Leithart
John 7:37-38: Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, If any many is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture says, from his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.
Let me remind you once again how we will be celebrating the Supper today and for the foreseeable future: The elders will be taking the bread and wine first, and then passing it to you. As you pass it from one to another, say “The body of the Lord” or “The body of Christ for you,” and when the wine comes say “The blood of the Lord” or “The blood of Christ for you.” Eat the bread as soon as you get it, and drink the wine as soon as you get it too.
As I mentioned in the exhortation, part of the purpose of this change is to ritually depict the reality of the church. That’s what the Supper is for. It was an axiom of patristic and medieval theology that “the Eucharist makes the church.” This means that God forms us as a body through the work He does in the Eucharist. But it also means that the way we celebrate the Eucharist portrays how the church does or should function.
Think of the medieval Catholic Mass: A priest speaking in Latin, a language no one can understand, elevates the consecrated Host and rings a bell so everyone can get a glimpse of God-made-bread. Then the priest and his liturgical assistants eat the bread and drink the wine. The laity stands and watches most Sundays out of the year. That says something about the way the church is ordered: It says that the priests are the true church, and the laity is the people of God only in a second, derived, metaphorical sense.
That’s not the church we want to portray here at this table because, we believe, that’s not the church as Jesus intended it. Rather, each of you is a minister to the whole body. As you pass the bread and wine to one another today, you are acting as priests to one another. You are ministering Christ to one another. You are feeding Christ’s body and blood to one another. You are all ministers in the church, all called and charged with the duty of building up the body of Christ.
This is exactly what Jesus says on the last day of the Feast of Booths. He claims to be the Rock in the wilderness, from which all Israel drank. And notice what he says happens to those who drink from Him: When we drink from Him, our thirst is satisfied, but we also have springs of water welling up in us to satisfy others. Jesus doesn’t pour His Spirit on us to make us inaccessible ponds of the Spirit, to make us reservoirs. He pours His Spirit on us to make us rivers, so that the refreshing streams of His Spirit can flow from us to one another and to the world.
That is what you are doing at this table, in the most literal sense. You are a river flowing with the Spirit to your neighbor; you are a member of the body of Christ, ministering Christ to the person sitting next to you.
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