Eating in the Presence of God

Starting in the Wrong Room

Most of us learn about Communion beginning in the upper room. That is understandable and it is also backwards. Reading the Supper as something Jesus invented at the end of the road reduces it's significance quite a bit.

Eating in the presence of God is one of the oldest patterns in Scripture, it is a covenant pattern before it is a sacramental one, and the Lord's Supper is where it eventually lands. Everything the four historic views argue about sits inside that frame.

Eden and the Meal that Broke

Scripture opens with people eating in God's presence without shame. Adam and Eve are given a garden of abundance and told to eat freely from it, and since there is no sin in that situation and they were made for fellowship with God, every meal they ate was a meal eaten in His presence. The Fall is then announced by a meal eaten in defiance. The first act of rebellion in the Bible is somebody eating the wrong thing.

Everything after that is God working to get His people back to the table.

Exodus 24 and the Covenant Meal on the Mountain

The formal ratification of the Sinai covenant involves a blood rite whose precise symbolism is contested. Paul Williamson notes that the rite in Exodus 24:6, in which blood is splattered on both altar and people, "is nowhere repeated in the Old Testament, making its precise meaning difficult to ascertain." He shows two readings: that the blood symbolises the fate of covenant-breakers, on the analogy of Genesis 15, or that it consecrates the people the way a priesthood is consecrated. Either way, "the twofold application of the blood… would appear to underline the bilateral nature of the covenant so ratified" (Williamson, 2007).

Then comes the meal:

Williamson argues that this meal supplements rather than replaces the blood ritual. Gentry and Wellum press further, drawing on Peter Leithart's distinction between an offering and a sacrifice. In biblical usage "a 'sacrifice' is an offering that is followed by a meal," so that where no meal follows, the term is inexact. Their conclusion is that the seventy elders eat with God "because they are family and are celebrating a friendship, i.e. marriage with God," and that one blood placed on both parties portrays a relationship now "as close as a blood or kin relationship" (Gentry & Wellum, 2012).

Douglas Stuart notes that eating together functions across the Old Testament as a picture of "cooperation and mutual acceptance, thus perfect peace," citing Isaiah 11:7 and 65:25 (Stuart, 2006). Paul House puts the theological point in four words: "Communion results from obedience" (House, 1998).

This is the template. A covenant is cut in blood, and then the parties eat together in the presence of God. Anyone reading Luke 22 without Exodus 24 in view is missing so much. This pattern also explains why the cup is so important. See The Institution of the Lord's Supper.

The pattern then continues past Sinai. Israel is commanded to bring a tithe of grain and wine and oil to the place where God causes His name to dwell, and to eat it there before Him and rejoice (Deut 14:23, 26). These are meals eaten in God's presence, a partial restoration of what was lost in Eden, but they still carried the reminder that sin has not yet been dealt with.

Passover, the Meal that Makes a People

Bavinck's reconstruction of the first-century Passover helps us understand communion better (Bavinck, 2008, vol. 4).

• Lambs were slaughtered in the temple court on the afternoon of the fourteenth of Nisan, the priests catching the blood in basins and pouring it in a single act over the altar.
• The meal began with a cup of wine and a thanksgiving. Bitter herbs and a bowl of purée followed, then the lamb with unleavened cakes.
• Before the lamb was eaten, the head of the house told the story of the Exodus, the first part of the Hallel was sung, and the second cup passed.
• After the meal proper, the father blessed and emptied the third cup, and all present drank.
• A fourth cup, the second part of the Hallel, and the blessing of Psalm 118:26 closed the evening.

Green gives a substantially similar order and adds: "the celebration of Passover assumes that the meal is not self-interpreting; why this particular food is eaten requires exposition" (Green, 1997). That observation is the hinge of the whole thing. Passover is a meal that comes with a required explanation, which is exactly why Jesus can reinterpret it by changing the explanation rather than the actual meal.

The New Testament then reads Christ's death through this lamb with no ambiguity at all. Jeffery, Ovey and Sach trace the connection through the Synoptic institution accounts, John's Passover countdown, the unbroken bones of John 19:35-36 fulfilling Exodus 12:46, the "lamb without blemish or defect" of 1 Peter 1:18-19, and the flat statement of 1 Corinthians 5:7 that "Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed." Their conclusion is that "it is indisputable that the New Testament writers saw in the sacrifice of the Passover lamb a foreshadowing of Jesus' redemptive death," and where the old Passover focused on the body and blood of a lamb "slain as a penal substitutionary sacrifice for the redemption of Israel," the Supper focuses on the body and blood of Christ, "who gave himself as a penal substitutionary sacrifice for his people" (Jeffery, Ovey & Sach, 2007).

Important notes on this:

• Peter Bolt argues the significance of Mark 14:17-25 "can be misunderstood if it is primarily considered as 'the institution of the Lord's supper', as is so frequently the case." The scene is Jesus' last Passover, and "during this last meal with his friends, Jesus reinterpreted the Passover meal, so that it became a pointer towards his own forthcoming death" (Bolt, 2004).
• Gregg Allison makes the same distinction from the other direction. The Lord's Supper is not the same thing as the Passover, "though instituted in the midst of a Passover celebration," and it is also not the same thing as the Last Supper, being "an ongoing rite that the church is to observe between his first and second comings." He cites I. Howard Marshall's warning that the institution narratives "describe the Last Supper; they are therefore not direct witnesses for the procedure followed at the Lord's Supper" (Allison, 2012).

Manna and the Rock

Paul's own typology in 1 Corinthians 10:1-4 is more restrained than later interpreters have wanted it to be. He says Israel "all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink," and that the rock was Christ. Gordon Fee asks what other word Paul could have chosen to accomplish two things at once, designating food and drink that were supernaturally given while suggesting the analogy with the Christian Supper. But Fee rejects Käsemann's confident reading that the terms "undoubtedly mean 'food and drink which convey pneuma'," judging it "to place the emphasis on the sacraments in a way that Paul does not" (Fee, 1994).

Fee's own conclusion is: "the food of the Table is the Spirit's food in the sense that the Spirit, as the real presence, once more appropriates the provision of the cross to the one who eats by faith, in celebration with others" (Fee, 1994). The emphasis is not on the elements conveying grace by their own properties, and not on nothing happening at all, but on the Spirit acting at the table. This is the same place the Spiritual Presence view lands.

The warning attached to the typology is the point Paul is actually making, and it is usually skipped. Craig Keener notes that the Israelites "had sacred food and drink, as the Corinthians do (10:16), but that did not save them" (Keener, 2014b). Thiselton refers to them as formative models, patterns from the past that offer parallels to the present, set against the tendency "to make the present moment the arbiter of everything" (Thiselton, 2006). Sacramental participation without covenant fidelity did not protect Israel, and Paul's whole argument is that it will not protect Corinth either.

Melchizedek, and a Typology Worth Resisting

Melchizedek's offering of bread and wine in Genesis 14:18 is the standard Old Testament type invoked for the Eucharist. But it is quite a weak connection.

Allison grants that it is "the only Old Testament type that seems to offer some harbinger of the Eucharist" with both elements present, then immediately qualifies it: "the fact that the New Testament does not make appeal to this action of Melchizedek as an anticipation of the Eucharist cautions us from freighting his offering of simple and common foodstuffs with too much importance" (Allison, 2014). He is sceptical of the other candidates. The unleavened bread of the Exodus symbolises a decisive break from sin (Ex 12:14-20; 1 Cor 5:6-8) and has no connection with a sacrifice for sin, and the manna was given as a test of obedience (Ex 16:4) rather than as a harbinger, with Jesus in John 6 emphasising the discontinuity between manna and Himself.

I agree with Allison. A typology is legitimate when the text or the apostolic New Testament writings establishes it. Melchizedek's bread and wine is a resemblance the New Testament declines to comment on, and it also declines to comment on it in the one letter that discusses Melchizedek at length. Hebrews has every opportunity and does not take it.

The Oath that Opens the Gap

Allison reads this oath as indicating two things at once: that Jesus anticipated departing from His disciples for "a sustained absence," and that He expected to keep this celebration with them again "at the time of the coming of the kingdom of God." His judgment is that "a strong eschatological atmosphere pervaded the Last Supper" (Allison, 2012). Green reads Luke's parallel similarly, taking the double reference to the coming kingdom as speaking to "the epochal character of this scene," with Jesus' words anticipating "a renewal of fellowship around the table" beyond His death (Green, 1997).

This is the evidence that constrains every theory of presence, and it is why The Ascension and the Presence of Christ is not an optional appendix to the doctrine.

Until He Comes

At the other end of the gap stands Paul's phrase.

Fee notes that Paul is "fully aware of the eschatological setting in which this meal was first instituted." Christ's death "is not itself the End, but the beginning of the End," and the phrase reminds the Corinthians "of their essentially eschatological existence" (Fee, 2014). The Dictionary of Paul and His Letters observes that eschatology "dominated the earlier section on the sacrament," which is why it resurfaces in the judgment theme of 11:29-32 (DPL, 1993).

One consequence follows from this. "Until he comes" is fatal to any theory of local bodily presence (aka. Transubstantiation). Horton states it exactly: "the prospective aspect, 'until he comes again,' is meaningless if in fact Christ returns bodily to earth in order to be present at every altar or table" (Horton, 2011). Paul's phrase presupposes an absence of a particular kind, and a doctrine that fills that absence with a substantially present body has removed the reason to say "until."

The Wedding at the far End

The eschatological banquet is a well-established Jewish and Christian hope. Bock traces the background through Isaiah 25:6, Psalm 22:26, 1 Enoch 62:14, Luke 22:16 and Revelation 19:9, noting that at that banquet "God's people will be fully vindicated and blessing will come to all whom he receives in his kingdom" (Bock, 1996). Richard Hays observes how Revelation deploys the image: the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:6-9) sets the bride "in fine linen, bright and pure" against the great whore, and the scene works as "a symbolic reversal of the Old Testament metaphor of Israel as the unfaithful wife" (Hays, 1996).

The pastoral consequence runs the opposite way to the polemical one, and Billings is the person who draws it best. He insists the Supper is a foretaste of the final heaven rather than of the intermediate state, and takes a striking practical conclusion from that:

At the Supper, the gathered have fellowship with Christ, but not in a disembodied way. Eyes should not be closed. Noses should smell the wine and bread. Hands should greet, bodies should embrace others in the covenant community, whether young or old; whether black, white, or brown; whether poor or rich; whether talkative or mute; whether mobile or immobile.
(Billings, 2018)

That is a direct rebuke to the way most of us actually run Communion. "Close your eyes, just you and Jesus" is the common instruction in Pentecostal churches, and Billings' point is that it privatises a meal whose entire eschatological logic is corporate and embodied. He cites Aquinas on why even paradise is insufficient, since the joy of heavenly worship is not complete without bodies and without other worshippers: "For man rejoices more with many rejoicing." Billings' summary is that "we need material bodies, and we need other worshipers, both at the Supper and at the final heavenly banquet."

Bavinck adds the confessional note toward the outside world. The Supper "serves as the confession of our faith before the world," and believers "confess at the Lord's Supper in the face of a world that does not know their unity" (Bavinck, 2008, vol. 4).

What This Does to a Sunday Morning

So what is a congregation actually doing?

Eating between two meals. Behind them, a garden where people ate with God without shame, a mountain where seventy elders beheld God and ate and drank, and a table in an upper room where the debt was declared settled. In front of them, a wedding.

The bread in their hand is like an appetiser, and the reason it can be an appetiser rather than a souvenir is that the host (Jesus, by His Spirit) is present. God is more committed to dwelling with His people than His people have ever been committed to dwelling with Him, and this meal is what that commitment looks like on a Sunday morning.

See also: The Institution of the Lord's Supper | Anamnesis - Remembrance and the Lord's Supper | The Table and the Body - Unity, Discipline, and Mission

Sources

• Allison, G. R. (2012). Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church. Crossway.
• Allison, G. R. (2014). Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment. Crossway.
• Bavinck, H. (2008). Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (J. Bolt, Ed.; J. Vriend, Trans.). Baker Academic.
• Billings, J. T. (2018). Remembrance, Communion, and Hope: Rediscovering the Gospel at the Lord's Table. Eerdmans.
• Bock, D. L. (1996). Luke 9:51-24:53. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Baker Academic.
• Bolt, P. G. (2004). The Cross from a Distance: Atonement in Mark's Gospel. New Studies in Biblical Theology. IVP.
• Fee, G. D. (1994). God's Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul. Hendrickson.
• Fee, G. D. (2014). The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Revised ed.). NICNT. Eerdmans.
• Gentry, P. J., & Wellum, S. J. (2012). Kingdom Through Covenant. Crossway.
• Green, J. B. (1997). The Gospel of Luke. NICNT. Eerdmans.
• Hawthorne, G. F., Martin, R. P., & Reid, D. G. (Eds.) (1993). Dictionary of Paul and His Letters. IVP.
• Hays, R. B. (1996). The Moral Vision of the New Testament. HarperOne.
• Horton, M. (2011). The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way. Zondervan.
• House, P. R. (1998). Old Testament Theology. IVP Academic.
• Jeffery, S., Ovey, M., & Sach, A. (2007). Pierced for Our Transgressions. IVP.
• Keener, C. S. (2014b). The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (2nd ed.). IVP Academic.
• Stuart, D. K. (2006). Exodus. New American Commentary, Volume 2. B&H Publishing.
• Thiselton, A. C. (2006). 1 Corinthians: A Shorter Exegetical and Pastoral Commentary. Eerdmans.
• Williamson, P. R. (2007). Sealed with an Oath: Covenant in God's Unfolding Purpose. New Studies in Biblical Theology. IVP.