A Meal To Remember!

How do you feel when it’s time to eat a meal? I like Ernestine Ulmer’s suggestion. She said, “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.” Orson Welles apparently liked to eat. He once said, “My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.”

For many of us, happiest family memories trace back to food and eating meals together. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and other holidays find many families gathering for fellowship and fun, and these gatherings often center around a meal. What we call “supper” in the South has always been a favorite meal for me. As a youngster in my parents’ home (and later in my own after marriage and children), the supper meal was usually the time when everybody came together to eat and “catch up on each other.” Food satisfied more than just physical hunger. For many of us meals form a large part of our happy memories bank.

The church of Christ has a special meal to remember! That meal is referred to in 1 Corinthians 11:20 as  “the Lord’s Supper.” This passage and its context (verse 17-34) is the fourth time the New Testament describes this meal. Three of the four gospel accounts also tell about the origin of what came to be called “the Lord’s Supper” (Matthew 26:26-29; Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:17-23).  The apostle Paul summarizes those accounts and the story they tell in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25 – “ For I

received from the Lord that which    I also delivered to you: that the Lord

Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.’ In the same manner He also took the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.’” 

Space will not allow a detailed analysis of these Scriptures. But one thing comes through loud and clear with even a superficial reading of all these passages – the Lord’s Supper is a meal to remember! Not like turkey and dressing at Momma’s or Grandma’s house on Thanksgiving. Not like a grilled-to-perfection steak you remember. Not like a Super Bowl get- together where you pig-out on favorite junk foods and laugh and high-five friends while you watch the football game. No, the Lord’s Supper is not a meal where we make memories to recall – it is a meal to remember. That is, the meal itself is the means by which we remember and call to mind something unlike anything else the world has ever seen or heard – the death of God’s Son. From its very beginning the church gathered to “break bread”, that is, eat the Lord’s Supper on the first day of the week (Acts 2:42; 20:7).

God has so arranged and ordained the worship of the church that every seven days, on the day He specified, His people in every locality are called together to take a trip back in time – all the way back to the cross – to remember Jesus’ death on a cross. There are many other things to be said about the Lord’s Supper (see 1 Corinthians 11:17-34). Several years ago at the Lord’s table Brother Travis Woodward led prayer before the cup was passed. He asked God to “help us take it with our minds at the cross.” That captures the essence of  the Lord’s Supper. “Do this in remembrance of Me,” Jesus said. For Christians, the Lord’s Supper is a meal to remember. God help us to never forget Jesus and what He did.

Dan Gulley