[T]he Lord’s Supper is to be seen as the meal ‘between the ages’. It is an anticipation of the heavenly meal which Jesus looked forward to sharing with the Twelve. Thus the Lord himself is the host who presides at the table. The church which looks forward to his coming and cries ‘Maranatha’ believes that he comes and is present with his people here and now. The disciples who take part are the company of the redeemed, and already they celebrate the final victory and salvation of God. They feed on heavenly food and anticipate the joys of heaven itself.
But the nature of the Supper is such that it testifies to the incompleteness of salvation. It brings out the tension between the elements of ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ in the church’s hope. Already by faith we participate in the heavenly banquet and enjoy the blessings of the age to come secured by the Savior’s death and mediated by his risen presence. But not yet are we taken out of the flesh and freed from temptation and suffering. We endure as seeing the invisible.
It is at this point that we may bring in the elements of thanksgiving and joy which mark the Lord's Supper. The heavenly meal is a scriptural picture for the enjoyment of salvation in terms of communion with the Lord. Such an experience, already vouchsafed to his people, must inevitably lead to the expression of joyfulness and praise to God. This element is expressed principally in Luke who shows how the early Christians rejoiced and praised God for their experience of salvation through the risen Lord. There is no conflict between this element and the solemnity and reverence which Paul commends as appropriate at the meal. For there is a distinction between the kind of joy which expresses itself in frivolity and which in the present context is based on a purely sensual or 'fleshly' enjoyment of the material gifts of food (cf. Jude 12), and the kind of joy which springs from a realisation of the goodness of God experienced in his gifts both material and spiritual. It is the elements of reverence for God as the giver and provider which prevents Christian joy from degenerating into a worldly kind of pleasure. The New Testament does not appear to associate sorrow or mourning over the death of Jesus with the celebration of the Supper. The supper was not an occasion for mourning over his death, but rather for rejoicing in his presence and giving thanks for the benefits procured by his death. Whatever may have happened in a later period, the early church remembered at the Supper what the Lord's death had provided rather than grieved over the fact that he had to die. The joy of salvation experienced and the hope of its heavenly consummation were dominant. (I. Howard Marshall, Last Supper and Lord’s Supper [Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1980], 152-53)
