Your faith is weak, and so He trusted Himself to the Judge who judges justly. Your sins are great and many, and so He bled in your place. Your chains held you fast, and so He broke them asunder. All this was done through a horrific death.

Here, with a loaf of bread and a goblet of wine, God uses us to put on display to the entire cosmos the death of the God who bled for us. It is not hyperbole to say that this meal puts before our eyes an act of brutal violence. The bloody body of Christ, His cries of holy despair, His great sufferings should really be brought to our mind’s eye when we look upon this bread and wine. 

But this is not in order to stir up tears of compassion for the suffering servant. Certainly, we should feel the great weight and glory of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. But in memorializing the bloody and gruesome death of the God-man, we are compelled rather to remember that He undertook this great work in order to nourish, fortify, and deliver you. 

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