It is a great shame that the Lord’s Supper and our interpretation of it have become such a cause of division within the Christian Church. The chief cause of trouble here is the Lord’s statement that the bread is His body. There are four major ways in which this has been interpreted. The Roman Catholic Church’s position had been developed during the Middle Ages, and by the time of the Reformation it took these words in the most literal of ways. Rome taught the view known as transubstantiation, that the bread and wine really became Christ’s body, since, after all, this is how Jesus puts it. In a Roman Catholic service, when the priest takes up the host, which is the bread, and utters the words of institution (“This is my body”), at that point the bread and wine are changed into the literal body and the literal blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. The bread and wine still taste the same; but their substance has been mysteriously changed. With this change, the worshipers knelt in worship before the bread that had become the body of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Reformers of course did not like that. Historically it was wrong because on the night of the Supper’s institution, Jesus was right there with His disciples. None of them would have understood that the bread and wine had actually become Christ’s body and blood when He was present with them. The Reformers also said that it is never the case that the sacrifice of Christ is repeated again and again as it is claimed to be repeated in the Roman Catholic mass. The Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross once for all for our salvation. Our salvation comes from faith in what He has done in the past, not in some continuing arrangement performed by the Roman Church by the work of human priests.
However, it was not just a difference of opinion between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformers. Further difficulty arose because the Reformers themselves could not quite agree on what was happening. Zwingli, the reformer from Zurich, believed that it was a great mistake when you begin to talk of any kind of presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli emphasized the fact that Jesus had ascended into heaven. His body is not here on earth anymore. Consequently, when we observe the communion service and repeat Jesus’ words about the bread being His body and the wine being His blood, we are not confessing anything like transubstantiation. The elements are not being changed at all. Instead, what we are doing is remembering what Christ has done. The bread and wine are symbols pointing to the reality of His death on behalf of sinners. The Lord’s Supper is therefore to be seen as strictly a memorial of the death of Christ.
Luther, the German reformer, did not agree with that at all. Luther believed that Scripture should be interpreted literally, and therefore Zwingli’s symbolic approach was not only wrong but dangerous. Luther had a hearty distrust of human reason, but he was a rational man and he knew that reason should be used properly. He was well aware that in our sinful state, our reason can often lead us astray. So when Luther came to those words of Jesus, “This is my body,” Luther certainly wanted to take them in some literal sense. Luther objected to the Roman Catholic idea that in some sense the sacrifice was repeated or made present again, but he did believe that in some way Christ’s body and blood must be present in the bread and wine.
In 1529 there was a meeting between Luther and Zwingli, and others on both sides of the issue, in the hope to be able to get them to agree on this matter of the Lord’s Supper so that the Reformation would be more unified. After long discussions that stretched over days, it broke down because Luther refused to be anything but literal at this point, citing the words of Christ, “This is my body.” And because Zwingli was unwilling to accept that interpretation, the meeting broke down and the much-desired agreement did not happen.
