One of the things I do as a priest is lead Communion services. There are many different names for Communion across the church. From Holy Communion, to the Eucharist, to Mass, to the Lord’s Supper. All of these are referring to the same event. When we receive bread and wine as a reminder and ongoing celebration of how Jesus gave his body and his blood for us. We celebrate communion and receive bread and wine because it is something that Jesus himself asked us to do.

On Maundy Thursday Jesus gathered with his friends to celebrate the Passover meal. We call this meal the Last Supper, because it was the last meal Jesus had with his friends before he would die on the cross the next day, the day we call Good Friday. This passover meal was meant to be about remembering when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, how God passed over the land of Egypt and all the firstborn children in the land died. But the Israelite firstborns were spared. God instructed the Israelites to take the blood of a lamb and put it on the doorframe, and the blood of the lamb was to be sign to spare this household from death. It was the blood of the lamb that saved the Israelites that night.

Fast forward to Jesus’ day and the same thing was going to happen, but instead a different lamb’s life was going to be given to save the people. It was the body and blood of Jesus, the lamb of God. And at this last supper, Jesus gave his friends a meal by which to remember what he was going to do.

23b the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ 25 In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ – 1 Corinthians 11:23b-25 [NRSVA]

This meal that Jesus gave to his friends and gave to us as his friends, as his church, was to be a reminder of how Jesus gave his life for us on cross to save us. How his body was broken and his blood was shed in order to save us from sin and death and bring us back to God and eternal joy and life with him.

Churches across the world celebrate this meal in various ways, and each is a powerful reminder and image of what Jesus did for us. Different churches make different decisions on what type of wine to use, whether to use real wine, non-alcoholic wine or a grape juice alternative. Different churches also use different kinds of bread, from loafs, to bread rolls, pittas, and the quite common wafer.

I had grown up in a church where we used a loaf of bread for communion, and the idea of using a wafer seemed a bit disappointing to me. In my mind there was always something substantial and exciting about using a loaf of bread.

First, it tasted pretty good, and there is always something satisfying about receiving Jesus being an enjoyable experience, which I find enhances our understanding of Jesus being a good thing and a God who longs to bring joy to our lives.

Second there is something about using ONE loaf of bread to feed everyone during communion. It feels that we are all sharing in the one bread of Christ’s body, which I think is very powerfully demonstrated in all sharing and eating from one loaf of bread.

Third, there is also something about breaking the bread by hand that I think is very moving. Tearing bread is never a neat job. It’s messy, has wonky edges, and takes a bit of force sometimes if the bread is a bit thicker. This is no bad thing in my opinion as it reminds us that the death Jesus died for us was also messy, not clean and tidy; that it was violent and incredibly painful for Jesus.

For all these reasons I prefer using a loaf of bread for communion. However, in recent years I have been in churches that use wafers for communion. These are small individual portion thin wafers of bread, which I always found quite underwhelming. I always used to be quite disappointed using wafers for communion at church due to their lack of tastefulness and how they are in individual portions and not actually broken as part of celebrating communion with one another.

Yet since I’ve become a priest and now celebrate communion using wafers as the bread, I have found a deep love and appreciation for them. This love is not for their ease of use, storage and shelf-life (though that is all very helpful). Rather this deep love for communion wafers has come from the deeply moving imagery it dramatises in the communion prayers.

In the modern communion prayer, we break the bread when the priest says the words:

We break this bread to share in the body of Christ. Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.

In the old Book of Common Prayer the priest brakes the bread during the prayers of institution, when the priest says Jesus ‘took bread; and, when he had given thanks, he brake it and gave it to his disciples.’

Whether you are following the new or old communion prayers. This moment of breaking the bread, of breaking the wafer is incredibly powerful. And I will show you why. During the communion prayers I take the larger priest wafer, I raise it into view, and I break it saying: We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.

The congregation is probably too far away to notice it, but for me or anyone gathered close round the altar or the table, you can hear an audible snap of the wafer as I break it. At first I thought nothing of it, but over time I came to realise the depth of what it meant to hear the snap of the wafer, as I say we break this bread to share in the body of Christ.

Now when I hear the snap, I remember that Jesus body was violent broken on the cross, that his body was being wrenched apart by the nails and being outstretched on the cross. I think of the snap and cracking pain of the nails piercing through Jesus’ flesh and cracking the bones of his hands and feet. And I find myself in awe of the immense pain and suffering that Jesus went through as he died on the cross for me. So often we take communion as this simple bit of bread, forgetting that it represents Jesus’ violent and gruesome death on the cross. Yet the joy of a wafer is that its stale and often tasteless structure poetically mimics the breaking of Christ’s body on the cross. And that is why I now love using communion wafers. I still prefer using a loaf of bread, because I do think there is something powerful about sharing from the same loaf of bread as one body of Christ. However, I do not think there is anything that compares to the moving and echoing snap of a wafer that powerfully speaks Jesus’ words to us: ‘This is my body broken for you.’

Amen.