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 loggeo 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's 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.

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