Dear en,
Garry Williams says, no, (en May) we cannot have the Lord’s Supper unless physically present together.
He quotes 1 Corinthians 10:17: ‘Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, since all of us share the one bread’.
He argues that this must mean you cannot have the Lord’s Supper unless you all actually eat from the same physical loaf of bread. So presumably large gatherings where more than one loaf is used are invalid. And presumably big churches must find bakers who bake big loaves!
May I suggest another understanding of this verse? That the one loaf represents the true and living Bread, namely the Lord Jesus Christ himself. What actually makes us one body in Christ is not eating the same physical loaf but our shared faith in the one spiritual Bread, the Lord Jesus Christ. The English Reformers were right to try to replace the Roman Catholic wording spoken at the time of taking bread in the Eucharist, ‘The body of Christ preserve you to everlasting life’ (those are the key words), with the wording, ‘Eat in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on Him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving’. They understood that though we are instructed to eat with the aid of God-given physical elements, the heart of the Lord’s Supper is to remember Christ’s death for our sins (a mental not a physical process) and to ‘eat’ in your heart by faith, that is, not by eating physical bread but by inwardly renewing personal faith in the Lord Jesus who died for our sins and rose for our justification. What priceless spiritual blessings flow from doing this!
So is a Lord’s Supper by Zoom valid? Or, during lockdown, are we to be deprived of the blessings occasioned by the Lord’s Supper? If remembrance and faith are at the heart of it, then I can see no reason why we should not take part in a virtual Lord’s Supper simultaneously, making clear at the start that it is only for baptised believers in right relationship with Christian brothers and sisters, as we would if meeting together physically.
Of course, we are all longing to be back physically together in our churches, and we are not going to be doing the Lord’s Supper by Zoom once lockdown is over. But for the time being, in these exceptional circumstances, I would rather we had the spiritual benefit of the Zoom version than be deprived of what many have found to be a spiritually helpful, temporary substitute.
Warmly in Christ
