Why the Lord’s Table
Exhortation from March 2, 2025
This ordinance is important, simply because our Lord commanded us to do it. And it's important because when we do it rightly, we remember not a set of truths you can read in a book, but more than that - we remember Christ himself. We remember his body and his blood.
This is important for us today, because we are coming out of a time in Christianity when we have made everything very clear, but also thin. We’ve gotten rid of every tradition and boiled down Christianity to just a set of propositional truths to know with our minds, and that's it. We say Communion is just a remembrance.
And that's not wrong. Christianity is a set of propositional truths that must be understood and believed. Christianity can be described with intellectually satisfying truths that really do all fit together - and in a beautiful way.
So Christianity is not NOT clear, and it’s not NOT thin, that way. But it is also THICK. It is about truths we can read in books, and it is about a body, beaten so as to barely resemble a human. It is about doctrines that we teach and proclaim. But it's also about nails and about blood and water.
Our God speaks truth, and our God must have blood. Our God gives us the book of Proverbs, and he gives us a lamb to be slaughtered. Our God patiently teaches us truth, and He roars like a Lion.
So the Table shows us who we are, and what we must do. When Isaiah says in his great oracle, Isaiah 53, that God's suffering servant was marred beyond all human semblance, that's because Jesus is standing in for us, showing us what we really are before Him. The table tells us that we are far worse than we allow, as we self-narrate our lives.
We must painfully see that, and accept it. But on the other side of that acceptance, the Table says, "But you are loved, beyond what you ever would have scripted for yourself. You are loved, not only by clear propositions sent coldly from distant heaven, but you are loved by a God who would come close, and take all that ugliness, all that you can’t look at, and take it all on himself."
We come to the table, because it is thick with this love.