In no church at the present day where the Lord's Supper is offered is there even a memory of its original meaning.
This is hardly surprising when one considers that the meaning of the meal was already being lost in the middle of the first century, less than three decades since the death of Jesus. Despite the efforts of modern scholarship to recover it, most notably at the hands of Albert Schweitzer over a century ago in The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the situation in the churches today remains pretty much as it was in the nineteenth century, to the end of which Schweitzer had summed up the situation. But we ourselves aren't just nineteenth century liberals in this regard. We are still first century Corinthians.
Far from being a meal whereby grace was thought to be transmitted to the believing recipient who now resided comfortably in the kingdom of God the church, the meal was instead supposed to represent an occasion for proclamation of a message marked by earnest expectation of something not yet realized, the presence of Jesus: "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come" (1 Cor. 11:26). It was not a question of the Real Presence, but of the future presence. This longing for the Lord's imminent return had received its inspiration from the eschatological message of Jesus itself, but that message was already in the process of being reinterpreted and was losing its original force. Otherwise the Corinthians would not have inquired of Paul about it, as 1 Cor. 7:1 shows, and Paul would not have so replied.
Close inspection of the correspondence shows that Paul was disdainful of the demeanor of some of the Corinthians, based in part on the false assumption of some who thought that the kingdom of God had already come in some sense. Paul even mocks them for it: "And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you" (1 Cor. 4:7-8). But the fact was, they didn't reign, and neither did Paul. As far as Paul was concerned, all the posturing of the Corinthians amounted to nothing but words. If they wanted to see evidence of the kingdom of God, he would come and show it to them in his capacity as an apostle of Jesus Christ, not in words, but in power (1 Cor.4: 19-21). This would not be a meeting of equals, where the outlaw Josey Wales meets Ten Bears.
Eschatological urgency is about the last thing the church wants to talk about today. The subject is too embarrassing, because the data raise uncomfortable questions. This is why one will hardly ever hear a preacher speak candidly about Mark's gospel which introduces Jesus' proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom of God in explicitly eschatological terms: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel" (Mark 1:15). The coming of the kingdom is so close, in fact, "that there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power" (Mark 9:1). Jesus himself expects not to eat the Supper after having just instituted it "until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God" (Mark 14:25). A Jesus of this sort could be someone who never expected to found a church, let alone a sacrament to sustain it. And based upon the relentless unfolding of history and the stubborn failure of it to come to a close, such a Jesus might possibly have been mistaken that the coming kingdom was just around the corner. The church already had had to respond to such questions by the time of the composition of 2 Peter: "There shall come in the last days scoffers . . . saying 'Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation'" (3:3-4).
The rationalization of the data which is now routine in most of Christendom prattles on about "the already and the not yet," wanting to have it both ways because that's what history has forced the church to do. The standard line of retreat is to assert that "the realized dimension of the kingdom of God is incomplete apart from the death-resurrection of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit" (R. H. Stein, The Method and Message of Jesus' Teachings, John Knox, 1995, p. 111). Paul would by no means acknowledge to the Corinthians a realized dimension of the kingdom in such terms. And if the ethics of Jesus as expressed in the gospels are sometimes too extreme, they also must be tamed in service of the hermeneutical expedient. "The ethic of Jesus is not an emergency ethic based on the nearness of the end" (Stein, p. 98). Accordingly, whatever does not fit the pre-conceived schema must not be universal ("Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God" Luke 9:60), or is a literary device of hyperbolic overstatement ("If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple" Luke 14:26). The multiplication of examples similar to these would only serve to underscore that there is a great deal of data which must be explained away.
Were it not for the fact that a piece of correspondence from Paul to the Christians at Corinth survived to become part of what we call the New Testament, we would know even less about the "sacramental" meal than we already do from the Synoptic gospels. More pointedly, however, were it not for the fact that the Corinthians had written a letter to Paul, which does not survive, asking him a number of questions about a variety of subjects, what we call First Corinthians would not have been written in response in the first place. Far from being everything we need to know to live our lives in Christ, the letters of Paul preserve but a matter of fact glimpse into the thought world of early Christianity.
