HOW IT WAS: The Lord’s Supper as Jesus Inaugurated It. (Part #1)

Introduction

“On the night our Lord Jesus was betrayed…,”[1] Good Friday as we now call it,[2] the Israelite city of Jerusalem was strangely quiet. Earlier in the day the narrow streets had been alive with frantic activity. Now the evening approached.

Sunset marked the beginning of the biblical holiday Passover. Over the last week and a half hundreds of thousands[3] of Jewish pilgrims from all over the land of Israel, and the Roman Empire, had converged on the surrounding villages and hillsides. While it was still light they had poured through the gates of the city to be within its white stone walls in order to celebrate this special meal with family and friends.[4] The ancient Israelites, later called Jews, had been instructed by God through the Law of Moses to do so on this date. At sunset. Each year.[5]

Therefore everyone raced with the sun. They rushed to get all things prepared for the Feast before the sun disappeared over the Judean horizon and the first stars became visible in the darkening Spring sky.[6] By the time it was officially night,[7] the once noisy streets were practically silent. All that could be heard from one home to another was a beautifully haunting chant in the Hebrew language as the traditional blessing[8] was pronounced. It was chanted by the leader of each household to mark the beginning of the holiday meal.[9] Passover had begun.

The Lord Jesus Christ is Jewish.[10] It’s important to remind ourselves of that fact. His first disciples were all Jewish. The flavor of the New Testament Church was Jewish. The human writers of the Bible—authors of both the Old and New Testaments—were all Jewish.[11]

To better understand Jesus and his story, today’s Christian needs to know a little bit about how Jews did things back then. The Bible is, after all, a Jewish book!

However, after the time of the Apostles, as more and more non-Jews entered into the community of faith, Christianity tended to lose sight of its Jewish roots.[12] Its origins.[13] Consequently, for many of us living today, in the 21st century, and dwelling outside of Jesus’ native land, the celebration of the Lord’s Supper for instance, the Eucharist,[14]…has become a near meaningless ritual rife with superstition[15]…and misunderstandings.[16]

It is therefore important for us to re-visit first century Judea. And the Passover of Jesus’ day.

So, together let’s re-visit “this night,”[17] the Last Supper that Israel’s Messiah ate with his disciples. But let’s observe it this time through “Jewish eyes.” As we look at “this night,” and if you’ll allow yourself to be transported back in history with me, I guarantee that you’ll develop a new appreciation for the Holy Communion meal…a new understanding of Good Friday. While we examine “this night” together and as time and culture are collapsed so that you witness the 1st century Jewish Passover that was celebrated by Jesus and his followers, you’ll more clearly see Christ as he truly is: The prophesied “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”[18]

Preparations

Passover came[19] in the Spring of each year, always on the full moon. It was a family meal that commemorated the liberation of the Hebrew slaves. About 1,500 years before Jesus, God used Moses and Aaron to deliver the Hebrews from their bondage to the idol-worshipping Egyptians. The Hebrew ex-slaves were therefore commanded by God never to forget under which circumstances they had gained their freedom. And for what purpose.[20]

Customs therefore developed over time to aid the Jewish people in remembering this miraculous event—and to help pass that memory on to their children. And to their children’s children.[21]

Passover and the related Feast of Unleavened Bread required preparation. A family did a thorough housecleaning so that all food and beverage products containing yeast, or any leavening agent, were removed from the Jewish home. After days of sweeping and scrubbing by parents and, if a family had them, servants, the children would be brought in to finalize the cleansing process.

The Jews always ate the Passover feast in the evening. About mid-morning of meal day, several hours prior to the feast, Dad, olive oil lamp in hand, took the kids on a “search” for any stray leaven which might have been overlooked. For fun, Mom would make sure she had left a few bread crumbs in a fairly conspicuous place so that, with Dad’s help, the children would “find” them. Then, usually using a feather, the “inspectors” would sweep the final contaminants onto a wooden spoon. Once that was done, crumbs, feather, and spoon were wrapped in an old cloth rag. Then the family would take the whole package outside, where Dad would oversee its burning. Afterwards he pronounced a blessing and declared the house officially leaven-free.[22]

The Prophet Zephaniah possibly had this well-known custom in mind when as spokesperson for God he wrote:

“And it shall come to pass at that time that I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and punish the men who are settled in complacency…” (Zep 1:12).

You see, leaven is most often used in Scripture as a symbol of corruption. That is why the Apostle Paul certainly referred to this ancient family ceremony when he admonished the unruly Corinthian church to…

“…[P]urge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us” (1Cor. 5:7).

After all leaven was removed from the house, it was time to prepare for the Feast.[23] Jesus and most of his disciples did not come from Jerusalem. They were from the northern Galilee region of their country. Therefore, according to the divine decree, they needed a place to eat that was within the walls of Jerusalem.[24] Ancient Christian tradition informs us that Mark, who wrote The Gospel According to St. Mark, was from Jerusalem. His family owned a large house in the western “upper class” section of town. Again, according to church history, this is where Jesus and his followers ate the Passover meal we now call “The Last Supper.”[25] It seems that Jesus had a standing invitation to dine there.

End Notes

[1] 1Cor 11:23.

[2] There is scholarly debate concerning on which exact day the Lord Jesus instituted the Eucharist. For our purposes, we will go with the traditional reconstruction which presupposes it to be Friday (i.e. Thursday night according to the usual Jewish reckoning of days, with Friday morning beginning at sundown Thursday). (See discussion in The NIV Harmony of the Gospels. Robert L. Thomas and Stanley N. Gundry, 1998, pp. 312-313).

[3] Non-natives of Jerusalem had to go through a week-long purification rite prior to entering the holy city ( www.templeinstitute.org ). Josephus, the Jewish historian. contemporary with the Apostle Paul, estimated from his eye-witness experience, and via some additional priestly sources to which he was privy, that the number of Jews in Jerusalem rose upwards of 2,000,000 during Passover season (Wars of the Jews II 14, 3 and VI 9, 3).

[4] Stein, R.H. “Last Supper” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels. Eds. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992, p. 446.

[5] Lev 23:5.

[6] Talmud, Shabbat 35b.

[7] In Jerusalem during the month of April it gets dark around 6pm.

[8] Santala, Risto. The Messiah in the New Testament in the Light of Rabbinical Writings. Jerusalem: Keren Ahvah Meshihit, 1992, p. 206.

[9] The meal is called in Hebrew the seder, which means “order” and refers to the orderly progression of meal and ceremony. Much of it was fixed before Jesus’ advent.

[10] His family, friends, and disciples all called him Yeshua, pronounced yay-SHOO’-ah. It means “Yah shall save.” The title Christ comes from the Greek word christos, which means “anointed one” or “christened one.” However, the Hebrew word he and his people heard was mashiakh, from which we derive the English word “Messiah.” Like christos, mashiakh means “anointed one” and refers in its most limited sense to the prophesied ruler, descended from King David, who would unite the scattered and fragmented 12 tribes of Israel, deliver his fellow countrymen from all foreign oppressors, subdue the nations (bringing those willing into acceptable worship of the one true God), and so usher in the resurrection of the dead and an enduring period of world peace.

[11] It is often assumed without firm evidence that Luke, the biblical author of Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts, was a Gentile. But nothing in either the Bible or ancient Church history even suggests this. See: "...Ellis, who argues that Luke was a Hellenistic-Jewish Christian.... Fitzmeyer argues that Luke was a Semite.... This view is quite plausible." (D. L. Bock "Luke, Gospel of" in The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, eds. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, I. Howard Marshall, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992, p. 496.)

[12] For example, the understanding of the connection between Passover and Easter is often vague, at best. In many European languages, the name for Resurrection Sunday is derived from the Hebrew word for Passover, pesakh. Hence you get things similar sounding like pascha. However, in English, the term we use, Easter, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon pagan goddess of Spring, Eostre, whose festival, called Eastre, came at the spring equinox. Another example can be seen in the controversy over the date of celebrating Resurrection Sunday. In the early years of the Church, this day had been rightly celebrated according to the Jewish lunar calendar in conjunction with the week of Passover. However, at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., the Church chose a new method of dating the celebration, cutting it away from its Hebraic roots.

[13] Used to be headquartered in the Philippines, now in Taiwan, Jeff Harrison of To the Ends of the Earth Ministries (Email: Jeff@totheends.com ) has a wonderfully researched and accessible seminar that details historically how this gentile-ization of Christianity took place. It was certainly God’s will for non-Jews to be brought into the covenant people. It was not God’s will that they forget who were and are the original heirs of the LORD’s promises and covenants (See Paul’s warning in Rom. 11:13-24).

[14] The Greek word eucharisto simply means thanksgiving, and thus is a fitting title for the central Christian remembrance ceremony (But see notes 15 and 16 below).

[15] The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation is an example of superstition wherein the bread and wine of the Eucharist are thought to be transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.

[16] Most Protestant explanations are no better than the Catholic one. Martin Luther’s view of consubstantiation preserves a proper element of mystery in the Eucharist, but regards an actual presence of Christ to be in the sacramental emblems of bread and wine themselves. It fails to effectively connect the whole matter back to the 1st century Jewish view of the Passover. Zwingli’s stance that the bread and wine are mere symbols likewise fails to link the Eucharist with an ancient Jewish understanding of Passover. By means of the reenactment of the Paschal meal, the Jewish worshipper was thought to be, in some sense, transported back in time, to take his/her place among the original participants in the first exodus from Egypt. It was no longer just the deliverance of each Jewish person’s ancestors that was spoken of; it became his or her personal deliverance. Therefore, the Eucharist is not a means to re-crucify the Lord, as in the Catholic Mass, nor a way to bring Jesus down from heaven to “hover about” the bread and wine, nor even a mere symbol by which the faithful may “call to mind” our Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection. Entering into an ancient Near Eastern mindset, and particularly a Jewish one, we should recognize the Lord’s Table as one way God has given us by which time—so to speak—may be “collapsed” in order for each of us to personally participate with the Hebrews as they left Egyptian slavery … and with the Lord Jesus and his disciples on that most fateful of all nights. By worthily partaking of the bread and wine together, we thereby renew our covenant with God and with each other.

[17] Taken from “The Four Questions” in the Jewish Passover liturgy: “What distinguishes this night from all other nights?”

[18] Taken from the Catholic Mass, an allusion to Joh 1:35.

[19] Although throughout this presentation I refer to Passover in the past tense, Jews are of course still around—a testament to God’s faithfulness to His covenants with His chosen people. And Jews today still practice the holiday with most of the same customs as I describe in this presentation. Plus additional ones.

[20] Exo 3:1-15:20.

[21] Exo 12:24-27.

[22] Edersheim, Alfred. The Temple; Its Ministry and Services. Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, Repr. 1972, pp. 219-220.

[23] Jesus’ disciples would have gone “to the Temple, bringing with them a lamb as the Passover offering. Once the congregation [of other Jews waiting to do the same thing] arrived in the courtyard, the gates were closed and the service was conducted to the sound of the Levites’ trumpets… Those standing in the courtyard saw row after row of priests holding the silver and gold vessels…which were used for gathering the blood of the offering… After being in the Holy Temple, the Passover sacrifice was roasted by each group or family in one of the special ovens set up all over Jerusalem to accommodate the needs of the festive pilgrims. The…lamb was roasted whole, in keeping with the biblical requirements, on dry pomegranate branches” Richman, Chaim. A House of Prayer for all Nations: The Holy Temple of Jerusalem. Jerusalem: The Temple Institute / Carta, 1997, p. 40, bracketed comments mine).

[24] Because the Passover was considered a sacrifice and the walls of a city defined its borders (See Deu. 12:5-13; also Keener, Craig S. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993, p. 120).

[25] Archaeological evidence has since corroborated this early Church tradition by the fairly recent discovery of what appears to be a Jewish Christian synagogue, with the niche for holding the Torah scroll pointing directly toward the present-day Church of the Holy Sepulcher (i.e. the empty tomb of Christ, instead of pointing toward the temple, as with traditional synagogues), and writing at the earliest bedrock level making plain reference to Jesus. It had been built of reused Herodian stone c. 135 A.D. under the traditional site where Jesus celebrated his Last Supper. (See Pixner, Bargil. “Church of the Apostles Found on Mt. Zion,” Biblical Archaeological Review 16, May-June 1990, pp. 16-35.). Pixner also reviews the relevant Church history concerning Mark’s family house.

-Michael Millier