What is the meaning and importance of the Last Supper?

Then He instituted His own Supper in remembrance of His death; the bread symbolizing His body, the cup, His shed blood. The account is very brief, and, for the full significance of it all, we have to go to 1 Corinthians 10 and 11. Remembrance, was what the Lord emphasized at the moment, and in view of His long absence we can see the importance of this. Through the centuries the memorial of His death has been with us, and the abiding witness of His love.

The verses which follow (21-27) witness to the folly and the feebleness which was found amongst the disciples. The hand of the betrayer was on the table, and He knew it, though the rest of the disciples were quite unaware of it. There was also strife amongst them, each wishing for the foremost place, and this just as their great Master was about to take the lowest place. Such, alas! is the heart of man, even of saints. It served however to bring out very clearly the fundamental difference between the disciple and the world. Worldly greatness is expressed and maintained by taking a lordly place: Christian greatness is found in taking a servant's place. In that greatness Jesus Himself was pre-eminent. Few words are more touching than this — "I am among you as he that serves." Such had been His life of perfect grace; and such, in supreme measure, His death was about to be.

In the midst of all the sorrow pressing upon Him now, the Lord takes ti me to introduce the most precious, simple memorial of Himself in reference to the great sacrifice He was about to make. The Passover feast had been observed, for it pointed forward to the death of Christ. Now the Lord's supper is to take a place of greater importance, for it is to be a memorial of His great sacrifice. The simplicity of it is beautiful. The bread and the cup, for each of which He gave thanks, are the simplest staples of man's sustenance, but how eloquently they speak of the body and blood of Christ. Simple as it is, this observance has proven for more precious to the saints of God than any Passover could ever have been, for its spiritual significance can be well understood by the saints of God since the Lord Jesus has died and risen again.

We break bread, so as to proclaim the Lord’s death by eating and drinking. This is the thought with regard to the Lord’s Supper, as it is portrayed in 1 Corinthians 11. There Paul writes: “As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes” (1 Corinthians 11: 26). Hence, we come together to announce the Lord’s death. This is a great privilege and yet, for all the joy in our hearts, it gives the gathering a solemn and earnest character. It is all about the Saviour’s death on the cross, which He suffered because of our sins. We do not proclaim primarily His victory and resurrection (although these aspects cannot be separated from His death), but we ponder over His death and make it known by eating of the loaf and drinking the cup. In a world that rejects Him, the Lord finds that there are those, even if but few, who remember Him in this way.

We too have a memorial of Christ’s death, the death seen in the passover, and literally fulfilled on the night on which the Paschal lamb was to be offered; and instituted “on the night in which He was betrayed.” The Lord’s Supper enables us to partake together in the fellowship of His death to whom we owe every blessing that God has given us, to show forth His death in the scene where men rejected Him and where He is still refused, and to express to Him our responsive affection as remembering Him in the expression of His great love for us.

The bread broken, and the wine poured out, speak of Christ in death. We remember Him in the place of death, where He has been; but we know Him now alive for evermore. And further, we do this in expectation of seeing Him again — "till He come." The Coming of the Lord is what we wait for. This feast is a testimony to the world that we take our place with the Lord of Glory whom the world crucified. In the presence of God, of angels, men, and demons, we "show the Lord's death till he come." The blood is shed for "many." If Israel reject Him yet the blessings procured by the Cross will flow out world-wide, and Gentile aliens will become, through grace, partakers of the heavenly calling. Luke records the Lord's touching request, "This do in remembrance of me." His people are ever on His heart. He would have us never to forget His dying love. Four things come out in connection with this feast of love: — 1 The Word of Christ — "This do." 2 The Work of Christ — "In remembrance." 3 The Person of Christ — "Of ME." 4 The Coming of Christ — "Till He come."

(Vv. 22-24). The institution of the Lord's Supper follows. The words "as they did eat" clearly distinguish between the Passover of which they were partaking and the Lord's Supper. In His supper the bread represents His body; the cup, His blood, shed not for Jews only but for many. It is a supper of remembrance. We are loved with such a love that the Lord values our remembrance of Himself. The blood of Christ in all its infinite value is ever before the eye of God, and He desires that it should ever be remembered by His people.

Accordingly, after the Passover Supper, He instituted the new memorial feast of the Lord's Supper which would remind them, and believers down through the centuries, of what He had done for them at Calvary's cross. The bread was emblematical of the body in which He suffered and completed the work of atonement and the cup would remind us of His blood which was shed on the cross for our sins. It was not, as some erroneously think and teach, that in the Supper the bread becomes literally His body and the contents of the cup become literally His blood, so that we actually eat His body and drink His blood as something which makes us more fit for heaven and gives us' the forgiveness of sins. The Lord was still bodily present with them when He instituted the Supper and surely He did not mean that, though He was bodily present, the bread and the cup He then gave them was also literally His body and His blood. No, He was thinking of the time when He would no longer be bodily present with them; thus He gave them, and believers throughout the Church age, the emblems of the bread and the cup which would recall Himself and His death on the cross vividly to their minds.

Scripture is clear and definite on the subject of the Lord's Supper. The words are as distinct as possible, “As oft as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord's death till He come.” Again, “This do in remembrance of Me.” We remember Him in death — the basis, center and spring of everything to us. The apostle calls attention to the fact that it was in the same night He was betrayed that our blessed Lord, in His thoughtful, unselfish love for us, instituted the feast, and this is full of touching interest for our hearts. But as to the feast itself — its significance — its object — its place, Scripture is most precise: “ye do show the Lord's death,” “Do this in remembrance of Me.” We remember a Christ who was dead; we call Him to mind in that condition in which, thank God, He no longer is. All this can only be by faith through the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no need to enter into sensational details; indeed such things are most offensive to all true spiritual feeling. We cannot keep too close to the actual, perfect language of Holy Scripture.

On the very eve of His betrayal, arrest and crucifixion the Lord Jesus gathered His disciples round Him, and after the Passover Supper He inaugurated this simple memorial of Himself. In the Bread and the Cup He signified that He was about to give Himself — His body and His blood — for us. Then He added 'This do in remembrance of Me,' so challenging the hearts of all the redeemed to obey and respond to such supreme devotion and love. In this act we also 'show forth the Lord's death until He come.'

The supper is the precious remembrance of the death of the Lord during His absence (1 Corinthians 11:26). Each Christian ought to respond from his heart to the touching invitation of His Saviour. At the same time, to partake of the one broken bread (symbol of the death of Christ, Man, in His body given for us) expresses on the earth the unity of the body (spiritual) of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:17).