Communion: what happens at the Lord's table?

I had a good-natured debate with a Anglo-Catholic friend a while ago about the nature of the Eucharist. His assertion was that Protestants, by insisting on the purely symbolic nature of the Lord’s Supper, had deprived the Eucharist of any spiritual power or dynamic between God and participant. As he understood it, Evangelicals viewed Communion was simply and solely a commemoration of an event in history. He contrasted this with the Catholic Mass where, as he saw it, God mysteriously and powerfully interacted with communicants.

It made me realise that we need to be so careful about how with think out and communicate what we believe about the Lord’s Supper. For although we Evangelicals do affirm that the bread and wine are only symbolic reminders of the body and blood, the Lord’s Supper is most certainly not simply an act of commemoration comparable to, let’s say, Martin Luther King Day in America or the two minutes silence for the Armistice.

Evangelicals, rather than using the term sacrament, tend to describe the Lord’s Supper or baptism as ‘a means of grace’. I think that is a term which can help us not to underestimate what is happening at the communion table. When believers come to the table to recieve those symbolic elements of the bread and wine in faith, God meets with them in a special and powerful way. Through this act instituted by the Lord himself, God communicates his grace to every heart assembled there, applying the work of Christ on the Cross to our hearts and ministering individually to every believers need. Whether through fresh assurance of forgiveness, renewed perseverance, rebuke for coldness, chastening for lovelessness, comfort in grief and pain, reminding us of our eternal hope or a myriad other ways, the Holy Spirit sustains us by imparting to us that fountain of blessings that flows from Christ’s work on the cross. This is where the true power of the Eucharist lies, and why we impoverish ourselves if we stay away from the table. At the communion table we meet with God as at no other time, which of course is why we call it communion - because we are communing with God himself.

Therefore I would suggest that mysterious ideas of the elements turning into the actual flesh and blood of Christ are not prerequisites for a high view of the Eucharist. The Lord’s Supper is a profoundly powerful, spiritual interaction without invoking ideas of Christ being resacrificed each time we celebrate it. So, let's stop and think before we describe Communion as ‘purely symbolic’ lest we strip the Lord’s Supper of its true spiritual power – a power which derives not from superstitious ideas about the bread and wine but from the mighty work of Holy Spirit applying to every believer present the glorious completed work of God’s son, now seated at the right hand of God on high.