Heidelberg Catechism
Q. 76) What does it mean to eat the crucified body of Christ and to drink his shed blood?
A. First, to accept with a believing heart all the suffering and the death of Christ, and so receive forgiveness of sins and life eternal.1
Second, to be united more and more to his sacred body through the Holy Spirit, who lives both in Christ and in us.2 Therefore, although Christ is in heaven3 and we are on earth, yet we are flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones,4 and we forever live and are governed by one Spirit, as the members of our body are by one soul.5
1 Jn 6:35, 40, 50-54.
2 Jn 6:55, 56; 1 Cor 12:13.
3 Acts 1:9-11; 3:21; 1 Cor 11:26; Col 3:1.
4 1 Cor 6:15, 17; Eph 5:29, 30; 1 Jn 4:13.
5 Jn 6:56-58; 15:1-6; Eph 4:15, 16; 1 Jn 3:24.
Here we come at the invitation and command of the Lord Christ to His table. And we might find ourselves asking “what means this,” and that even if we have been around these things all our lives. Just as a fish is the last one you’d want to ask about what water means so because Christians have been so long around the Lord’s table sometimes they are the last ones to know what it all means.
As such we take a few minutes to remind ourselves of the meaning of eating the crucified body of Christ and the meaning of drinking the shed blood of Christ.
For our purpose this morning note the language they use here in the question. Following Christ’s institution of the meal the catechizers speak directly about the Sacrament. They do not tell us that we are eating or drinking a symbol. They tell us that we are eating the crucified body of Christ and drinking His shed blood. They used this language even though they knew it had been misused and misinterpreted from the Church from which they were departing. They understood that even though there was not a literal consuming of the body and blood of Christ, still the union between the Church as body and Christ as the head was so intimate that they retained the idea of eating the broken body of Christ and drinking the shed blood of Christ. They offered a spiritual eating and a spiritual drinking and yet still a very real eating and drinking.
As they turn to the explicit answer of what this means they immediately point to the death of Christ by saying
First, to accept with a believing heart all the suffering and the death of Christ, and so receive forgiveness of sins and life eternal.1
They thus establish that in the Eucharist we find the atonement and our own escape from death. The table is thus proclaiming the death of Christ and that our sins are no more remembered by God. When we partake of the Table we set aside the sting of death and embrace life eternal.
Part of the implication of this is that we, as those who partake of Christ’s table, are not preoccupied with death. This sets us apart.
Let’s take our own social order as an example. We are seeing daily a preoccupation with avoiding death. Our social order is so fearful of the idea of death that, ironically enough, we are killing ourselves in the name of avoiding death. We are hearing, at every turn, are we not, that the most extreme measures are justified if we can only save one life. If we can save one life it is worth spiraling into a Great Depression. If we can save one life it is worth buying drones from China so as to make sure Battle Creek citizens are social distancing. If we can save one life we will shut down a whole state when the problem is restricted to three counties. If we can just save one life. And this as coming predominantly from those who have no problem visiting death upon the judicially innocent unborn.
The Christian, precisely because he comes to the Table and sits under the Word should not be characterized by this kind of abject and senseless fear. And why is that? Because the meaning of eating the body of Christ and drinking His shed blood is in part that Christ has died our death. We are the atoned for people. Christ has died in our place. In the table we eat of the bread of eternal life and we drink the cup of forgiveness. Death, at least should not, have the terrorizing effect on God’s people so that we pursue near certain death in wanton destruction of economic infrastructures in order to escape the panic and stampede of the remotely possible death.
Coming to the Lord’s Table gives us a preternatural calm. We have no desire to die before the Lord’s timing but neither do we find ourselves panicked out of our minds that we might die.
And so in proclaiming the Death of Christ as we come to the table and eat and drink in faith we once again are reminded of the Atonement that the Lord Christ provides. He takes from us our sins and accounts our sins to Him and God counts Christ’s righteousness … Christ’s acceptability … Christ’s favor … Christ’s perfection, to our account. We find our safety from our certain coming death in all that Christ has done for us.
This accepting of Christ’s death and atonement that is proclaimed in the Table really does mark the epistemologically self-conscious Christian as different.
As we live in a community of faith basic to any healthy community is embracing Christ’s atonement.
All communities outside of Christ, whatever foundation they may seek to have or profess, are founded on sin and so as instrumental to their fallen community they seek to establish some mechanism of atonement within their fallen social order for you see no social order established on sin can experience anything other than death. Such social orders are without effectual atonement, without gracious grace, and without a valid hope.
And so, as Atonement is an inescapable category (by this we mean that while the need of atonement may be verbally denied, all anti-Christ social orders [communities] will implement some form of godless atonement in order to deal with whatever idea of sin that social order creates and acknowledges) all social orders when examined will have a means of atonement — a means of covering sin. If men in a social order will not have Christ’s death and atonement they will ferret out false blood atonements.
And what is the means of Atonement right now in our social order? What will cover our sins of the fear of death? What atonement will deliver us from the power of fear of death? Why clearly one answer is vaccines. Vaccines are one of our blood atonements. They will cover our sin. They will set us free from our mindless fear of death. Or so we tell ourselves that.
So we eat the flesh of the unborn in vaccinating up. Our false atonement is mercury laden and has who knows what strange DNA and other pollutants and we inject all this in order to deliver us from death. We won’t have Christ’s blood atonement and His death in our place and so we create false blood atonements and we metaphorically eat their flesh and drink their blood.
You see, my friends, blood atonement has not gone away in our social order. It has merely been transferred. Atonement, imputation, substitution… all key realities of the Christian faith our inescapable realities that can not be escaped.
So, as we come to this table to eat His crucified body and drink His blood we do so understanding that in part the meaning is that Christ has died our death, has covered and forgiven our sins, and has, even now given to us a eternal life that finds us going from eternal life unto eternal life until this life though swallowed in death will yield the fullness of eternal life. We will have this Atonement… this forgiveness … this eternal life and no other.
