Nourishment?
Have been chewing on Covenant renewal in Communion a lot. I’m starting to think the emphasis on the Table is not so much nourishment as resurrection and commission under oath.
Adam could eat from any tree in the garden. That’s the love feast, the nourishment. The Tree of Life was the key to Covenant Succession, the future. The Tree of Wisdom was the Covenant cup — drinking the sword of the Law (Numbers 5), a ministry of death.
So Jesus wrapped up all the previous history, his genealogy, in the bread, and broke it. He never had any children.
And He turned it into Spirit, a New Covenant Oath. When we eat the bread, Adam is consumed, but He is the new Adam, a new “risen” (yeasted) history. When we drink the cup, we promise to keep His commandments. It ministers both life and death, and we bear spiritual children from those inside our house and those outside of it.
The elements are administered separately, but mixed inside us. We don’t leave the Table — walk out of the king’s court — with full tummies due to Communion. We are Covenant nobles who miraculously walk out of there alive. The Table is for spiritual grown-ups, i.e. those no longer under external Law, but internal Law.
“But on the nobles of the children of Israel He did not lay His hand. So they saw God, and they ate and drank.” Exodus 24:11
Communion isn’t nourishment. The flaming-sword-in-a-cup consumes us and makes us Jesus’ body. This is related to credobaptism. We can’t import the Old Covenant into the New Covenant without qualification. God has a process, and things have changed, matured. We have moved from the firstborn redeemed at the bloody Altar, through the Laver, to a priesthood of elders around the fragrant Altar where the blood is in small, memorial doses. We are 24 elders before the Throne. Just as baptism is not for infants, so the Table is for New Covenant knights. We’ve been “dubbed” under the sword (beheaded for the testimony of Jesus) and now we are qualified to carry it.
