PVC, Holy Communion & the Remembrance of Jesus

 PVC, Holy Communion & the Remembrance of Jesus

By Matthew Michael

The Holy Communion is a very important sacred rite of the church, whether of the reformed or Catholic traditions. I did not by this reflection seek to  desecrate it, but I seek to appropriate its biblical meaning in order to connect its biblical significance directly to our Christian civil responsibilities.

 I've to also say that I don't usually involve myself in the impersonal online Christian debates, unless the issue at hand is crucial to the existential survival or pertains to  our corporate Christian responsibility to God and humanity. I think the issue of Christians' refusal to participate in the political process  and the threats of this attitude to our collective survival lies within the preceding serious concerns. With the way Nigeria is going at the moment, there is the threat of our collective annihilation if Christians refused to participate in the political process by way of getting their Permanent Voters Cards (PVC) and going out to vote on election day. I support fully that  Christians without PVC should not be allowed to take the Holy Communion. 

To begin with, the chief aim of the communion is to remember Christ. The magna carta of the Holy Communion or Eucharist reads:

"For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:23-24). This same understanding of the Holy Communion is preserved in the synoptic traditions of the Gospels (see Luke 22:19-20; Mark 14:22-25; Matthew 26:26-29). The central purpose of the Holy Communion is the sole and collective responsibility of the church, and each individual Christian to "remember" Jesus. Consequently, the "remembrance" of Jesus is at the core of the Christian Eucharist feast. However, does the church have the power to stop Christians from taking the Holy Communion?  Or Putting this differently, are we not stopping Christians from remembering Jesus by stopping them from taking the Holy Communion? To answer these questions, we need to understand the semantics of "remembrance" in the rite of Holy Communion.

In the context of the Eucharist, remembrance is not just the mere recollection of the events of Jesus' life or even death  but it describes one's  identifying with, and standing in solidarity to everything that Jesus eternally represented. Remembrance here becomes the important act of reenacting the presence of Jesus in the world. In this regard, remembrance is synonymous to the act of reenacting Jesus' life, salvation and power in edifying his body, the church and impacting the world. Similarly,  we remember Christ in the context of the Holy Communion, if we reenact his love and compassion for the church by standing in solidarity with the persecuted and the suffering of his church. I think there is no remembrance of Jesus--that the Holy Communion tries to symbolize--if we do not identify ourselves with the suffering and struggles of his physical church. 

If this premise is accepted, then the church should help its member to stand in solidarity with the wounded and the persecuted by participating in the political process which will clearly guaranty their security, well-being and  emancipation. For the many politically powerless Christian communities in Nigeria, the first of this process, is to get a PVC. Through this act of involvement, each member remembers Christ, and participates in the healing of his physical body, the church. In so doing, we participate in the higher act of communion with Christ's physical church by using the political process to seek for its healing and well-being. It is only when this act is truly done that the  remembrance of Christ at the Lord's table becomes true to the memory of Jesus who stood for the poor and the dehumanized members of the human society, and throughout his life and death seeks for their wholistic redemption. If this is not done, the mere taking of the body of Jesus as a ritualistic exercise or the  mere sacrament of the church without the memory of his actual identification and desire for societal transformation becomes useless, and the narrowed spiritualization of this wholistic remembrance.

 I think there is no point taking the body of Jesus in Holy Communion when we individually destroy the physical body by our inactions and political passiveness. I think we are not spiritually fit to eat the body of Christ in Holy Communion if we are politically useless to the collective well-being of the physical body of Jesus, the church.

The individual indifference towards the political process in the past has made the church in Nigeria politically vulnerable  because it has created the elections of incompetent and terrorist-supporting individuals into government who have turned blind eyes to the killing and massacres of Christian communities. We must help Christians in Nigeria to rediscover the Jesus of the Bible and to remember him not just in the spiritual act of eating of his body in Holy Communion, but in the physical act of standing in solidarity with the pains, social, and political struggles of the church in this turbulent moment in her history.