One of the great moments of the church’s thanksgiving for salvation brought by the death and resurrection of Jesus is our remembrance of His love that we celebrate in the Lord’s Supper. Whether we may call it communion, or eucharist, it is the act of thanksgiving calls attention to Christ’s salvific sacrifice, but also to our bond as the body of Christ.During this special time of remembering Christ’s death and resurrection, let us consider that precious evening when Christ ate with his apostles. Now as they prepared to eat the Passover meal, they asked Jesus, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?” (Mark 14:12). Jesus sent two of them into Jerusalem where they found a large upper room where they could celebrate this feast (Mark 14:13-16).Then during the meal, Jesus took bread, then “after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’” Next “he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’” (Mark 14:22-24).Luke records Jesus’ command: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). The church has been doing this ever since!The institution of this special thanksgiving meal, Lord’s Supper, is a mystery to the disciples. Jesus has not yet died, and the talk of body and blood make no sense to them. But it will. Passover was celebration of God’s people being set free. On this particular Passover, Jesus assigned some new meaning to a few of the elements: The bread, he said, was his body. The wine, he said, was his blood. This will set us free from sin and restore a relationship with God. As so we remember this blessed sacrifice.Some partake of the Lord’s Supper weekly, as was the practice of the early church and was until modern times, while others may observe it on a less frequent pattern, what we are doing is participating in an action that links us in an unbroken line to Jesus and his disciples in that Upper Room on the night he was about to be betrayed.Our communion is an expression of faith in Christ and an experience we share with all fellow believers that is founded on Christ’s sacrifice. The apostle Paul repeated,
