Day 5

From Mark – The Lord’s Supper

from the reading plan


Mark 14:1-72, Isaiah 53:2-3


My parents divorced when I was in my early teens. I don’t remember much about our family dynamics, but there was one constant event that sticks in my mind—eating dinner together. Every single night, no matter what else happened, my family sat around the same table and ate dinner. In a sense, the dinner table was an opportunity to recommit to one another, to look across the table and say, “That’s my father, mother, and brother.”

Not long before His crucifixion, Jesus sat around a table with His family—that ragtag group of disciples He called His brothers. They broke bread and sipped wine, to remember Jesus’ soon-to-be broken body and poured-out blood (Mark 14:24-25). When they looked around at one another, they were bonded together as brothers under the covenant that Jesus’ blood would establish. Christians are bound together by that same blood today.

Sunday morning worship services are more than a time to “get something” from a pastor or worship band; they’re dress rehearsals for eternity. In the final act of God’s story, His family will gather around one table, feasting and giving thanks for Jesus’ broken body and shed blood (Rev. 19:7-10). We rehearse like those disciples, and we look forward to the Last Supper when Jesus returns to make all things right.

While we weekly highlight preaching and music in Sunday morning gatherings (for good reason!), we must not forget the Lord’s Supper, “for as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). When we praise God through the preaching of His Word, the singing of hymns and songs, and partaking in the Lord’s Supper, we present to the world that multi-sided prism of the ways God is worshiped in eternity.

When we gather around the Lord’s table, our eating and drinking is a recommitment. We look at our brothers and sisters in Christ, and remember that we’re one family, one body. We may go our separate ways throughout the week, visiting each other here and there, but we always come back to the same table. We collectively hold the bread and wine or juice and look upward to our Father in heaven, who sent His Son for us.

Jesus came into the world to save it, and yet He was despised and rejected (Isaiah 53:3; Matthew 27:15-44; John 19:1-7). He was nailed to a cross, dying the death we deserved. His cross seemed like an upright coffin, but was actually a victory chariot. Three days after His crucifixion, His heart kick-started and He walked out of the grave, prevailing over the sin and death that nailed Him to the cross.

The Lord’s Supper is a beautiful, powerful, tangible reminder of that victory. Because of Jesus, we are sons and daughters, adopted by the Father (Galatians 4:4-7). Take a seat at the table with your brothers and sisters, and proclaim what He has done.

Written By Brandon D. Smith

Post Comments (3)

3 thoughts on "From Mark – The Lord’s Supper"

  1. Dalton Beaty says:

    The Last Supper is such a beautiful picture. Imagine Jesus, sitting at a table with all of the people that have followed his teaching for these years. They have seen Him do great miracles, and heard His teachings. Jesus loves these men. And they love Him. Deeply. Imagine the emotions at the table when Jesus tells them that this will be His last supper. But the tension gets even higher when Jesus tells them that one of the men at that very table whom he loved would betray Him. And then He tells them that another of them would deny him not once, not twice, but THREE times.
    Communion is something that I hold sacred and dear to my heart. It is a time to really sit and remember what this last supper would have been like, and what it represented. That even though Jesus knew all that was going to happen to Him and the anxieties that came with that, he was willing nonetheless to follow the will of His Father. May we have that same passion in all the syd of our lives.

  2. Anthony says:

    The little reading after the scripture passage said that we have been adopted by the father. That means so much. It didn’t say we have been adopted by God, even though we have. But we have been adopted by the father. One of the things I struggle with more than anything is really truly believing in the forgiveness of God. When I was growing up, if I had done something my parents had told me in the past not to do, and asked why I did it, the would always ask this question: “either you’re stupid or you don’t care” This still affects me to this day because part of me cannot separate that from God, even though I never seen see that kind of response from Him throughout scripture. But as I just wrote this last sentence, I had this thought come to mind that says, if it is not in scripture, then why would you believe that is how he is? In summary, unless we are spending time with Jesus every day, we will go backwards in faith and become like Judas, who obviously had a very wrong view of who Jesus was, and become faithless

  3. Adam Freeman says:

    In this passage we all come back together every day to be united again. After all the things we must do to separate ourselves from one another we stay apart but still always come back together. One day Jesus will come back to us and we will all be one united in Christ together.

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