One bread, and the One it points to
This Is My Body
On the last night before he suffered, in a borrowed upper room, Jesus took bread into his hands. He had eaten bread all his life, blessed it at countless tables, multiplied it on a hillside. Now, hours from betrayal, he lifts it and says a word no one had ever attached to bread before. This is my body, given for you.
“And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”Luke 22:19
“And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.”1 Corinthians 11:24
The bread in Scripture
The setting is the Passover, the meal that carried Israel's memory of deliverance out of Egypt. Every year the family gathered, blessed the bread and the cup, and told again how God had brought them out with a strong hand. Jesus keeps this ancient shape faithfully. He takes bread, he gives thanks, he breaks it, he gives it. These four verbs, take and bless and break and give, are the same rhythm the Gospels record when he fed the multitudes, and they will echo again on the Emmaus road. The gesture is deeply Jewish and deeply familiar. What is new is the sentence he speaks over it. Luke 22:19 records the words plainly, and Paul preserves them independently in 1 Corinthians 11:24, writing to a church years before the Gospels were set down. That two witnesses, one narrative and one liturgical, carry nearly the same words tells us how early and how central these words were. Paul says he received this from the Lord and handed it on, using the technical language of tradition carefully guarded. The saying was not a later embellishment. It stood at the heart of the church's common life from the beginning. Within the words themselves are three movements. First, this is my body. The bread of the Passover, which spoke of affliction and haste and rescue, is now identified with him. Second, given for you. The breaking of the bread is bound to the breaking of his body on the cross the next day. What his hands do to the loaf, the world will do to him, and he offers it willingly. Third, do this in remembrance of me. He commands repetition. This is not a moment to be admired once and left behind. It is a practice to be carried forward, a memorial that gathers his people around his self-giving until he comes. The cup follows, spoken of as the new covenant in his blood, and the two together, bread and cup, become the shape of the meal the church has kept ever since. But the bread comes first, and it is the bread that he names his body. From that night, ordinary bread on a table has never again been merely ordinary for those who follow him. It has become the appointed place where his death is remembered, proclaimed, and received.
What it comes to mean
Few sentences in Scripture have been pondered more deeply, or divided sincere Christians more sharply, than this is my body. It is honest to say at the outset that the church has never spoken with one voice about exactly how the bread relates to the body of Christ, and that faithful believers who love the same Lord read the word is differently. This page will not pretend the disagreement away, nor crown one tradition the winner. Some Christians, including the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, confess a real and objective presence. In the Catholic understanding, often called transubstantiation, the bread truly becomes the body of Christ while its outward appearance remains, so that what is received at the altar is the Lord himself. The Orthodox affirm the same reality with reverent reserve, preferring to call it a mystery rather than to explain the mechanism. For these Christians the words are as direct as they sound. Other Christians confess a real presence understood differently. Many Lutherans hold that Christ is truly present in, with, and under the bread, without the bread ceasing to be bread. Many in the Reformed tradition, following Calvin, teach a spiritual presence in which the faithful are lifted by the Holy Spirit to feed on Christ truly, though the elements are not changed. Still others, often traced to Zwingli and common among Baptists and many evangelicals, receive the bread chiefly as a memorial, a solemn remembrance and proclamation of the cross, obeying the command to do this in remembrance of him. These are not careless positions. Each rests on serious reading of the same texts. Those who hear is as identity point to the plainness of the words and their weight in the early church. Those who hear a memorial point to Jesus speaking in vivid figures elsewhere, calling himself the door and the vine, and to his own command to remember. What unites them matters more than the labels suggest. All confess that the meal is his gift, that it centers on his body given and his blood shed, that he is genuinely met there by faith, and that the church is commanded to keep it until he comes. Where they differ is on the nature of the presence and the manner of the change, and on this the page leaves the reader before the mystery rather than above it. To sit at this table is to stand within a family that has argued lovingly about how deep the gift goes, precisely because none of them think it shallow.
How it points to Christ, the bread of life
Whatever a Christian believes about the how, the who is not in doubt. The bread points to Christ, and Christ points to the cross. He does not merely teach about sacrifice at that table. He hands himself over. This is my body, given for you, is the language of a gift already decided, a life not taken from him but laid down. The bread broken in his hands is a parable of what he is about to do with his whole self. This is why the meal is never nostalgia. It proclaims a death, but the one who died is risen, and so the remembering is also a communion with a living Lord. He who fed thousands with loaves now gives them the one thing bread could never give, himself, and with himself the forgiveness of sins and the pledge of the covenant sealed in his blood. The bread of life is not a doctrine to be admired but a person to be received. At every table where his people gather, the same hands are at work, taking, blessing, breaking, giving. Christians will keep disagreeing about the depth and mode of his presence, and they should not pretend otherwise. But when the bread is lifted and his words are spoken over it, all of them are looking at the same crucified and risen Christ, and all of them are being invited to the same thing. Take, and eat, and remember, and live.
Questions people ask
Do all Christians believe the bread literally becomes Christ's body?
No, and this is where sincere believers differ. Catholics and Orthodox confess a real change, many Lutherans a true presence without change, the Reformed a spiritual presence by the Spirit, and many evangelicals a memorial. All center on Christ's body given, and Scripture does not settle the exact manner for us.
What does do this in remembrance of me mean?
Jesus commands his people to repeat the meal, not merely recall it. Remembrance in Scripture is active, making a past deliverance present to a new generation. So the church keeps the meal to proclaim his death, receive his gift, and look for his return, until he comes again.