Maundy Thursday: the Church divided and united by the Eucharistic mystery
by Archbishop Cranmer:
Bread and wine, broken and poured out. Was ever so much distress, division and human misery caused by a supper? Is it flesh and blood, or isn’t it? Jesus in a wafer? Seriously? Is it a memorial of sacrifice or a sacramental recreation? Do the elements actually change? Are they indwelt or dwelt with and under? Is Jesus present but not in? Transubstantiation, consubstantiation or transignification? Spiritual presence but not literal? Heresy, blasphemy or divinely-instituted orthodoxy?
What a mess.
For Calvin, the institution of the Supper was Christ’s ‘seal’ of his sermon in John 6, and he termed it a ‘mystical union’. Calvin believed that there is a real ‘spiritual’ reception of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper. The sacrament is a real means of grace – a channel by which Christ communicates himself. Luther and Calvin agreed that communion with a present Christ who actually feeds believers with his body and blood is what makes the sacrament. The question between them was the manner in which Christ’s body exists and is given to believers. Calvin held that, while Christ is bodily in heaven, distance is overcome by the Holy Spirit, who vivifies believers with Christ’s flesh. Thus the Supper is a true communion with Christ, who feeds believers with his body and blood. Calvin’s view of the Lord’s Supper appears to be a median position between the views of Luther and Zwingli, but it is in fact an independent position. Rejecting both Zwingli’s ‘memorialism’ and Luther’s ‘monstrous notion of ubiquity’, he held that there is a real reception of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper, but in a spiritual manner. With Zwingli, Calvin held that after the ascension Christ retained a real body which is located in heaven:
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