The bread says nothing to us of the remission of sins. The broken
bread proclaims, indeed, our nourishment from Jesus, but falls short
of the deep and solemn truth that it is the very life-blood of
Christ Himself which nourishes us and vitalises us. And the bread,
in like manner, proclaims indeed the fact that we are fed on Him,
but says nothing of the joy of that feeding. The wine is the symbol
of that, and it proclaims to us that the Christian life here on
earth, just because it is the feeding on and the drinking in of
Jesus Christ, ought ever to be a life of blessedness, of abounding
joy, by whatsoever darkness, burdens, cares, toils, sorrows, and
solitude it may be shaded and saddened. They who live on Christ,
they who drink in of His spirit, they should be glad in all
circumstances, they, and they alone. We sit at a table, though it be
in the wilderness, though it be in the presence of our enemies,
where there ought to be joy and the voice of rejoicing.
But beyond that, as our Master Himself taught these apostles in that
upper room, this cup points onwards to a future feast. At that
solemn hour Jesus stayed His own heart with the vision of the
perfected kingdom and the glad festival then. So this Communion has
a prophetic element in it, and links on with predictions and
parables which speak of the 'marriage supper' of the great King, and
of the time when we shall sit at His table in His kingdom.
For the past the Lord's Supper speaks of the one sufficient oblation
and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. For the present it
speaks of life produced and sustained by communion with Jesus
Christ. And for the future it speaks of the unending, joyful
satisfaction of all desires in the 'upper room' of the heavens.
How unlike, and yet how like to that scene in the upper room at
Jerusalem! From it the sad disciples went out, some of them to deny
their Master; all of them to struggle, to sin, to lose Him from
their sight, to toil, to sorrow, and at last to die. From that other
table we shall go no more out, but sit there with Him in full
fruition of unfailing blessedness and participation of His immortal
life for evermore.
Dear brethren, these are the lessons, these the hopes, which this
'blood of the new covenant' teaches and inspires. Have you entered
into that covenant with God? Have you made sure work of the
forgiveness of your sins through His blood? Have you received into
your spirits His immortal life? Then you may humbly be confident
that, after life's weariness and lonesomeness are past, you will be
welcomed to the banqueting hall by the Lord of the feast, and sit
with Him and His servants who loved Him at that table and be glad.
'UNTIL THAT DAY'
'I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine,
until that day when I drink it new with you in my
Father's kingdom.'--MATT. xxvi. 29.
This remarkable saying of our Lord's is recorded in all of the
accounts of the institution of the Lord's Supper. The thought
embodied in it ought to be present in the minds of all who partake
of that rite. It converts what is primarily a memorial into a
prophecy. It bids us hope as well as, and because we, remember. The
light behind us is cast forward on to the dimness before. So the
Apostle Paul, in his solitary reference to the Communion--which,
indeed, is an entirely incidental one, and evoked simply by the
corruptions in the Corinthian Church, emphasises this prophetic and
onward-looking aspect of the backward-looking rite when he says, 'Ye
do show the Lord's death _till He come_.'
Now, it seems to me that those of us who so strongly hold that the
Communion is primarily a simple memorial service, with no mysterious
or magical efficacy of any sort about it, do rather ignore in our
ordinary thoughts the other aspect which is brought out in my text;
and that comparative ignoring seems to me to be but a part of a very
lamentable and general tendency of this day, whereby the prospect of
a future life has become somewhat dimmed and does not fill the place
either in ordinary Christian thinking, or as a motive for Christian
service which the proportion of faith, and the relative importance
of the present and the future suggest that it ought to fill. The
Christianity of this day has so much to do with the present life,
and the thought of the Gospel as a power in the present has been so
emphasised, in legitimate reaction from the opposite exaggeration,
that there is great need, as I believe, to preach to Christian people
the wisdom of making more prominent in their faith their immortal
hope. I wish, then, to turn now to this aspect of the rite which we
regard as a memorial, and try to emphasise its forward-looking
attitude, and the large blessed truths that emerge if we consider that.
I. First, let me say just a word about the twin aspect of the
Communion as a memorial prophecy, or prophetic remembrance.
Now, I need not remind you, I suppose, that according to the view
which, as I believe, the New Testament takes, and which certainly we
Nonconformists take, of all the rites of external worship, every one
of them is a prophecy, because every act in which our sense is
brought in to reinforce the spirit--and by outward forms, be they
vocal, or be they manual, or be they of any other sort, we try to
express and to quicken spiritual emotions and intellectual
convictions--declares its own imperfection, digs its own grave, and
prophecies its own resurrection in a nobler and better fashion. Just
because these outward symbols of bread and wine do, through the
senses, quicken the faith and the love of the spirit, they declare
themselves to be transitory, and they point onwards to the time when
that which is perfect shall absorb, and so destroy, that which is in
part, and when sense shall be no longer necessary as the ally and
humble servant of spirit. 'I saw no temple therein.' Temples, and
rites, and services, and holy days, and all the external apparatus
of worship, are but scaffolding, and just as the scaffolding round a
building is a prophecy of its own being pulled down when the
building is reared and completed, so we cannot partake of these
external symbols rightly, unless we recognise their transiency, and
feel that they say to us, 'A mightier than I cometh after me, the
latchet of whose shoe I am not worthy to unloose.' The light that
shines in the dark heralds the day and its own extinction.
So, looking back we must look forward, and partaking of the symbol,
we must reach out to the time when the symbol shall be antiquated,
the reality having come. The Passover of Israel did not more truly
point onwards to the true Lamb of Sacrifice, and to the true
Passover that was slain for us, and to its own elevation into the
Lord's Supper of the Christian Church, than the Lord's Supper of the
Christian Church points onwards to the 'marriage supper of the
Lamb,' and its own cessation.
But then, again, let me remind you that this prophetic aspect is
inherent in the memorial aspect of the Communion, because what we
remember necessarily demands the coming of what we hope. That is to
say, if Jesus Christ be what the Lord's Supper says that He is, and
if He has done what that broken bread and poured out wine proclaim,
according to His own utterance, that He has done, then clearly that
death which was for the life of the world, that death which was the
seal of a covenant, that body broken for the remission of sins, that
wine partaken of as a reception into ourselves of the very life-blood
of Jesus Christ, do all demand something far nobler and more perfect
than the broken, incomplete obedience and loyalties and communions
which Christian men here exercise and possess.
If He died, as the rite says that He did, and if dying He left such
a commentary upon His act as that ordinance affords, then He cannot
have done with the world; then the powers that were set in motion by
His death cannot pause nor cease their action until they have
reached their appropriate culmination in effecting all that it was
in them to effect. If, leaving His people, He said to them, 'Never
forget My death for you, My broken body, and My shed blood,' He
therein said that the time will come, must come, when all the powers
of the Cross shall be incorporated in humanity, and when the parted
shall be reunited. The Communion would stand as the expression of
Christ's mistaken estimate of His own importance, if there were not
beyond the grave the perfecting of it, and the full appropriation
and joyful possession of all which the death that it signifies
brought to mankind.
Therefore, dear brethren, it seems to me that the best way by which
Christians can deepen their confidence and brighten their hope in
the perfect reunion and blessedness of the heavens, is to increase
the firmness of their faith in, and the depth of their apprehension
of, the sacrifice of the Cross. If the Cross demands the Crown, then
our surest way to realise as certain our own possession of that
Crown is to cling very close to that Cross. The more we look
backwards to it the more will it fling its light into all the dark
places that are in front of us, and flush the heavens up to the
seventh and beyond, with the glories that stream from it. Hold fast
by the Cross, and the more fully, believingly, joyously,
unfalteringly, we recognise in it the foundation of our salvation,
the more gladly, clearly, operatively, shall we cherish the hope
that 'the headstone shall be brought forth with shoutings,' and that
the imperfect symbolical communion of earth will grow and greaten
into complete and real union in eternal bliss.
Let me urge, then, this, that, as a matter of fact, a faith in
eternal glory goes with and fluctuates in the same degree and manner
as does the faith in the past sacrifice that Christ has made. He,
and He alone, as I believe, turns nebulae into solidity, and makes
of the more or less tremulous anticipation of a more or less dim and
distant future, a calm, still certainty. We know that He will come
because, and in proportion as, we believe that He has come. Keep
these two things, then, always together, the memory and the hope.
They stand like two great piers, one on either side of a narrow,
dark glen, and suspended from them is stretched the bridge, along
which the happy pilgrims may travel and enter into rest.
II. And now, let us turn for a moment to the lovely vision of that
future which is suggested by our text.
The truest way, I was going to say the only way, by which we can
have any conceptions of a condition of being of which we have no
experience, is to fall back upon the experiences which we have, and
use them as symbols and metaphors. The curtain is the picture. So
our Lord here, in accordance with the necessary limitations of our
human knowledge, contents Himself with using what lay at His hand,
and taking it as giving faint shadows and metaphorical suggestions
as to spiritual blessedness yonder.
There is one other way, as it seems to me, by which we can in any
measure body forth to ourselves that unknown condition of things,
and that is to fall back upon our present experiences in another
fashion, and negative all of them which involve pain and limitation
and incompleteness. There shall be no night--no sorrow--no tears--no
sighing, and the like. These negatives of the strong and stinging
griefs and limitations of the present are perhaps our second-best
way of coming to some prophetic vision of that great future.
Remembering, then, that we are dealing with pure metaphor, and that
the exact translation of the metaphor into reality is not yet
possible for us, let us take one or two very plain thoughts out of
this great saying--'Until I drink it new with you in My Father's
kingdom.'
Then, we have to think of the completion of the Christian life
beyond, which is also the completion of the results of Christ's
death on the Cross, as being, according to the very frequent
metaphor both of the Old and the New Testament, a prolonged
festival. I do not need to speak of the details of the thoughts that
thence emerge. Let me sum them up as briefly as may be. They include
the satisfaction of every desire and the nourishment of all
strength, and food for every faculty. When we think of the hungry
hearts that all men carry, and how true it is that even the wisest
and the holiest of us are 'spending our money for that which is not
bread, and our labour for that which satisfieth not'; when we think
of how the choicest foods that life can provide, even for the
noblest hunger of noble hearts, are too often to us but as a feeding
on ashes that will leave grit between the teeth and a foul taste
upon the palate, surely it is blessed to think that we may, after
all life's disappointments, cherish the hope of a perfect fruition,
and that yonder, if not here, it will be fully true that 'God never
sends mouths but He sends meat to feed them.' That is not so in this
world, for we all carry hungers which impel us forward to nobler
living, and which it would not be good for us to have satisfied
here. But, unless the whole universe is a godless chaos, there must
be somewhere a state in which a man shall have all that he wants,
and shall want only what he ought.
The emblem of a feast suggests also society. The solitary travellers
who have been toiling and moiling through the desert all the day
long, snatching up a hasty mouthful as they march, and lonely many a
time, come together at last, and sit together there joyous and
united. Deep down in our hearts some of us have gashes that always
bleed. We know losses and loneliness, and we can feel, I hope, how
blessed is the thought that all the wanderers shall sit there
together, and rejoice in each other's communion, 'and so shall
_we_ ever be with the Lord.'
But besides satisfaction and society the figure suggests repose.
That rest is not indolence, for we have to carry other metaphors
with us in order to come to the full significance of this one, and
the festal imagery is not all that we have to take into account; for
we read, 'I grant unto you a kingdom, and ye shall sit on twelve
thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel,' as well as 'ye shall
eat and drink with Me at My table in My kingdom.' So repose, which
is consistent and coexistent with the intensest activity, is the
great hope that comes out of these metaphors. But for many of us--I
suppose for all of us elderly people--who are about weary of work
and worry, there is no deeper hope than the hope of rest. 'I have
had labour enough for one,' says one of our poets. And I think there
is something in most of our hearts that echoes that and rejoices to
hear that, after the long march, 'ye shall sit with Me at My table.'
But besides satisfaction, society, and rest, the figure suggests
gladness. Wine is the emblem of the joyous side of a feast, just as
bread is the emblem of the necessary nourishment. And it is
_new_ wine; joy raised to a higher power, transformed and
glorified; and yet the old emotion in a new form. As for that
gladness, 'eye hath not seen, neither hath it entered into the heart
of man to conceive, the things that God hath prepared for them that
love Him.' Only all we weary, heavy-laden, saddened, anxious,
disappointed, tormented people may hope for these festal joys, if we
are Christ's. The feast will last when all the troubles and the
cares which helped us to it are dead and buried and forgotten.
These four things, brethren--satisfaction, society, rest, new
gladness--are proclaimed and prophesied to each of us, if we will,
by this memorial rite.
Again, there comes from this aspect of the Communion the thought
that the blessed condition of the Christian soul hereafter is a
feast on a sacrifice. We must distinguish between the sense in which
our Lord drinks with us, and the sense in which we alone partake of
that feast of which He provides the viands. But just as in the
symbolic ordinance of the Communion the very essence of it is that
what was offered as sacrifice is now incorporated into the
participant's spiritual being, and becomes part of himself, and the
life of his life, so, in the future, all the blessedness of the
clustered and constellated joys of that life, which is one eternal
festival, shall arise from the reception into perfected spirits with
ever-growing greatness and blessedness of the Christ that died and
ever lives for them. That heavenly glory, to its highest pinnacle of
aspiration, to its most rapt completeness of gladness, is all the
consequence of Christ's death on the Cross. That death, which we
commemorate, is the procuring cause of man's entrance into bliss,
and that death is the subject of the continual, grateful remembrance
of the saints in the seventh heaven of their glory. Life yonder, as
all true life here, consists in taking into ourselves the life of
Jesus Christ, and the law for heaven is the same as the law for
earth, 'He that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me.'
Lastly, the conception of the future for Christian souls arising
from this aspect of the Lord's Supper is that it is not only a
feast, and a feast on a sacrifice, but that it is a feast with the
King.
'_With you_ I will drink it.' Brethren, we pass beyond metaphor when
we gather up and condense all the vague brightness and glories of that
perfect future into this one rapturous, overwhelming, all-embracing
thought: 'So shall we ever be with the Lord.' I could almost wish
that Christian people had no other thought of that future than this,
for surely in its grand simplicity, in its ineffable depth, there lie
the germs of every blessedness. How poor all the material emblems are
of which sensuous imaginations make so much, when compared with that
hope! As the good old hymn has it, which to me says more, in its bold
simplicity, than all the sentimental enlargements of Scriptural
metaphors which some people admire so much--
'It is enough that Christ knows all,
And I shall be with Him.'
Strange that He says, 'I will drink it _with you._' Does He
need sustenance? Does He need any external things in order to make
His feast? No! and Yes! 'I will sup with Him' as well as 'He with
me.' And, surely, His meat and drink are the love, the loyalty, the
obedience, the receptiveness, the society of His redeemed children.
'The joy of the Lord' comes from 'seeing of the travail of His
soul,' and His servants do enter into that joy in deep and wondrous
fashion. We not only shall live on Christ, but He Himself puts to
His own lips the chalice that He commends to ours, and in marvellous
condescension to, and identity with, our glorified humanity drinks
with us the 'new wine' in the Father's kingdom.