As we come to the Lord’s Table, we are seeking to be fed. The food and drink available to us here are the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. Put another way, we are being made partakers of His perfect humanity as we come, and are being nourished up into that humanity, bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh. This is all a great mystery, Paul says, and so we need to take care that we do not do anything that would empty it of its mysterious or sacramental character.
This means we must avoid the error of Rome on the one hand, which simplistically destroys the sacrament by saying that the substance of the bread and wine are changed, and that we eat the body and blood of the Lord physically, with our mouths. We also need to avoid the widespread error among Protestants that says this Supper is nothing but a mere reminder, and that if we already “remembered” the cross of Christ with our brains, this Supper adds nothing to the remembrance. This “mere memorialist” position does not do justice to God’s cosmic purposes. This says we eat with our minds, by gnawing on propositional bones.
But we hold that as we come to this Table in faith, God uses our actions of eating and drinking to accomplish a heavenly transaction—and that transaction is nourishment and growth up into our shared human nature with Jesus Christ. We are being made new, transformed into a new humanity. If we come to the Table in unbelief or hypocrisy, the sin is that of holding these objective realities in contempt, and so we incur the chastisements of the covenant. We eat and drink damnation. We participate in the body of Jesus Christ in such a way as to invite removal from it.
The body of Christ does not descend to this Table. He is seated at the right hand of God. Rather, this Table, and those gathered around it, ascend into the heavenly places to be nourished there. This spiritual feeding on the body of Christ must not be taken as an imaginary feeding. True faith sees better than that.