David Lose in his weekly article, “In the Meantime,” on the Gospel lesson for Sunday (John 14:1-14) wrote the following. Many of us will partake of Holy Communion tomorrow and its good to have a reminder of what God is really doing.
I’ve always been captivated by Martin Luther’s sense of the “real presence” of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Rather than side with those who said that mere finite bread could not hold Jesus’ infinite body, and so argued the bread was not really bread but had been transubstantiated into Jesus’ body, or with those who again said that mere finite bread could not hold Jesus’ infinite body, and so the bread was just bread, a reminder of Jesus’ love, Luther argued that, as with the Incarnation, there are times that, indeed, the finite can hold the infinite. What we experience in the Lord’s Supper, he believe, is just that kind of real presence. It’s a confession of faith that doesn’t boil down very easily to clean cut answers but instead offers a relationship: It is really God who is really present for us in a way we can really receive.