On yesterday's edition of Things Unseen, I asked a question. What do you think about when

the Lord's supper is being celebrated in your church? Our minds, I think, can easily

drift towards a kind of hazy dreaminess, can't they? So it helps us to have a particular

truth on which to focus, like nails we can hang our thoughts on that will help us to fix

our eyes on the Lord Jesus. After all, we need to receive more than just a small piece

of bread and a tiny drink of wine. We need the blessing of meeting with the Lord Jesus

himself. In fact, the word I want to think about today is the word blessing. Or if you

want it to rhyme with yesterday's word proclamation, I think you could probably call it

benediction. It's a word Paul specifically uses in connection with the supper. In 1 Corinthians

10 verse 16, he talks about the cup in the supper as the cup of blessing that we bless.

If you use the new international version, it's translated the cup of thanksgiving for

which we give thanks. But I don't think that's quite right. Nor did the translators of the

English standard version. Paul uses a Greek word that comes from the verb you log out

to bless. It's a verb which I think has lost the full weight of its biblical meaning today.

But if we want to understand what the Lord supper means, we need to recover its significance.

And I find one of the most helpful ways to do that is by thinking about what may still be the

most common use of the verb to bless. It's when someone sneezes and we say, bless you.

Why do we do that? Well, it may well go back to the Middle Ages when sometimes a plague,

the bubonic plague swept away large proportions of the population of Europe. It was regarded as

an indication of the curse and judgment of God. And guess what? Sneezing was one of its common

symptoms. Just as it was sometimes said in 2021 and 2022, if you've got a sore throat,

you've probably got COVID. And so saying bless you was actually a kind of prayer. It was saying,

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