Communion

Communion is taken but not entirely understood.  When Jesus said "this is my body" and "this is my blood", what was He pointing at?  A meal, yes, but think of the time and place they were at.  It was the Passover meal.  This links up to what Israel had been doing for so many centuries, since God delivered them out of Egypt.  Jesus was saying that those who eat Passover without linking it to what He was about to do - and the disciples didn't really understand what was coming, but they would be able to look back at that Passover meal and these words of Jesus after His crucifixion - Jesus was preparing them.  He said that those who eat of it without linking the meal to His sacrifice were eating it unworthily, and their destruction from doing so is obvious - they wouldn't think of His sacrifice as any particularly worthwhile matter, and so they would miss the gospel, which has us not only believing His death was a sacrifice for our sins, and the reality of His burial, Resurrection later - even on the third day - and His subsequent witness by many people that He had arisen, indeed, but their call on His name for their salvation due to that belief, and so they would be destroyed by eating the Passover meal without understanding.  Eating His flesh and drinking His blood was a metaphor using the food to point to repentance from the old life into His death, about which Passover had always been a metaphor.

When we take communion due to some ritual or duty, we misunderstand the link Jesus was giving His Jewish disciples between Passover and His sacrifice.  That's all it ever was.  As Gentiles, we probably don't even eat Passover, so it's rather moot for us.  We Christians know about His sacrifice already, or else we wouldn't be saved, and we don't really consider the link, except as a historic fact, between His death for our sins and Passover, because we are not Jewish.  This isn't to say that we have a hard time understanding that link, but it is to say that our ritualising the Communion of the Last Supper rather misses the point, and the Roman Catholic Eucharist does more so, perversely turning the metaphor on its head so that the meal is thought to be Christ, Himself, during His sacrifice, which is what the metaphor pictures, but the metaphor is not the thing it references.  I think that in Protestant Communion, we have some of that, as though we must "commune" with God through the physical act.  But, again, the Scriptural passage used as the basis for Communion is widely misunderstood without the link seen by those Jews sitting with Him between Christ's then-upcoming sacrifice and the ancient Passover meal.

Those Jewish disciples of Jesus could be comforted when He was scandalously murdered by the legal authorities when they thought back to that Last Supper and knew that they should accept His sacrifice as the very thing pointed toward by all those centuries of Israelite celebration of Passover.  Then they would understand along with it that His sacrifice was about to take them out of Egypt - that even that historic rescue from Pharaoh was a metaphor of what was then occurring spiritually as His sacrifice was not only familiar to them in the eating of Passover but necessary as the means of final escape from the power of sin, which we now know and which was unfurled through their generation that sin's power was through the Law.  Cycles tie together from one glory to the next with Jesus' one-time Last Supper with His disciples (at which He referenced each time they ever eat Passover).