Think about your first camping trip. Or your first baseball game. Your wedding day, or your conversion. What do you feel? It’s amazing how vivid the past can be. If memories are powerful, sharing memories are even more so. When I think back to college by myself, I grin. But when my old roommate tells the story about the possum and the blow-darts, I can’t stop laughing. Memories are super-charged in community.
REMEMBERING IN COMMUNITY
At the Lord’s Table, we remember the Lord’s death for us (1 Cor. 11:23–25). But while the Supper is personal, it is not private. As Guy Waters has written, “The meaning of the Supper is not the sum total of our unaided powers of reflection. . . . We engage our minds so that in the Supper we may commune with the Savior.”
The Supper isn’t like flipping through old photo albums by yourself, pondering fond memories from your youth. Remembering happens in community—first with Christ and then with your brothers and sisters in Christ (1 Cor. 10:16, 25). The new covenant meal is communal to its core. And that shouldn’t surprise us. The old covenant meal was communal, too.
To ratify his covenant with Israel,
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