“Couple o' Cups”

Friday, July 31, 2015

In your previous post, Divided We Stand, you wrote, "When we take the Lord’s Supper, we use Christ’s example as our guide.  Christ took the bread first and then the juice (Matt 26:26-27), so we do it in the same order." I understand this, but would this not also mean that we should only use one cup?

Sincerely, Cupbearer

Dear Cupbearer,

We should only use one cup… unless the Scriptures give us a reason to think that the one cup was an unimportant detail – which they do. Jesus states that it is what is in the cup that matters, not the cup itself (Matt 26:29). When Jesus took the cup, He gave thanks for the grape juice inside of the cup (Mk 14:23-24). The grape juice represents Christ’s blood; the cup does not. In fact, Jesus told the apostles to divide the juice among themselves (Lk 22:17). We don’t know how the apostles went about doing that. They may very well have poured the juice from Jesus’ cup into twelve other individual cups. When we use multiple cups to distribute the fruit of the vine in the Lord’s Supper, we are doing what Christ did… dividing the juice among all the believers who are going to remember Christ’s death.

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