Eucharist and Lord's Supper

THE SHAPE OF THE LITURGY
them of the eternally fulfilled passover of a deliverance from worse than
Egyptian bondage.!
But the only way to the final coming of that Kingdom is by His own
hideous death to-morrow, and they have understood little or nothing of
that way.2 They have only blindly loved Him. His death would prove to
uncomprehending love only the final shattering of the hope of that Kingdom's
ever coming. Even the amazing fact of His resurrection, seen simply
as the reversal of Good Friday, could provide no interpretation of what had
happened, no prevailing summons to them to take up their crosses and
follow Him into the same unreserved surrender to the Kingship of God.
Above all, it could provide no eartWy fellowship within that Kingdom
with Himself beyond death. 'Having loved His own that were in the
world, He loved them unto the end.' And so at the last chaburah meeting
there is the fore-ordaining of the eucharist, which provided the certainty
that in the future they would come to understand and enter into-not His
death only-though that gives the clue-but His life also, His Messianic
function and office, His Person and the Kingdom of God itself-learn by
experiencing these things, by 'tasting of the powers of the age to come.'3
And the means are to be two brief and enigmatic sentences attached by
Him-quite unforgettably-to the only two things they are quite sure in
the future to do again together. Byattaching these sayingsexclusively to the
corporate rite of the chabi1rah and not to any individual observance or to
the personal possession of any particular spiritual gift, He had effectively
secured that this understanding, when they reached it, should be corporate
-the faith of a church and not the speculation of individuals.
But at the last supper itself all this is still in the future; it is the sowing
of the seed of the eucharist, not its first reaping. At the supper His chabUrah
could not understand the new meaning He intended them in the
future to attach to the old rite of the bread and the cup, for that which it
interpreted was not yet accomplished. It was the giving of a triple pledge;
to Himself, that what He had to do to-morrow He would accomplish; to
them, that '1 appoint unto you a kingdom, as My Father hath appointed
unto Me; that ye may eat and drink at My table in My Kingdom';4 to His
Father, that the cup for all its bitterness should be drunk to the dregs. To
our Lord's whole life the last supper has the relation of an offertory to a
liturgy, whose preceding synaxis consists in the scriptures of the Old
Testament and the sermon of His life and ministry; whose consecration is
on Calvary and oblation in the resurrection and ascension; and whose
communion is the perpetual 'coming' with power to His own. They did
not yet understand, but with Him, by Him, at the eucharist that uncomprehending
chaburah would become the primitive jewish church, which
proclaimed from the first, not His survival of death but 'Let all the house
1 Luke xxii. 16. 18.
,1 Luke xxii. 29; 30.
" John xiv. 5. 3 Heb. vi. 5.