Saturday, April 4, 2015

HOW IT WAS: The Lord’s Supper as Jesus Inaugurated It. (Part #4)

Could it be that when Jesus, the rabbi from Galilee, instituted his Eucharist in the 1st century that he (or a later follower of his) also introduced a new custom into the (then fairly fluid) Jewish Passover liturgy—a custom that had the leader choose the middle of the three loaves of unleavened bread, like the 2nd person of what Christians now refer to as “the Holy Trinity” was chosen for a special assignment?

Could it be that the middle loaf of this “bread of affliction” is broken and half of it consumed, like our Lord Jesus, who was “afflict[ed]” for our sins. Indeed, he referred to himself as the “Bread of Life,” who must be personally appropriated in order for an individual to live eternally with God?[1]


Could it be that the other half of the broken loaf, the afikoman, is taken, wrapped in a linen “shroud” and hidden from view, just like Jesus the Messiah, suffered, died, was wrapped in a shroud, and then buried? And could it be that the afikoman is sought for by children during the modern Passover, like Jesus and his kingdom must be sought for by those who humble themselves like little children?[2] Is there a cryptic message from Jesus himself in the modern Passover seder?

Please also remember, afikoman means “I am coming.”[3]

The Gospel text simply says:

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed[a] and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is my body” (Mat 26:26).[4]

Likewise he also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you” (Luk 22:20).

We know that the third cup of wine drunk at this stage of the Passover meal was called by Jews the “cup of redemption” and also the “cup of blessing.” So when we read in one of Paul’s letters that he called the wine of the Eucharist the “cup of blessing,”[5] it is fairly certain that he had the third of the four Passover cups in mind. Further evidence is that both Paul and Luke state explicitly that the cup Jesus used to inaugurate the new covenant was drunk “after supper,” apparently referring to the full-blown meal (See above, also 1Cor 11:25).

And that is when the “cup of blessing” is drunk during the Jewish Passover ritual.

In the Bible, covenants are binding legal agreements between two or more parties, … sealed in blood. Moses had inaugurated the covenant given at Mt. Sinai some 1,500 years before Jesus by sprinkling the blood of sacrificed cattle on the assembled representatives from Israel. Then he spoke thus:


“This is the blood of the covenant which the LORD has made with you according to all these words” (Exo 24:8).

The new covenant was not invented by Jesus and his followers. It was hinted at throughout the Hebrew Scriptures,[6] and specifically promised by God via the prophet Jeremiah about 600 years before Christ:

“Behold, the days are coming,” says the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah … I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts … they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them … For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jer 31:31-34).

Therefore, Jesus took the third cup of the Passover meal, the “cup of redemption,” the “cup of blessing,” and he pronounced the traditional benediction.

When he told his disciples, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you,” Jesus was purposefully linking the meaning of the third cup in the Passover liturgy, the “cup of redemption,” the “cup of blessing” together with a series of biblical phrases.[7] The first phrase came from what Jeremiah had said (“new covenant”) 600 years before Christ. The second phrase came from what Moses had said (“blood of the covenant”) about 1,500 years before Christ. And the third phrase, concerning an innocent person who would die on behalf of sinful Israel, came from what the prophet Isaiah had about 700 years before Christ:

“… he poured out his soul unto death … (Isa 53:12).

By this particular statement at Passover, drinking, not the first, second or fourth, … but the third cup of the seder, the “cup of redemption,” the “cup of blessing,” Jesus meant to communicate to his Jewish disciples in that upper room a couple of things:

First of all, please remember that the Passover in Egypt was God’s salvation for all who applied the lamb’s blood to their doorposts. The LORD judged Egypt. But His death angel did not perform his task based on whether one were Israelite or Egyptian. Each family had a firstborn. Israelite and Egyptian. And each firstborn was protected from the angel so long as he, and all family members, stayed inside the house where the Passover lamb’s blood had been properly applied.

For those who for whatever reason failed to apply the blood of the slain lamb to the doorposts of their house, the result was a terrible tragedy.

Jesus wanted his followers to apply the blood he referred to—his own blood—to the “doorposts” of their hearts and so be saved from the coming judgment of God. He was promising to “redeem” and “bless” them if they accepted the covenant. Just like those Hebrews who accepted the terms of the Passover deliverance were redeemed and blessed. To drink the cup under Jesus’ “new covenant” conditions would be an act of faith for the disciples. Just like it was for the ancient Hebrews back in Egypt.

Secondly, by his statement in that upper room, Jesus wanted his disciples to understand that he would initiate the prophesied “new covenant” via his own “blood,” thereby “pour[ing] out his soul (i.e. life)” so that God might forgive their sins.

By their drinking of that cup of wine, the disciples were accepting the terms of this promised “new covenant,” this binding legal agreement sealed in blood. They thereby committed themselves in faith to their Messiah, who would die on theirs and all of Israel’s behalves. They hardly knew the full extent of what they were doing, or what actually would happen to Jesus the next day. The crucifixion. Nevertheless the disciples present, having faith in their leader and friend, drank the cup anyway and so entered into the “new covenant” that would shortly be ratified by Jesus’ own shed blood.

And that is how it can be for anyone today.

Most of us basically know the rest of what happened with Jesus and his followers that Good Friday in the upper room. Jesus vowed that he would not drink wine again until they all celebrated together in his Father’s kingdom.[8] The remaining eleven disciples and Jesus spoke and prayed together.[9] They sang.[10] Then all of them left Mark’s family’s Jerusalem home heading east, going down into the Kidron valley that skirted the portion of the city closest to the temple, then up they went onto the nearby Mount of Olives where they and other pilgrims were camped for the holidays.

In the meantime Judas Iscariot had aroused members of the religious establishment who viewed Jesus as a threat to the stability of the occupied nation.[11] These leaders convened a meeting and sent Judas to find Jesus.

Sometime later on the mountain, Jesus agonized in prayer in an isolated olive grove named for an oil press, Gethsemane. [12] Meanwhile his followers, eyes heavy with wine, food, and sorrow, fell asleep a short distance off from where Jesus prayed. Judas and a band of Jewish temple guards, sent with him by the religious leadership, traveled outside the city walls and up the slope of the Mount of Olives to arrest Jesus.[13]

Betrayed by a kiss from a kinsman and friend, Jesus began his trial in earnest and the next day walked the lonely road to the cross.


End Notes
[1] Joh 6:35, 48-58.
[2] Mat 18:1-5.
[3] Paul later wrote, “This means that every time you eat this bread and drink from this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until *he comes*” (1Cor 11:26, emphasis mine).
[4] In the Passover liturgy we find these words: “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate when they came out of Egypt.” Yet no knowledgeable Jew of any era would insist that the bread he held in his hands were the actual bread that the Hebrews baked centuries prior on the night of their exodus from Egypt. If any of that bread at all had remained, it could not be handled, much less eaten. Indeed it would have long since crumbled and become dust. In the same way, we should not insist that when Jesus said, “This is my body,” that he meant that the morsel in his hand had somehow changed to become his actual body; this is a hyper-literalism foreign to the thought-world of Jesus and his contemporaries. But neither should we see our partaking of the bread as a mere recalling-to-mind of the passion of Christ, and his promised return. Memory in the Bible is rarely passive, but most often involves resolve to perform acts of covenant loyalty (E.g. “Then God remembered Noah …” [Gen 8:1]; “And … God remembered Abraham …” [Gen 19:26]; “… and God remembered His covenant …” [Exo 2:24]. Etc. The question to keep in mind for a proper understanding of memory in these and other verses is: Did God ever FORGET Noah, Abraham, or His covenant with the Patriarchs? Also see Deu 25:19 “Do not forget [the covenant unfaithfulness of …] Amalek.”). Again, the idea in older Jewish thought was that through reenacting ancient events via covenant rituals (E.g. the Passover, … or in our case as Christians, the Eucharist, baptism, etc), time was—in a manner of speaking—“collapsed” so that those present personally participated in that singular unrepeatable past event. The event was not repeated per se, and what was past did not become current. The ritual participants themselves, so to speak, went back in time. Note what Jonathan Went states: “Eating Passover is considered to be not a memorial but a reliving. Hebrew allows for this since it had no word for history and its verbs do not properly distinguish between past and present.” (“Passover and the Eucharist,” Leadership University Website, 1998-2005, emphasis mine). Likewise, the chief rabbi of England wrote regarding this aspect of the Passover: "History is what happened to someone else. Memory is what happened to me" (Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi, The Times, 22 April 1995). Therefore, when we eat and drink the Eucharistic elements, we should understand that God does not transubstantiate the bread into the actual body of Christ, or the wine into the actual blood, and thus through celebrating the Eucharist we (or someone) re-crucifies our Lord (See Heb 10:12). No, we are the ones somehow transported back in sacred history to sit with Christ and his disciples in that Upper Room some 2000 years ago.
[5] 1Cor 10:16. See also Stern, David H. Jewish New Testament Commentary. Clarkeville, MD: Jewish New Testament Publications Inc., 1992, p. 471.
[6] E.g. Deu 30:6; Isa 42:6; 49:8,9; Eze 11:19, 20.
[7] As a rabbi, Jesus handled the Scriptures in a very Jewish way, here linking different Bible passages together for a multifaceted, yet unified message using a midrashic technique called “stringing pearls.”
[8] Mar 14:25. Since there remained one more cup, the “cup of Elijah,” to drink to complete the required four cups of the Passover celebration, it seems likely that the disciples partook of it while Jesus abstained.
[9] Joh 13:31-18:1.
[10] Mat 26:30; Mar 14:26. We may not know all they sang, but it at least included Psalms 115, 116, 117, and 118 since these were dictated by the Passover liturgy at the conclusion of the seder.
[11] Joh 11:47-53.
[12] Gethsemane is from the Greek transliteration of two Hebrew words gat (i.e. press) and shemenim (i.e. oils). The fact that the place to which they retired was some kind of garden, and that (so it is claimed by a few botanical experts) there remain on the traditional site living olive trees whose roots (not trunks and branches) are from the essential time of Jesus, lends credibility to the name.
[13] Joh 18:3. While the TEV has “… a group of Roman soldiers, and some Temple guards sent by the chief priests and the Pharisees …,” there is nothing in the text itself to warrant such an editorial interpolation about Romans. During the later interrogation by Pilate and the actual crucifixion it is plain that the occupying forces were heavily involved. But the arrest in Gethsemane appears to have initially been the sole plan of the Jewish leadership, carried out through the greedy disciple Judas Iscariot. A literal rendition of Joh 18:3 from the Greek states that a “band of men and officers [was] sent from the chief priests and Pharisees.” No mention of Roman soldiers. Yet.


-Michael Millier

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