This event is a public ritual. It is a sacred meal at the center of the new city, the City that God is establishing in the earth.
It is a potent meal, but it is not potent in the way a nuclear reactor is, or a great turbine engine is, or a profound magic spell. It is potent the same way saying the Pledge of Allegiance before basketball games is.
Moderns like to pretend that human beings can live without ritual, and that a city can be built without organizing rituals. This is quite false, and we have our rituals, like the Pledge, but because we are moderns, we don’t think that we have them. And the result of this is that we have banished God’s appointed rituals from His city, and we have done so in order to get rid of superstition. But what this has done is create a vacuum (a vacuum of disobedience) within the Church, so that our identity, our sense of time, the way we name ourselves, is all stamped by the civil order, and not by our fundamental allegiance, which is that of being Christian.
When the Church is living in vibrant faith, we do not have to be urged to make “political” applications of our faith. This is because the establishment of a new city in the midst of the city of man—which is what we are doing here, in this worship—is in its very nature a political act. Because of this, many believers, because they don’t want a collision with the authorities, have made an accommodation with those authorities. Instead of proclaiming that the Church is the establishment of the future of all humanity, they have agreed that the Church is just one sect among many, and that we will play by the idolatrous rules, just like the others.
Put this another way. Whenever you eat this bread, and drink this cup, you are voting. Not only so, but you are voting in the most potent way possible, the way God wants His people to vote. Do you want the kingdom to come? Then eat, and drink. Do you want God’s will done on earth, as it is in heaven? Then eat, and drink.