---

This passage is instructive when regarded in its bearing upon great and ever-recurring controversies. Around the observance of the Lord's Supper a multitude of irregularities had arisen. Here, then, if anywhere, was the opportunity for the apostle to glorify the sacrament, and to surround it with all those symbolic rites which would make its desecration impossible in the future. But we hear nothing of priest, altar, lights, incense, and genuflexions; but simply of a state of heart of those who unite in the act.

I. THE TRUE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER. It is a "proclaiming" (R.V.) the death of Christ until He come.

1. The Lord's Supper is a memorial of the one fact in the Master's story which every natural feeling would have led His followers to conceal, and there was not a feeling of horror at the thought of the Cross which they had not experienced. The thought so familiar to us, but which the world has learned from Calvary only, of victory through suffering and the crown won by the Cross, was unknown to them. The Cross was a sign of defeat and disaster. No wonder that Peter should cry: "That be far from Thee, O Lord." The humiliation and despair of the day after the crucifixion baffle description. More pathetic utterance could hardly be spoken than "We trusted that it had been He who should have redeemed Israel."

2. There are few facts more remarkable than the revolution of feeling which is shown in the action of these men in regard to the Lord's Supper. In the hour of their reviving faith, it was the Cross to which they gave prominence, and the one characteristic of early Church life was the keeping of the feast by which they proclaimed "the Lord's death till He come." A festival of the Incarnation, or of the Transfiguration, or of the Resurrection, would have been intelligible. But this is the memorial of His death.

3. And could anything have set it forth with more impressiveness as the distinctive truth of Christianity? Other systems have had teachers, leaders of genius and power, and lawgivers. But where else do we find a Saviour who has died for the sins of men? Christ's claim rests not on the profundity of His wisdom, but on the infinitude of His love. So there is a fitness in the Supper as the proclamation of the gospel. The guests are not the wise or the holy, but sinners who have learned, to put their trust in Christ. They eat the bread and drink the wine as a confession that in His death alone is their hope of eternal life.

II. THE INFLUENCE WHICH THIS VIEW OF THE LORD'S SUPPER SHOULD EXERT ON US. The apostle points out distinctly when be says: "Let a man prove himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup."

1. What miserable trifling are all the questions which men discuss with so much heat as compared with this! Forms of observance — what are they all when weighed in the balances with the spirit of the observance? Surely the first and chief question must be as to our right to a place at the table, and as to our preparation for filling that place with consistency. Here is a meeting-place between God and the soul. This is a renewed act of faith and most solemn confession, and this is the point in which all proving of ourselves converges; and it is one evil result of certain theories that their tendency is to keep this out of view. The attention is fixed on the priest and the altar rather than on the relations between Christ and the soul of the individual worshipper. The whole reminds us of Micah when, having detained the wandering Levite, he exclaimed, "Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my priest." He who comes filled with the solemn awe of the altar and the priest, and allows these to interrupt his communion with Christ, "feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside."

2. Here, then, is the one question for each communicant, What is the death to me? It is not enough that I hold as an article of my creed that Christ died for sinners. This act of communion is a profession of my personal trust in that death to deliver me from my sins. It is in the light of the Cross that we begin to understand something of the infinite tenderness of the Divine heart, and so to learn the exceeding sinfulness of sin.

3. What may be the special benefits to the soul which comes in humble faith to this banquet of love, it would be presumption in any man to decide. Who would under take to determine the possibilities of spiritual growth which may be the result? Here, as everywhere, to faith all things are possible.

(J. Guinness Rogers, B.A.)

---

---

KJV: For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come.

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