Knowing the fulness of God and living in the new covenant means that we are invited to partake in Holy Communion, the sacrament Jesus commanded all His disciples to take. So often, however, it is easy for us to do this without stopping to reflect on what it really means or pondering the significance of these ordinary looking emblems:
Stephen spoke from Matt 26:26-29 this morning, looking at how Jesus invested the Passover feast with new meaning as He took and distributed the bread: ‘This is my body, broken for you.’ All are invited to receive from Him by taking from what He offers us, accepting that there is so much more of God to experience than we have currently tasted. In the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, twelve baskets of bread were left over; there is an abundance in God we can barely comprehend! God always has more for us; His input into us never runs out.
There is nothing physically special about the bread or the wine, but the symbolic meaning behind these ordinary things shows us that God has made a new way for us all to be reconciled to Him. The blood of Christ, shed on the cross for all mankind, is sufficient to atone for all people’s sin, throughout all history. We can come before God now in a clean and holy way, since we are made holy through the sacrifice of Christ. He wants us to know Him all His fulness, and by taking the bread and wine, we can continue on our journey of getting to know God more and more in this fulness. Holy Communion is not simply a man-made ‘tradition’; it is not something we do to fill the space in a service. It is our act of obedience, the way we remember all Christ has done for us and should become, therefore, our means of partaking in the very life of God.