The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? (17) For we, though many, are one bread and one body; for we all partake of that one bread.

The first letter to the Corinthians was written by the apostle Paul. Our verses today teach a spiritual and not a corporal participation of the blessings of Christ’s body and blood. All it asserts is the fact of participation – the nature of participation must be determined by other sources.

The cup of blessing is a reference to the common Jewish expression for the last cup of wine drunk at many meals. The faithful bless the cup – give thanks to God for the cup because of what it symbolizes, namely, our sharing in the benefits of Christ’s shed blood – the blood of Christ by which we have justification by faith in the atonement that our Lord has accomplished. Likewise the bread used at the Christian feast, the Lord’s Supper, is symbolic of believers participation in the effects of Christ’s slain body. The term one bread stands for unity – solidarity – of our relationship as a redeemed community in Christ. When wine as wine is not the symbol of Christ’s blood but only when it is consecrated for that purpose. It is set aside from a common to a sacred use. It is not Christ’s literal blood and body.

There is a lot of division in our understanding of Holy Communion whether it is transubstantiation or symbolic or other. C.S. Lewis notes that Holy Communion is the only rite we know of the Lord himself instituted. He writes that he finds “no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern in me have no privilege over the savage or the child. Here is big medicine and strong magic…..The commandment, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.”