Robert Kolb (PhD, University of Wisconsin) is mission professor of systematic theology emeritus at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles.
Trying to wrap our minds around God not only frustrates, it breaks our minds. He—“he” indicates that God is a person—exceeds our imaginations in unimaginable ways. Trying to stretch our minds into his immensity and his timelessness brings our thinking to its point of collapse every time. God in his fullness is hidden from us not just because we are sinners who have consciously and determinedly tried to avoid looking at him. The Creator in his totality extends far beyond the competence of our fantasy because Creators are simply greater than what they create.
But our God, in his desire to have conversation and community with his human creatures, comes near to us in ways suited for human comprehension and analysis. It is not as though we barge or creep into his heavenly presence. He barges and creeps into the midst of our early existence. He did so in the flesh and blood of the first century Jew in the Roman province of Judea named Jesus of Nazareth. He does so with ordinary human words that let us know that his love and faithfulness last forever even as he demonstrates his presence in the course of our ordinary life, filled with words in many forms, with water and with bread and wine.
The presence of our God in the midst of the hustle and bustle of each day’s activities and tasks is not passive. He may seem to just sit by and watch, or even hide, but he is always at work, even when he seems absent. He is there for us even when the distractions of the day divert our attention and cause us to concentrate on what seems the here and now of the moment. But he remains there for us, a part of our every here and now, through the busy hours of the day and the hours of the night, whether restless or restful. He goes with us into the most dangerous of situations and stands by us in our ordinary routines.
The Lord’s Supper brings us the mystery of his presence in the ordinary means of sustaining life, bread and wine. God is in our face literally with his passionate love that delivers his forgiveness that we can taste…
Indeed, it can be said that he truly delights in being with us, and that he is always present for our well-being, our salvation, our joy, and our peace. God graces us with his presence in so many different ways. All of them are mysterious, some because they defy our reason or are simply beyond our ability to envisage, some because they are so ordinary, some because they defy our experience. He revealed himself as a kid in a crib, as a criminal on a cross, as a corpse in a crypt—and in his resurrected body.
The Holy Spirit comes to talk to us and, with his words, conveys Jesus to us in our own languages; the number of fifteen mentioned in Acts 2 has been multiplied in our day more than a hundred fold. He has always depended on oral communication to convey his presence, from conversations in the Garden before the fall through chats with the patriarchs and prophets, into the entire era of the New Testament to his day. He set these conversations down in written form as the Holy Spirit made his presence known in the writing of the prophets, evangelists, and apostles. And, as a multi-media communicator, the Holy Spirit knows how to use not only hearing and sight but also the feel of the water that conveys with it that we as sinners are buried with Christ and then raised to new life to walk in his footsteps. He also conveys the promise of death and resurrection “for you” in the bread that bears his body and the wine that bears his blood.
The Lord’s Supper brings us the mystery of his presence in the ordinary means of sustaining life, bread and wine. God is in our face literally with his passionate love that delivers his forgiveness that we can taste, with the body sacrificed for us on the cross and the blood shed there to receive the judgment that the law has pronounced on us, death. On Golgotha he paid the price of the soldier fighting for the freedom of his people. But with his resurrection he snatched his and our victory over sin, death, Satan, the law’s condemnation, and God’s wrath from what seemed like defeat. When we go to the Lord’s table, we are taking our places at the celebration of his triumph, at the feast acclaiming his victory.
His table gathers us together with people we know and people we do not know, with individuals we like and individuals we do not like. It gathers the family that he has chosen for himself and adopted as his children. As he gathers us into the crowd around him, his presence reconciles us with others: we meet the strangest people when he comes with his circle of friends into our presence.
We become part of his presence in the lives of others, for he makes us family. He calls us to practice his love for one another, a love that radiates out from his cross and his empty tomb as we experience them at his Supper. In sharing resurrected life with us, he has shared life with other people, some easy to get along with, others downright prickly personalities. But we enjoy being able to enjoy siblingship with them all.
God himself is indeed present, and that is a call for us to adore him, to adore him with silence, humbly kneeling with deepest reverence. It is also a call to plunge into the world with the Word of his presence, speaking, touching, leading, serving. For without the flesh of his own that brought God’s presence into our world in Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy Spirit is depending on us to convey his presence in our speaking of the promise that Jesus gives and in loving with the kind of regard and self-sacrifice that made his presence in any crowd so clear.