While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them. (Mark 14:22-24, NIV)
Is the bread and cup literally Jesus’s body and blood? Maybe that depends on what you mean by literally. Luther thought the wording settled it. Zwingli cited John 6:63 (that the words Jesus spoke were spirit and life rather than flesh) and declared, “That verse breaks your neck.” Luther, unfamiliar with Zwingli’s Swiss idiom for saying, “This proves you wrong,” apparently took Zwingli himself too literally on that point. Doing the sixteenth-century equivalent of unfriending Zwingli on Facebook, he refused fellowship with him. Going even further than blocking somebody on his phone, he reportedly considered it God’s judgment when Zwingli died.
Even Jesus’s disciples didn’t always know how literally or figuratively he was speaking. When Jesus spoke literally about his coming death and resurrection, his disciples wondered what he meant (Mark 9:9-10). When he spoke figuratively, about Lazarus sleeping or about going to him, disciples took him too literally and said, “He’ll get better if he sleeps!” and “He’s going to his death too!” (John 11:11-16). When he spoke figuratively about the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod, they thought he was speaking about literal bread (Mark 8:15-16). Is it any surprise that disciples today still have trouble agreeing on when Jesus was speaking literally and when he was speaking figuratively?
Jesus spoke his words about his body and blood at the last supper, in the context of Passover. (Although I’m Protestant and Brant Pitre is Catholic, and despite what I’m about to say, I think his book on Jesus and the Last Supper is the best one on the subject, and I agree with most of it.)
The rite of Passover was a reenactment of the first Passover. It was a memorial (Exod 12:14), thus in memory of the act (like the Lord’s Supper, 1 Cor 11:24-25; with Zwingli). Still, it was a remembering that included reenactment and entering into the experience of the ancestors in a sense. The later Passover Seder says it was not just for the ancestors, but for “us,” God’s people today. In the same way, when we participate in the last supper, we share in Christ’s body and blood with all God’s people (1 Cor 10:16-17).
Should we speak of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist? Again, that invites us to ask what we mean by the “real presence.” Jesus’s presence is with us all the time by the Spirit (John 14:23), so the experience of the Lord’s Supper must be something more particular than that, experiencing his presence in a special way. It may not be the only time or the only way we experience his presence in a special way, but when we meditate on his death for us, and symbolically reenact it so it is as if in some sense we were there at the Last Supper, we surely do meet the Lord’s presence in a special way. Calvin spoke of Jesus’s real presence by the Spirit.
But does it become physically (not just “mystically”) Jesus’s presence? If one chemically tested the wine and bread, would it contain human DNA? I could be very wrong, but I don’t think that anybody views the Lord’s Supper as chemically his body and blood, or supposes that (as second-century critics of the church argued) we practice cannibalism. No one says that the bread and wine lose the empirical appearance of bread and wine.
I believe that the context of the Last Supper again helps us. At the Passover, the host declared, “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate when they came out of the land of Egypt.” No one believed that this was literally the same bread that the ancestors ate—thirteen hundred years stale and actually already chewed up and digested by the ancestors. Rather, they were sharing in the experience of their ancestors. I believe that by the Spirit we share in a genuine spiritual experience. I don’t see it as Christ’s physical presence in the same way as the incarnation, however, which really was his flesh and blood with human DNA, just as I don’t think the Passover physically makes us second-millennium BC Israelites about to leave Egypt.
Having said that, one of the most important issues in participating in the Lord’s Supper is to be our celebration that we are actually one body together in Christ (1 Cor 10:17). Here Paul is most explicit about a real presence, because he has already described us Christ’s body (like our individual bodies, 1 Cor 6:19) as his temple (1 Cor 3:16), which must not be divided (3:5, 17). Where do we encounter someone’s presence more than in their body? So more important than our specific theology about the details of how it works out is our practice toward other members of the body. If we break fellowship over our interpretation of these verses the way Luther did, perhaps we fail to rightly discern the body of Christ (11:29; cf. 11:17-22).
