Communion points us forward and backward at once
Even if you’ve been involved with Christianity and the church for many years and have taken the Lord’s Supper countless times, you might not recognize the meal’s emphasis on the future. Each time believers in a local church break Communion bread together, they remind one another that the “already-but-not-yet” of eternal life will soon and very soon become our lived reality.
Communion has its roots in the Passover meal, which the Jewish people celebrated annually for more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ. The Passover meal commemorated the redemption of the Hebrew people from the hand of Pharaoh and their birth as a new, free nation. During the climactic tenth plague, the angel of death passed over those who trusted the Lord for their salvation and had demonstrated their faith by marking the lintels of their doors with the blood of a lamb (Ex. 12).
On the night before Jesus was arrested, he told his disciples that the meal was about him and the greater redemption he brought by his death as the greater Passover Lamb. He would die in the place of his people, his blood would be smeared over wooden beams, his life given in exchange for ours. Luke recounts the meal in this way:
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And when the hour came, he reclined at table, and the apostles with him. And he said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he said, “Take this, and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” (Luke 22:14–20, ESV throughout)
Our familiarity with the passage causes us to miss the audacity of what occurred in the first institution of the Supper and continues to occur until the restoration of all things. Jesus dared to alter a long-established tradition, one mandated by God in the Scriptures and central to the religious and national identity of the Jewish people. Not only did Jesus change the meal but also made the meal about himself. “This is my body,” he declared. _This is my blood_.
In an essay about the importance of the Lord’s Supper, theologian B. B. Warfield describes the intentional care of Jesus to connect the Supper to the Passover meal as “no accident,” stating the new meal was “in execution of a thoroughly detailed plan of action, formed in the clear light of the whole future.” Surely the disciples would have struggled to comprehend all that felt new to them, such as the idea of a Messiah who must first die. Yet, notes Warfield, the disciples “can scarcely have failed to catch [that] their Master was identifying himself with the Paschal Lamb, and he was appointing to them a new symbol in its stead.” Indeed, the old things were passing away: behold, all things were to become new (2 Cor. 5:17).
We might struggle to grasp the enormity of Christ’s audacity that would have been so clear to the disciples, so I’ll put it like this. Imagine an American citizen having the audacity to change our Pledge of Allegiance. “No longer shall you say, ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag,’” the person says, “but you shall pledge allegiance to me.”
In addition to missing the audacious authority claim, we often miss the focus on the future within the Lord’s Supper. Jesus told the disciples he desired to eat the Passover with them before he suffered because, he said, “I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:16). Then he said, “For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes” (v. 18).
The meal, even for Jesus, lifted his eyes beyond present suffering to the bright future awaiting him and, indeed, all of God’s people. When the kingdom comes in all its fullness, Jesus will feast with his people, and his people will feast with him.
We are not accustomed to thinking about the clear implications of his words _I will not eat it again until …_ but they teach us that Jesus waits even now, after 2,000 years. He promised he would “not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” The fullness of heaven coming down to earth, and the fullness of all the redeemed feasting with Jesus in their resurrected, perfected, glorified bodies, remains yet to come. That fullness is coming, Jesus says. The kingdom of God, the place where people and creation joyfully acknowledge the rule and reign of Jesus, is coming—not in part, but in full.
After the first Passover meal in Egypt, the Israelites’ annual observance of it primarily pointed back to that first rescue. In many ways the regular practicing of the Lord’s Supper in local churches also points back to our rescue—to the death of deaths, to the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world, to the inaugurating of the new covenant in his blood. Amen and amen.
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Yet the Lord’s Supper does not merely point backward. It also points forward to restoration in a way that both we and Jesus have yet to fully experience.
This same focus on the future shows up in Paul’s discussion of the Lord’s Supper. After recounting the classic lines about taking the bread and the cup in remembrance of Jesus, Paul writes, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). Note the words _you proclaim_. Each local church may have only a few Christians ordained to the preaching ministry. In some churches, the congregation may call perhaps only one person their preacher. But when each member of the body takes the bread and the cup, we all become proclaimers. The Lord’s Supper makes us all apocalypse preachers who preach to one another a simple sermon: Just as surely as Jesus has died, so he will come again. And when he comes again, as Jesus promised and Paul reminded and many of us sing to each other on Sundays, “We will feast and weep no more.”
Jesus’s first miracle turned water into wine at a wedding reception, a miracle that saved the best wine for last. In a similar way to this first miracle at that wedding, so also the repeated observance of the Lord’s Supper portends not an ominous future but a bright and beautiful future for believers, another saving of the best for last. As often as we eat the bread, and as often as we drink the cup, we preach the fullness of a world of delight coming to those who struggle. Take heart, suffering Christian. Jesus has overcome the world.
The body of Christ broken for you.
The blood of Christ shed for you.
Take and eat in faith until he comes again.
Benjamin Vrbicek is the lead pastor of Community Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Excerpted from Vrbicek’s book _The Restoration of All Things: How the Promise of Christ’s Return Brings Us Comfort Today_ (Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2026). Used with permission.