Matthew 26:26 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

As they were eating. — Again we must represent to ourselves an interval of silence, broken by the act or words that followed. The usual “grace” or blessing had been spoken at the beginning of the feast. Now, taking one of the cakes of unleavened bread, He again utters a solemn formula of blessing, and gives it to them with the words, “Take, eat, this is my body;” or, as in St. Luke’s fuller report (Luke 22:19; comp. also 1 Corinthians 11:24), “This is My body that is given for you” (literally, that is in the act of being given); “do this in remembrance of Me” (better, as a memorial of Me). It would be an endless and profitless task to enter into the labyrinth of subtle speculations to which these words have given rise. Did the bread which He thus gave them contain at that moment the substance of His body, taking the place of its own substance or united with it? In what way is He present when those words are repeated and the faithful receive the “sacrament of the body and blood of Christ?” Questions such as these, theories of Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation, and the like, are, we may venture to say, alien to the mind of Christ, and outside the range of any true interpretation. As pointing to the true path through that labyrinth, it will be enough to remember (1) that our Lord’s later teaching had accustomed the disciples to language of like figurative boldness. He was “the door of the sheep-fold” (John 10:7). What they would understand at the time and afterwards was, that He spoke of His body as being as truly given for them as that bread which He had broken was given to them. (2) That the words could scarcely fail to recall what had once seemed a “hard saying which they could not hear” (John 6:60). They had been told that they could only enter into eternal life by eating His flesh and drinking His blood — i.e., by sharing His life, and the spirit of sacrifice which led Him to offer it up for the life of the world. Now they were taught that what had appeared impossible was to become possible, through the outward symbol of the bread thus broken. They were to “do this” as a memorial of Him, and so to keep fresh in their remembrance that sacrifice which He had offered. To see in these words, as some have seen, the command, “Offer this as a sacrifice,” is to do violence to their natural meaning by reading into them the after-thoughts of theology. (See Notes on Luke 22:19.) But, on the other hand, the word rendered “remembrance” or “memorial” was one not without a sacrificial aspect of its own. Every “sacrifice” was a “remembrance” of man’s sins (Hebrews 10:3). Every Paschal Feast was a “memorial” of the first great Passover (Exodus 12:9; Numbers 10:10). So every act such as He now commanded would be a “memorial” at once of the sins which made a sacrifice necessary, and of the one great sacrifice which He had offered. (3) It seems something like a descent to a lower region of thought, but it ought to be noted that the time at which the memorial was thus instituted, “while they were eating,” is not without its significance in the controversies which have been raised as to fasting or non-fasting communion. Rules on such a subject, so far as any Church adopts them, or any individual Christian finds them expedient, may have their authority and their value, but the facts of the original institution witness that they rest on no divine authority, and that the Church acts wisely when it leaves the question to every individual Christian to decide as he is “fully persuaded in his own mind” (Romans 14:5).