as Christ’s resurrection is a reality. Let’s proclaim this “until He comes.”
The Arnold Journey 