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The Lord's Supper — what a title! How full of memories, how it carries us back into the very heart of the past! What a solemn night it tells of — what a meeting — what a parting! The Lord's Supper, however often it is celebrated, always ought to carry us back to the institution. For the little company of the disciples it was a night of gloom. The week had opened amid Hosannas; for a moment it had seemed as if the Saviour was to be the hero and the idol of the multitude. But the acclaims died away. The bitter hostility of the rulers reasserted itself in a series of angry or crafty assaults; and now we are on the very eve of that other and most opposite cry — "Away with Him; crucify Him. His blood be on us, and on our children." The fortunes of the new gospel, as man must judge, were that night at the very lowest ebb. As the event advances it is made quite evident that this is a parting meeting, and that the Lord and Master knows it. He speaks of Himself as departing, not on a temporary journey, but by a violent death. People who are bent upon explaining away everything that is remarkable, still more everything that is superhuman in the Gospels, have denied that the words "Take, eat, this is My Body; Drink ye all of this, for this is My Blood," were words of institution at all. They say that they were merely a pathetic way of typifying to the disciples His approaching death, and had nothing to do with any future commemoration of it when He should be gone. It is not necessary to argue this point, because we have the clearest testimony from the earliest date rationally possible; the testimony of friends and foes; of Christians and Pagans; of St. Paul and St. Luke; of Pliny no less than , that those who heard the words did understand them as words of institution, and did act upon them as such. The breaking of the bread, the coming together to eat the Lord's Supper were phrases of perpetual recurrence as soon as there was any Church founded, and wherever that Church spread itself over Asia and Europe; and that custom, always, and everywhere, explained itself by going back to the scene in the guest-chamber the night before the Crucifixion. But now, if the words had this meaning, the thought comes upon us with great force, how wonderful is it that our Lord, knowing that tiffs was His last night upon earth as a man in flesh and blood, instead of regarding it as an end, looks upon it as a beginning, speaks of it as a preliminary, a necessary preliminary to results foreseen and foreknown, in particular to what He calls the remission or dismissal of sins, and gives directions for the perpetual remembrance of His approaching baptism of blood, in an ordinance which is to have for its marked feature the symbolic eating and drinking of His own Body and Blood. Brethren, this is a great thought. Our Lord in the same night in which He was betrayed, the very night before tie suffered, did not look upon that betrayal or upon that passion as a disaster, as a blow struck at His work, or His enterprise, but rather as its necessary condition. It is the fore-ordained consummation. The same night in which He was betrayed, and in the clearest foresight of His Crucifixion, He founds an ordinance, He institutes a sacrament in express recognition, and for the everlasting remembrance, of His death of violence and torture, of ignominy and agony. "Well, now let us pass on to the very words of the institution, so much more surprising and startling than if they had merely spoken of commemorating His death — "Take, eat, this is My Body"; "Drink ye all of this, for this is My blood." It would not have been at all startling, and not at all surprising, if our Lord had hidden His disciples to come together from time to time to meditate upon His cruel and suffering death. A mere man might have thought of this, might even have made it a religious service to go over the particulars of His passion, partly as a memorial to a lost friend, and partly for the encouragement of serious, devout, and humble living. But this cannot be said of the expressions before us — "Take, eat, this is My Body." "Drink this, for it is My Blood." So far from this being the common language of a dying friend, it would be language of which all would shrink from the hearing or the uttering. Brethren, it speaks for itself, that they must have regarded Him who said, "Take, eat, this is My Body," as one altogether different from any common, or any merely human person. It would be cruelty, it would be impiety, it would be insanity in any friend, living or dying, to use such expressions concerning himself. They say this, if they say anything, "My death shall be your life;" "My body is given, My blood is outpoured for you." In that death is involved the life of the world. In that separation of flesh and blood which is the act of dying, the sins of the world are taken away; yet this is not as a single isolated fact just to be accepted, just to be relied upon, without corollary or consequence — not so. "I, the dying, the once dead, shall be alive again after death, and be your life, not as a dead man, but as one alive after death; so must you deal with Me. You must receive Me into your hearts, you must, as it were, eat Me and drink Me, so that I may enter into your very being, and become a part of you; not as a man in human form treading upon the earth, companying with you as a man with his friends, but in a totally different manner, as one that died and was dead, but who now liveth to die no more; as one that has died and risen again; as one that is now in heaven; as one that has the Holy Spirit, and sends Him forth for perpetual indwelling in the hearts of His people. "So eat, so drink, for refreshing, and for sustentation." The flesh profiteth nothing"; no, not though you could hold in the hand and press with the teeth the very body of the Crucified. The flesh, even the sacred flesh, profiteth nothing; "it is the Spirit that quickeneth." One moment of spiritual contact with the risen and glorified is worth whole centuries, whole millenniums, of the corporeal co-existence.

(Dean Vaughan.)

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KJV: And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him.

WEB: When the hour had come, he sat down with the twelve apostles.