"They told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread." (Luke 24:35).
The disciples on the Emmaus road had just had a Bible study. It was one conducted by Jesus himself. But even then, they didn't "know the Lord". They needed to experience his presence in "the breaking of the bread.".
Luke tells us in Acts that this breaking of bread was an important element of worship in the early days of the Church. Just how important it was, we can learn from Paul's letters, and from the Gospel - from John's account in particular.
Paul's clearest explanation of this breaking of bread is in his first letter to the Corinthians. The Christians in Corinth were surrounded by pagans. They were also divided among themselves about various issues. Paul wanted them to unite as a single group, and used a powerful and useful image to get his message across, of a body with its various parts, with different functions, but all working together.
But the Corinthians were not just a body. They were the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27). They were knit together into a body because, when they "gave thanks together", they shared in Jesus' body and blood. "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing of the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." (1 Cor 10:16-17). The next few verses make it clear that in "giving thanks", Christians share in Christ's sacrifice, and set themselves apart from pagans who sacrifice to their own false gods.
This sharing in Christ's body and blood is not just a sharing. It is a proclamation. "As often as you eat the bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." (1 Cor 11:26).
Much of John's Gospel is a commentary on the same thing. The wine, the new wine of the Messianic Kingdom, represents Jesus, the True Vine. And the bread is Jesus, the bread of life. "Whoever eats of this bread will live forever." (John 6:51).
When we think of communion, we should always remember that communion is both with each other, and at the same time with Jesus himself, he in us and we in him. John's record of Jesus' teaching is quite explicit: "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you... Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them." (John 6:53, 56). It is by eating and drinking that we share Christ's life, death and resurrection.
Wars have been fought over just how we "eat the flesh of the Son of Man", and how we "proclaim his death until he comes". A bit before the time of the Renaissance, in the thirteenth century, theologians proposed a theory of how, by eating bread, we could also be "eating flesh". With the help of ancient Greek philosophy, they suggested that the underlying substance of the bread and the wine were changed: the idea, called transubstantiation, is still part of Roman Catholic doctrine today.
But for most people, the concept of matter consisting of external attributes (accidents, in Aristotelian philosophy) and an inner essence (or substance), was far too difficult. We can understand flour and water changing to bread, or a lay person changing to a judge, but not bread changing to a person!.
And the idea was easy to misunderstand. Simple people believed that Christ was physically present and that he was sacrificed anew in the bread and the wine. The Reformers tried to correct this, but some of them went too far the other way, and saw the whole service just as a simple act of remembrance, merely reminding us of the Last Supper, and merely recalling rather than "showing forth" Christ's death.
The Church of England treads a middle way. We avoid words like "substance" and "change". Instead, we insist that Christ is "really present" in the bread and the wine. We go no further into the meaning of "really" and "present", and meanings also change with time. But in any case, the most important change is not the change of the bread and the wine, but the change experienced by the disciples at Emmaus, the change brought about by Christ's death and resurrection - the change to us ourselves!.
HD