By Robin G. Jordan
The rules that prevent some church traditions from celebrating the Lord’s Supper online were not made by God. They were made by men. Like the Pharisees, some church traditions have chosen to fence in the Word of God. They give more weight to their customs than they do to God’s Word. They even negate the clear teaching of Scripture.
What the coronavirus outbreak is doing is breaking down the fences that we have erected around God’s Word, the barriers of custom which we have raised. It is forcing us reevaluate and rethink long-held beliefs and practices.
The antiquity of a belief or a practice is no guarantee of its validity. Nor is its widespread acceptance. Error can be hoary with age and yet nonetheless be error. Error can be accepted by all but a few and yet nonetheless be error.
In the Anglican Church who is the minister of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is largely determined by custom. The Holy Scriptures do not specify who should preside at a celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Their silence speaks volumes if we would heed it.
If who presides at such a celebration was a matter of great importance, we should reasonably expect Jesus to have identified such person when he instituted the Lord’s Supper. But Jesus does not place emphasis upon whom should preside at its celebration but on how often we should celebrate it. This is what the Holy Scriptures record and this is what the Bible, like Jesus, emphasizes.
Jesus’ command to “do this in remembrance of me” is not to solely to the disciples in the upper room or to their purported successors but to his whole church in every place and in every time. This includes his twenty-first century followers assembled together in cyberspace. Jesus does not specify in what way his disciples should gather to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, only that when they come together they should celebrate it.
We have made it our practice to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a building that has been set apart for “worship, prayer, study, and community life,” to quote the Church of England’s Church Closure Poster. Here again if it was a matter of great importance we should reasonably expect Jesus to drawn our attention to it. But Jesus himself says nothing about where we should celebrate the Lord’s Supper.
Being what we are, we are not satisfied with Jesus’ silence and the Holy Scriptures’ silence. We must fill in these silences with details of our own imagining and then elevate these imaginings to the level of revelation and higher. We replace God’s Word with our own word.
Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper on the night of his arrest. On previous occasions he had escaped arrest but on this occasion he would fall into the hands of those who would put him to death. They may not have executed him but they turned him over to the Roman authorities who did their dirty work for them.
As we gather on Easter Sunday in cyberspace, death hangs over us like a cloud as death hung over Jesus that night. It is a time more than ever we need the grace of the Lord’s Supper, the grace that God supplies through the sacrament that Jesus instituted. It is not the time to withhold from his followers that grace simply to honor the traditions of men.
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