YEAR 2023 SYNOD THEME: AN EXTRACT FROM THE BISHOP'S CHARGE
4. Empowering us to be Blessing in the World
The Lord's Supper is intended to be both a representation of Christ's one sacrifice and church members' Eucharistic offering of themselves to God. The Lord's Supper leads the Church to realize afresh its own involvement in the saving event of the death and resurrection of Christ and to become related in a new way to this event. In a sense, therefore, God represents the sacrifice of Christ to His people in the sacrament. The Church, therefore, makes a glad self-sacrifice of thanksgiving in response to Christ's sacrifice of propitiation. It is supremely in the context of the Lord's Supper that the members of the Church within the one body can present themselves in body and soul as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God (Rom 12:1).
And I believe that as Christ’s sacrifice brought about goodness and blessedness to humankind, so do our sacrifices of thanksgiving in the sacrament bring the same to the world around us.
Conclusion
Interpretations of the Lord’s Supper must take full account of its corporate nature. The Supper is a meal, which is essentially a social means of fellowship. The early Church had an actual fellowship meal between the giving of the bread and the wine. The Jewish Passover feast, which forms the background of the Lord's Supper, essentially celebrates an action in which God dealt with His people as members of one body, and individuals find themselves strengthened and built up within the revitalizing of the corporate fellowship with God. The ‘new covenant’ is a covenant between God and His whole people before it is a covenant between God and the individual.
Christians’ communion with each other within the one fellowship is, therefore, an important aspect of the Lord's Supper. Paul referred to this communion in 1 Cor 10:17, ‘For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.’ The meal strengthens, first of all, the fellowship of love and service.
Participants in the Lord’s Supper encounter in the present the actuality of what is future. The Lord's Supper, like the Passover, is the ‘remembrance of a unique event, whose effect is decisive not only for those who participated in it historically but also for those in each generation who participate in it sacramentally. But the Lord's Supper also anticipates what is to come. Instead of returning immediately in the glory of His completed kingdom, to usher in visibly the new age for humankind, Jesus Christ has held back the final full manifestation of His reign. In the lengthened interim He gives within His Church, especially in the Lord's Supper, a foretaste of the final marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:7-9) and of the powers of the age to come (Heb 6:4).
Participants in the Supper, therefore, within a temporal form and through a transitory event confront, as far as possible while still in the "last days" (Heb 1:1; 1 Peter 1:20), what will belong to them in Christ when they see Him as He is (1 John 3:2). At present they can have this confrontation only through a sacramental veil. The sacrament is thus the appointed means by which God gives participants this gracious encounter with what is to come, and it is meant to make them always look forward in hope to the glory of the final destiny of all things, even while they offer themselves, in union with the crucified Lord, to the service of His word in the life of this present world. The prayer Maranatha, "Lord, come!", must ever spontaneously arise from the Church in the celebration of the sacrament (cf. 1 Cor 11:26; 16:22).
The Gospels and Pauline Letter to the Corinthians do not give us a binding statement as to how often we should celebrate the Eucharist. Luke 22:19 'And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave to them, saying. ‘This is my body given for you, do this in remembrance of me.