When we reflect on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, we commonly understand the wine to symbolize Christ’s shed blood and the bread Christ’s broken body. And such a view is right and biblical. For as with baptism, the Supper manifests the gospel to our senses: In the elements, we see visibly and feel tangibly and taste palatably the cross, the gospel.
But what if there’s more to the wine and bread, symbolism which we could also defend from the Bible?
I started considering this after hearing lyrics from the Christian artist Kings Kaleidoscope. In the song “Backwards,” songwriter Chad Garner meditates on how in Christian life we sometimes take one step forward only to be followed by two backwards. In this context, he writes,
“I take the wine but leave the bread.”
How is it possible to take the wine and leave the bread? Of course, we can do this with the physical elements. But given the context, Gardner isn’t speaking of just drinking the wine but avoiding a piece of bread. Rather, he was delving into more of the biblical meanings of the wine and bread in the Supper.
The Wine and Forgiveness
First, let us reconsider the wine. Fundamentally, we can all agree the wine symbolizes the blood of Christ. But we may, I think, take a step further and ask: What does Christ’s shed blood mainly point to? And if we do that, the biblical answer—from Old Testament to the New—is that shed blood specifically symbolizes forgiveness of sin.
The author of Hebrews, connecting the Old Testament to what Christ accomplished on the cross, made this point short and sweet: “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22; see also Leviticus 17:11). And Jesus explained the wine with this very idea: “this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:28).
As a result, we can rightly say that when partake of the wine (or in many circles, the juice) in the Supper, we are not only being pointed to Christ’s shed blood, but God particularly is directing us to the dwell on the fact that with Christ’s shed blood we are forgiven.
The Bread and Satisfaction
Yet what about the bread? Almost everyone agrees the wine symbolizes forgiveness. When we consider the bread’s symbolism, though, we usually simply say it symbolizes the same reality as they wine: the forgiveness of sins. And in a sense, this is correct. For us to be forgiven, Christ’s blood not only needed to be shed, but his body also was killed.
I don’t think this is all we should think when we consider the bread and body, however—for two reasons.
First Consideration: The Bread Is Simply “His Body” Given “For You”
First, the translation many of us are used to, “my body…which is broken for you,” is not kept in any of the Lord’s Supper texts in most modern translations (eg. ESV, NASB, NIV, NLT) because the oldest, most reliable manuscripts do not include “broken for.” The original words Jesus says are either 1) simply, “This is my body” (as in Matthew 26:26 and Mark 14:22), or 2) more specifically, “This is my body, which is given for you” (as in Luke 22:19 and 1 Corinthians 11:24).
As a result, we’d be mistaken if we understood the bread as only referring to Jesus’s broken body on the cross. He never says that. He defines the wine specifically as his blood shed for the forgiveness of sin. But the bread he explains more generally: 1) the bread generally is his “body” (he does not say it is only his broken body on the cross), and 2) the bread is generally his body “given for us” (he does not say it is only his body broken for us on the cross). Put these two together, then, and we see that the partaking of the bread is a vaguer call than the partaking of the wine (which is explicitly said to be for the forgiveness of sins). Jesus’s words, of course, do include his body on the cross, but the call to eat the bread is a more general call for us to partake of his body (1 Corinthians 10:16).
So, when Jesus held up the bread in the Supper, he simply said it was his body given for us. That’s the first thing for us to reconsider when we think about the bread.
Second Consideration: The Bible’s View of Bread
Second, we continue to reconsider what Jesus might mean by the bread and body when we think about what bread symbolizes throughout the Bible. From the Old Testament up through the New Testament, particularly including Jesus’s teachings about bread in John 6, we start to see that we can’t arrive at Jesus’s words at the Supper and believe the bread merely symbolizes his body on the cross broken to forgive our sins. It symbolizes this, but also much more.
For example, consider the manna in the wilderness given for the Israelites. God calls this “bread from heaven” (Exodus 16:4), and so do the prophets (Nehemiah 9:15), and so does Jesus (John 6:31). What was the point of this manna bread from heaven? It was given by God to show the people he can be trusted, that he is for them. And most fundamentally, it was given sustain and satisfy the hunger of God’s people.
With this in the background from the Old Testament, now consider Jesus’s use of bread in John 6. Talking to his Jewish listeners, Jesus takes up the idea that the manna provided sustenance and satisfaction and then he applies it to himself. He states that he is where soul-sustenance and soul-satisfaction can be found. And he amplifies the idea to an infinite, eternal degree: his bread provides unending sustenance and satisfaction (John 6:35; 6:51).
Which brings us back to the Supper. With this set in place as the Bible’s view on bread—namely, symbolizing sustenance and satisfaction—when we hear Jesus offer us wine (representing his blood shed for sin) and bread (generally symbolizing his body), it’s us who then assume that the body is only talking about his body being killed on the cross. As shown in point one above, Jesus never specifies the bread like this. He does specify that the wine represents his shed blood, but he doesn’t do this with the bread which represents his body.
Rather, the bread simply is his “body” which is “for us.” And what does bread given for people mean biblically? Bread is given for sustenance and satisfaction, which is exactly how Jesus used it for himself: he is the bread of life given to us for infinite and eternal sustenance and satisfaction.
He’s Offering Us Satisfaction in Himself
It’s our mistake, therefore, to assume that in the Lord’s Supper Jesus is only referencing his cross and the forgiveness of sins with the wine and bread. Of course, being the Passover and the night of his crucifixion, the cross certainly is the emphasis—especially since Jesus’s cross for forgiveness is the crux of the Christian gospel (1 Corinthians 2:2). But when he offers us the bread which is “for you,” he isn’t merely offering us forgiveness. He’s offering us himself, for our sustenance and satisfaction for our souls.
All this means that when we come to the table, we come not only for forgiveness, but also for satisfaction in Christ. A blunder would be, as Garner wrote, to “take the wine but leave the bread”—to come to Jesus simply because we want to be forgiven (who doesn’t?), but then turn elsewhere for sustenance and satisfaction.
But such a Christian faith isn’t Christianity. It isn’t what Christ offers us. He gives us wine for forgiveness and himself for satisfaction.
Wine without bread isn’t a meal. We need both.
Let us, then, remember this next time we come to his table: We have a Savior who not only bled and died so that we could be forgiven, but one fully satisfies our souls forevermore.
May he be praised for the wine and for the bread.
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This also makes sense of why Jesus would make the Lord’s Supper one of the two ordinances for the church. In baptism, we see symbolized the once and for all washing away of sin. In the Supper, we see symbolized not only Christ’s cross, but that we continually need to come to him for both forgiveness and satisfaction. What a wise and helpful Savior we have.
