Recently a friend told me that his child wasn’t able to take communion yet, because he couldn’t properly prepare himself. I could spend time dismantling the reasons alleged to prove that a Christian child has any need to prepare himself in the manner assumed to be out of his reach. First Corinthians 11 contains no such demand. Exodus 12 contains no such demand (as modern Reformed anti-paedocommunionist often admit). The rules by which these demands are place on young children are utterly perverse. No one forbids a small child pray, or put a quarter in the offering plate, despite the great risk involved in wrongful giving. Warnings against high-handed sin and the sins possible to those who have attained high position and authority are somehow never placed on them, but on the youngest and most dependent members in Christ’s kingdom.
But rather than deconstructing the tissue of fallacies that have been erected to rationalize the unbiblical barriers that have been established, I want to just remind readers of what the Gospel is supposed to mean for individuals:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
Our young children have a lot ahead of them. The “sufferings” Paul mentions here includes every adversity they will ever experience in life. Often they go through things in later life we never imagined or wished for. But they have been taught to trust Jesus from infancy. They are supposed to know that God is with them through all the processes and trials of their maturity. They know they have the hope of the glory of God precisely because they now (we tell them as parents commanded so to raise them) have peace with God.
It is entirely perverse to turn the road they must travel into an attempt to attain peace with God. Fellowship with God in Christ, communion with Jesus, does not require preparation but is itself the only necessary and completely sufficient preparation for everything else that can befall us in this life. Eating and drinking with Jesus is never something to be earned or attained or deserved by his people. It is a gift of peace and reconciliation that can only be given by grace.