Jesus gave us this meal and said, do this in remembrance of me. So it’s no accident that we celebrate the Lord’s Supper on the Lord’s Day – the Christian Sabbath.
The fourth commandment is to remember the Sabbath Day, to remember that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, to remember that Israel had been slaves in Egypt and God had brought them out. Here at this table, Jesus renews that fourth commandment having remade the world, having brought us out of the Greater Egypt of sin and death. So we celebrate this meal remembering the New Creation, the New Exodus, the New Covenant accomplished by Jesus in His death and resurrection. We remember the Sabbath rest that Jesus won for us here in our worship and in our homes as we rest and rejoice in Him.
But all of this underlines a broader Christian habit that Jesus is teaching us here, the habit of remembering and giving thanks. At the center, we remember Jesus and we give thanks for Him. But we are also celebrating this meal thousands of years into the history of the world, two thousand years into the reign of Christ, and so we have so much to remember and give thanks for.
One of the natural results of this kind of Christian remembering is loyalty to our people. Loyalty to Jesus is central and over all, but we can’t help but remember the many generations that have come before us who also remembered Him. They remembered Christ and they taught their children to remember Him, and then they taught their children, and their grandchildren became our great-grandparents.
For some of us this is literally true, and what a great gift that is. But in our modern individualism so many of us don’t know much about our families or the little we know is pretty distressing. But let this meal teach you to begin remembering again, to knit you closer to your people, past, present, and future, and let it teach you to remember that part of the grace of this table is the fact that here all of us have been adopted into a new family in Christ, and now you have family like the stars of the heavens, a family beyond all reckoning.
So come and remember, and come and welcome to Jesus Christ.
Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash
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