Resilient Leadership with Dr. Glenn Packiam: Theology and Culture

What Makes Communion So Special?

Glenn Packiam — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:18:22 GMT

Isn’t Communion just “one of the ways” we worship and experience God? What makes it so special? What makes it the “container” for the “content” of God’s presence? Are the bread and cup really the body and the blood?

In order to shed a bit more light on Communion, may I take you on a little walk through church history? We’ll walk more quickly at first, but then slow down as we get to the Reformation. Grab your coat. We’ll start at the beginning.

When Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to His disciples, saying “This is my body which is given for you”; and when He took the cup, gave thanks, and said, “This is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for you,” He may not have known how the struggle over those words would divide His Church.

From the Early Church to the Middle Ages

Justin Martyr, a church leader in the second century, insisted in his First Apology on taking those words literally.1What does “is” mean except, of course, is. (A closer examination of Greek syntax that shows that Jesus’s words could be rendered, “This, my body” and “This, my blood” came later.) From this early premise, theologians of the third and fourth century, like Cyril, Chrysostom, and Ambrose, began to suggest that the bread and the cup would undergo a “miraculous change.”2

Still, it was not until the Middle Ages that thinkers tried to explain how this change transpired. By the eleventh century, “theologians commonly spoke of a change in substance occurring in the bread and wine,” with the term transubstantiation coming into use later, around 1150.3 But it was not until the mid-1200s that the term and its accompanying tradition achieved its final form in the Latin or Western Church, thanks largely to the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.4

With Aquinas leading the way, medieval theologians began the shift by saying that the Eucharist was not only an act of God infusing grace to the recipient, but also a “human response,” a sacrifice offered to God.5 Aquinas took this teaching to its logical conclusion in his Summa Theologica by calling the Eucharist a “sacrificial offering” in its own right, thus paving the way for the deeply embedded medieval view that “the Mass was itself a meritorious act.”6

The Reformers

It was to this medieval view of the Eucharist that the Reformers, beginning with Martin Luther, reacted most strongly. The Eucharist was not the cause of God’s grace; God’s loving nature is the cause for His grace. Nothing, not even our participating in the Eucharist, earns or merits grace. The Reformers also insisted that the Eucharist was not human work or sacrifice offered to God. Luther viewed the Eucharist as a sign of “God’s promise given to faith.”7 This notion of the Eucharist as a sign may have its roots in the Roman context for the Latin word sacramentum: an “oath of fidelity and obedience to one’s commander sworn by a Roman soldier upon enlistment in the army.”8 Augustine had developed this idea of the sacrament as an “outward, visible sign of an inward, invisible grace” centuries prior.9

So it’s not the cause of grace but a means of grace. But how? How is Christ present with us in the Eucharist? Here the Reformers were divided. Luther, the most “conservative” of the Reformers in terms of how much he wanted to preserve of the doctrines and practices of the Church, worked with the idea of transubstantiation, changing it in a small yet profound way. For Luther, Christ was not present in place of the bread and the wine but with the bread and the wine. In Luther’s view, the worshippers “ingest the Lord’s body and blood under and with the Communion elements, with the substance of the physical realities.”10

If Luther was the most conservative of the Reformers, then the most radical was likely Ulrich Zwingli. For Zwingli, Christ’s presence was not in the bread and wine at all. Rather, Christ is “spiritually present” with the gathered worshippers, just as Jesus promised to be present whenever “two or three gather” in His name.11 The focus was no longer on the words of institution from Christ—“This is my body, this is my blood”—but on His injunction to do this “in remembrance.” Thus, the Eucharist became for Zwingli a “memorial meal.” In American Christianity, I should note, we owe quite a bit of our heritage to Zwingli, for better or for worse, whether we know it or not.

John Calvin, a later Reformer, took a middle way. He agreed with Luther—and Catholic theologians—that Christ’s presence at the Eucharist is focused on the bread and the wine, but, like Zwingli, he did not think it was a physical presence. Christ is in heaven, but the “heavenly Christ meets the believer in the bread and wine” through the Holy Spirit.12

The English Reformers tended to take Calvin’s view, lopping off the extremes on either end: the Catholic “transubstantiation” and Zwingli’s “memorial meal.” Cranmer, the architect of the Church of England’s first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, leaned more toward Zwingli’s perspective—and the Swiss reformation with him. “This cup” must be taken figuratively, as a metaphor.13

Cranmer’s “subtlety” and “skill” can be seen in the prayers he curated for the Communion service. Editing an old prayer by adding a key phrase about Christ’s sacrifice “once offered,” he then expounded on it so as to leave no room for any need for another sacrifice—from Christ or from the worshipper—for another sin or sinner. And while the words in the Catholic rite proceed to make comparisons of the Communion elements to the cross, Cranmer subtly left it out, going right to a prayer to the Holy Spirit:

Hear us (o merciful father) we beseech thee: and with thy holy spirit and word, vouchsafe to bless and sanctify these thy gifts, and creatures of bread and wine, that they may be unto us the body and blood of they most dearely beloved son Jesus Christ.^[i]14

Here Cranmer went beyond what Zwingli had done by emphasizing the role of the Holy Spirit. But he also, in Zwinglian fashion, made the presence of Christ something experienced by the worshipper—“that they may be unto us”—rather than something that existed objectively. Once again, this emphasis is not secondary. This shows that for Cranmer, “the place of transformation [was] not the sacrament itself but the heart of the believer.”15

There is one more word of note in Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. After each worshipper receives the bread and the wine, the priest leads everyone in the following prayer:

Almighty and ever-living God, we most heartily thank thee, for that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have duly received these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us … of thy favor and goodness toward us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people….16

The words mysteries and mystical are used to describe the elements in general and the body of Christ in particular. One wonders if these words are meant to be a reference to the word used in the early Christian centuries for what we now call the sacraments. Because of the dominance of Greek in the early centuries, the Greek fathers appealed to certain New Testament texts that contain the word mysterion—like Ephesians 3:2–3—as the basis for calling these symbolic acts “mysteries” and not “sacraments.”17 While a sacrament may be a sign, a mystery involves room for something beyond what we can know.

In this prayer we find the best of the three traditions: the Catholic and Lutheran view of the Eucharist as a sign—sacrament; the Zwinglian view of the Eucharist as a memorial meal; and the Eastern Orthodox view of the Eucharist as a mystery.

Heres a 2-minute video I made in 2013 about why the Lord’s Table has been the centerpiece of Christian worship for 2000 years

(I looked different back then!)

What This Means For Us

The meal is a sign; the meal is a memorial; the meal is a mystery.

So how do we take on the sign and wear the pledge of faith? How do we participate in the memorial, the remembering? How do we enter this mystery?

We do so by partaking of the meal, the Lord’s Supper, Communion, the Eucharist, which means “thanksgiving.” For that reason, many churches call it “The Great Thanksgiving.” For God has come to do for us what we could not, to be for us what we cannot. We come with empty hands; He fills us with Himself. His body becomes our bread, our portion; His blood becomes our drink, our sustenance. His grace becomes more than enough.

Thanksgiving, indeed. Thanks be to God!

Thanks for reading Resilient Leadership with Dr. Glenn Packiam! This post is public so feel free to share it.

*This was an excerpt from a 2013 book I wrote called, Discover the Mystery of Faith: How Worship Shapes Believing.

Here’s a live version of a song I co-wrote with Jennie Lee Riddle based on the “Memorial Acclamation”— the climactic moment of the Anglican communion liturgy:

Justin Martyr, First Apology, trans. Thomas B. Falls (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, Inc., 1948), 105–106.

Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1994), 532.

Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 532.

Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 533.

Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 513.

Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 534.

Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 535.

Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xxvii.

Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, xxx.

The Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1815), 193.

Grenz, Theology for the Community of God, 512.

Donkey. Towel. Cross.

Glenn Packiam — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:50:46 GMT

Whenever Christians pray the Lord’s Prayer, they add the lines that based on David’s prayer in 1 Chronicles 29:10-12:

“For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

Strictly speaking, these words aren’t in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew’s gospel, where the rest of the Lord’s Prayer is found. But they are in the earliest records of Christian worship and was well known by pastors in the first few centuries of Christianity, like John Chrysostom.

But our biggest challenge with these words is not its textual origins, but rather its cultural associations.

When someone says: Kingdom, Power, Glory…

We hear: empire, abuse, and vanity.

This is an age weary of exploitation, suspicious of grandiosity, and nervous about narcissism. All with good cause. Too many leaders— indeed, too many Christian leaders— have used religious language to cloak their ambitions and stroke their ego.

So what are we to make of ending the most famous prayer in the world by ascribing “kingdom, power and glory” to God?

The answer is, Look at the life of Jesus.

Like all the other lines in the Lord’s Prayer, we must look at the Lord of the Prayer to see what these words mean. Jesus didn’t merely pray these words; He lived them.

Donkey.

Holy Week begins with Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. The people responded by waving palm branches. There is a slight incongruence here in the symbols. The palm branches were a well-known sign of revolution. During the Maccabean revolt just a century earlier, palm branches were minted on coins as a sign of their success liberation from empire. Palm Sunday— from the crowd’s point of view— was not a nice little church in the park; it was an energetic cry for revolution.

And yet Jesus rode in on a donkey. This was not simply a fulfillment Zechariah’s vision; it was a re-framing of it. In Zechariah, the king would ride into the city on a colt after the battle had been fought as a sign of peace. But Jesus was riding in before any blood had been shed. And when it came to that, it would be his own blood not that of his enemies. The donkey is a sign of lowliness and humility. Think how different this image is from the many, many statues around the world of a conquerer on a horse.

The people called for a revolutionary; Jesus entered as a man of peace.

Towel.

On Thursday of Holy Week, Jesus issued a “new commandment”: Love one another as I have loved you. Loving one another was not a new commandment. It’s right there in the Torah, Leviticus to be precise. The new part was to love as Jesus loves us.

John 13:3-5 gives us a stunning scene of this love:

“Jesus knew the Father had given everything into his hands and that he had come from God and was returning to God. So he got up from the table and took off his robes. Picking up a linen towel, he tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a washbasin and began to wash the disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel he was wearing.”

At the every moment that Jesus was most aware of His power, of the things that were in His hands, of His identity and destiny, He took off His robes and took up a towel.

This is echoed by the early Christian hymn in Philippians 2:

“Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.But he emptied himself by taking the form of a slave and by becoming like human beings.”

Power looks like the Lord of all washing the feet of His betrayer and denier.

Our world has a simplistic lens for power: powerful people are bad; powerless people are good. Any form of power— economic, political, organizational, or ecclesial— is deemed as inherently unfair. So we fixate on who has power and how they can be brought down. (Think of the rallies against the rich or the race to claim victimhood. In the frame of power dynamics, there is no other moral category other than “oppressed” and “oppressor”.)

But the gospel of Jesus Christ forces us to rethink not just who holds power but how power is used.

Power is to be expressed by taking off our pride and taking up servanthood for the sake of someone else’s good.

Cross.

Then came Good Friday. The cross in all the other Gospels is the place of sacrifice and surrender. For John, it is something more. It is the revelation of love and the location of glory. “When Jesus finished saying these things, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, so that the Son can glorify you’ ” (Luke 17:1).

This has to be the reason why Christians did not choose palm branches as the symbol of their movement. Instead, the chose a more shocking image: the instrument of torture and execution became the picture of love and definition of glory.

Glory became the supreme act of love: the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the undeserving.

A Prayer for Holy Week

In the light of Jesus, the final words of the Lord’s Prayer take on new meaning.

When you pray, “kingdom, power, and glory”, think: donkey, towel, cross.

Kingdom looks like a king who comes in humility to bring about peace through the giving of his life.

Power looks like service for the sake of the other, even those who have hurt us and deserted us.

Glory looks like sacrificial, self-giving love.

Holy Week teaches us to pray differently.

Try praying the Lord’s Prayer by inserting these words after each line:

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name…”