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By Such Stripes Are We Healed
by Jack Shaver

©The United Church of Canada, 1985
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 0-88622-196-X
7M/12/85/APL
Used with Permission

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I Corinthians 11: 17-26

I am sure you recognized verses 23 to 26 of today's reading as something you have heard repeated in the service of Holy Communion. Throughout its history the service was concerned to keep its liturgy biblically based. Paul's summary in the Corinthian letter of what the Lord's Supper was all about has been used in the basic order of the Christian celebration of the Supper from the earliest time. It is interesting to note that Paul included this summary because he disapproved of the way in which the congregation at Corinth behaved at the Supper.

This re-celebrating of the Lord's Supper-Holy Communion-the Eucharist-began and remains the distinctive act of worship of Christians. With regard to this act there soon grew up a doctrine of the "real presence" of Christ. This was part of the understanding the church grew to have of itself. No one came to faith in Christ in isolation. The trust that God was in Christ reconciling the world to God was mediated from one believer to another. And the ministry of reconciliation was entrusted to the community of believers. It is through the earthen vessel of other believers that the glory ofGod confronts me in the face of Jesus Christ.

Typical of many of the church's central dogmas, this doctrine of the real presence became as much an occasion of dispute as of unity. Christians quarrelled over what it meant. Was Christ present in the physical elements or in the community? How was Christ present in the bread and wine? The dispute included the matter of identifying the mediators of the real presence: Who were Christ's true priests? These were not light quarrels and they left the church painfully and tragically divided.

But whatever is at issue in these disputes, all Christians hold to some doctrine of the church as the community that embodies the faith and to a doctrine of the real presence in Holy Communion.

How consistent with our "earthen vessel" understanding of the church's ministry to find that the very words which the church came to use to institute her sacrament of Christ's real presence were first penned on account of one congregation's misbehaviour!

Further study of Paul's summary is even more revealing. In verse 21 he says:

For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show the Lord's death until he comes.

Right at the heart of the celebration of Christ's real presence, we place the words "till he comes"! Christ is both truly present and about to come again. Does this sound something like the state of Abraham, Sarah and family who "saw the promise and greeted it from afar"?

And that same verse 26 has more for us. How do you celebrate Christ's real presence? You proclaim his death, or as the Elizabethans translate it, "You show the Lord's death till he come." The way we present the real Christ alive and present with saving power in our midst is a penetrating understanding of his death.

Benediction
Now may the God of peace

who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep,
through the blood of the everlasting covenant,
make us perfect in every good work to do his will,
working in us that which is well pleasing in his sight;

Through Jesus Christ,

to whom be glory for ever and ever.

Amen

(Hebrews 13: 20-21)