At our service on Maundy Thursday, bread and wine will be taken and blessed by the Celebrant to be for us the body and blood of Christ. We sinners though we are, are invited to receive the bread and wine. When we put our hands out to receive the bread and take the cup to sip the wine, we have to make a decision. Am I just eating a piece of bread and sipping some wine or am I taking the Lord Jesus into my life?
At the time that Jesus lived bread was a basic food and wine was a basic drink. Wine was safer to drink than water which might be contaminated. The equivalent today might be tea or coffee and a biscuit. We are alive because we drink and eat food to keep our physical bodies alive. To keep our spiritual bodies alive we are invited to eat the spiritual food of bread and wine.
The receiving of spiritual food begins with our personal response to God, but it is more than this because we receive this spiritual food with others, it is also a corporate act.
Many of our activities in a church are about sharing food and drink together. So coffee and biscuits after our service on a Sunday; Monday Cuppa, Suppers Together, refreshments at Book Sales, Artisan Markets, Concerts and at numerous other meetings: this sharing of food and drink mirrors our central service of the Eucharist. As Jesus said, when 2 or 3 are gathered together, “I will be with you.”
Do you have to pass an exam before you can do this? No: all you have to do is to want Jesus to enter your life, so that sinner that you are you may want to be him and walk with him in your life. Why do we need to receive communion regularly? Because we are sinners and we lose sight of Jesus being with us. As human beings we need the constant reminder that God loves us so much that he gave himself in the person of Jesus to show us the way of true love, when he died for us and so it is with this service that we walk the way of the Cross as once more we begin our journey with Jesus to his death on Good Friday and then to God’s greatest gift, the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Day.
Andrew SSL