Last week, we looked at Judas and his betrayal of Jesus. This week, the Resurrection Egg contains a tiny cup. What does this cup represent? If you guessed communion, you are correct. Let’s go back to this same moment in time, but instead of focusing on Judas and the coins, let’s look at the Last Supper.
Luke 22:7-23 (NIV)
7 Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. 8 Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.”
9 “Where do you want us to prepare for it?” they asked.
10 He replied, “As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters, 11 and say to the owner of the house, ‘The Teacher asks: Where is the guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ 12 He will show you a large room upstairs, all furnished. Make preparations there.”
13 They left and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover.
14 When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table.15 And he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. 16 For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.”
17 After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, “Take this and divide it among you. 18 For I tell you I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”
19 And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
20 In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. 21 But the hand of him who is going to betray me is with mine on the table. 22 The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed. But woe to that man who betrays him!” 23 They began to question among themselves which of them it might be who would do this.
This event is one of the most pivotal moments in history and it becomes one of the two most important ordinances, sacraments, or practices (different denominations prefer different terms) within all of Christianity. Why is this event so important? And if it is so important, why does it seem to go by so quickly in the text?
It is interesting to notice that more detail seems to be given to the obtaining and description of the room than to what Jesus says about the bread and cup. In order to understand the significance of what Jesus is saying, we need to understand the significance of the meal He and disciples are eating. It is no ordinary supper and it is not a coincidence that He institutes what comes to be known as communion or the Lord’s Supper during Passover. To those of us who are not Jewish, we might not be all that familiar with Passover. Recently, I looked into hosting a Passover meal for my family and it seemed rather daunting. There are a lot of steps involved, a lot of specific ingredients to gather. When the text states, four different times, that the disciples made preparations for it, they weren’t kidding. Depending on what instructions a person follows, it is a lot to prepare. While writing this sermon, I researched and learned quite a bit about Passover. What was interesting to me is that there is no definitive way that people celebrate Passover. Some people have turned it into a sort of thanksgiving style feast with lots of food and dessert even. Others stringently follow the traditional Jewish requirements. There seem to be a lot of different ways that people celebrate Passover, much like communion. Depending upon the denomination, communion is celebrated casually without even having actual bread or not even grape juice instead of wine. Other denominations and Catholics have very inflexible rules in place in how to observe communion. Jesus didn’t give detailed instructions. I wish He did, for it would have made things a lot clearer. Yet, Passover seems to be very detailed and still people have overly complicated it or overly simplified it over the years as well. Does the Bible give us specific instructions on how to observe Passover? We know it has to be prepared, so it can’t just be “anything goes.”
First, what is Passover? Passover is a celebration of when God caused Pharoah to let the Israelites go from captivity. Before Pharoah would let them leave, God sent a series of plagues to come upon the Egyptian people. The last plague was the worst. In Exodus 12, we first hear the term Passover:
The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, “This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year-old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs. That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast. Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire—with the head, legs and internal organs. Do not leave any of it till morning; if some is left till morning, you must burn it. This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is the Lord’s Passover.
“On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt.
“This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord—a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel. On the first day hold a sacred assembly, and another one on the seventh day. Do no work at all on these days, except to prepare food for everyone to eat; that is all you may do.
“Celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And anyone, whether foreigner or native-born, who eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel. Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.”
Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel and said to them, “Go at once and select the animals for your families and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the doorframe. None of you shall go out of the door of your house until morning. When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.
“Obey these instructions as a lasting ordinance for you and your descendants. When you enter the land that the Lord will give you as he promised, observe this ceremony. And when your children ask you, ‘What does this ceremony mean to you?’ then tell them, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when he struck down the Egyptians.’” Then the people bowed down and worshiped.
What is so interesting to me about Passover is that from the beginning, before the event that it celebrates even happened, God told the Israelites to observe Passover as a lasting ordinance. He basically told them, this event is going to be so important that you will need to remember what I will do, and you are to tell your children and their descendants about it by observing this ceremony. It is similar to what Jesus is doing during the Last Supper. He is telling the Disciples that His body is being given and His blood will be poured out, and so they are to remember this event that is about to happen by repeating this ceremony with the bread and cup.
For something so vital to Christianity, it seems strange to me that Jesus didn’t say more words about it. Let’s look again at what Luke records Jesus saying:
19 And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”
20 In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”
He really spoke in an economy of words, didn’t He? It may be short, but He certainly communicated a lot of information. Jesus says about the bread, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” He is saying that the bread represents His body, He is giving His body for them, and they are to do this in remembrance of Him. Then He takes a cup and says, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” It is just one sentence, but it is packed with meaning. What does Jesus mean when He says, “the cup is the new covenant in my blood?”
The key word is covenant. To know what the new covenant is, we should see what the old covenant was. The first time the Bible mentions covenant is when God made a covenant with Noah that He would save his family. Then, after the flood, God made a covenant with all of mankind that never again would He flood the whole earth. God also made a covenant with Abraham that he would be the father of many nations. Then, in Exodus, God makes a covenant with all the Israelites. He promises in Exodus 34:10, “Then the Lord said: ‘I am making a covenant with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the Lord, will do for you.’”
We could say that a covenant is a binding promise. God will never break any covenant that He makes, but people could, and did, break the covenant. Deuteronomy 31:10 tells us, “When I have brought them into the land flowing with milk and honey, the land I promised on oath to their ancestors, and when they eat their fill and thrive, they will turn to other gods and worship them, rejecting me and breaking my covenant.”
God knew people would disobey Him, sin and break the covenant, and so He established a method of forgiveness. In Exodus 29:38-46 He gives instruction to Moses as to what the High Priest is to do. He says, “This is what you are to offer on the altar regularly each day: two lambs a year old. Offer one in the morning and the other at twilight. With the first lamb offer a tenth of an ephah of the finest flour mixed with a quarter of a hin of oil from pressed olives, and a quarter of a hin of wine as a drink offering. Sacrifice the other lamb at twilight with the same grain offering and its drink offering as in the morning—a pleasing aroma, a food offering presented to the Lord.
“For the generations to come this burnt offering is to be made regularly at the entrance to the tent of meeting, before the Lord. There I will meet you and speak to you; there also I will meet with the Israelites, and the place will be consecrated by my glory.
“So I will consecrate the tent of meeting and the altar and will consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve me as priests. Then I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God. They will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God.”
This method of sacrifice for forgiveness was established and followed all the way up to the time of Jesus. Mark 14:12 recounts, “On the first day of the Festival of Unleavened Bread, when it was customary to sacrifice the Passover lamb, Jesus’ disciples asked him, ‘Where do you want us to go and make preparations for you to eat the Passover?’”
Until Jesus died on the cross, the old covenant was unchanged. Now, everything that God had established was about to be fulfilled. Everything that God put into motion was about to click into place. In this Last Supper that Jesus was having with His disciples, He was illustrating what was about to happen. Even the bread is an echo of the original sacrificial offering of flour that the lamb was coated in and the wine is an echo of the drink offering of wine. This Last Supper is taking the place of that former Passover meal. When Jesus says that the bread and the wine are His body and blood, He is saying, without telling them directly, that He is the Passover Lamb.
This was not the first time that Jesus used this language of flesh and blood to communicate this idea. After Jesus fed the 5,000, John 6:53-60 says: “Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
The text tells us that the disciples didn’t understand what Jesus was talking about. Even during this Passover meal, when Jesus took the cup and the bread and said it was His body and blood, I don’t think they fully grasped what He was talking about. I think the only reason we can understand it is because we know the whole story.
When Jesus physically died on the cross, His body and blood were shed. He became the Passover lamb. Just as the Israelites placed the blood on their doorposts and their lives were spared the judgment of death, so we too escape judgement and death when we, through faith in Jesus, are covered by Jesus’ blood that He shed on the cross for us. We are given eternal life because He died for us. No longer do we need to sacrifice an animal for forgiveness of sins. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice. As John the Baptist proclaimed in John 1:29, “The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, ‘Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’”
As we figuratively walk with Jesus to the cross during this time of Lent, we should proceed with repentant hearts. Just as the Israelites broke their covenant with God, we too have failed to follow God’s laws perfectly. Thanks be to God that even when we fail, He remains faithful to His covenant He has established through Jesus.
Hebrews 9:11-15 says, “But when Christ came as high priest of the good things that are now already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not made with human hands, that is to say, is not a part of this creation. He did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant.”
This new covenant was given to us when Jesus died on the cross, taking the place of the Passover Lamb. Most Christians don’t celebrate Passover, but we should certainly celebrate the Lord’s Supper. You could say that every time we take communion, we are celebrating Passover. Just as Passover remembers what God did, in communion we are remembering what Jesus did for us when He died on the cross. We are proclaiming the death of the Lamb of God who died to take away our sins. 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 says: “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
When we remember the sacrifice that Jesus made to be our sacrificial lamb, how can we not respond to Him with hearts of thanksgiving and praise? I think this benediction of Hebrews 13:20-21 perfectly states our rightful response, “Now may the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip [us] with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
Sing: Good, Good Father
Take My Life and Let it Be
Great is Thy Faithfulness
Pray: Heavenly Father, we thank You for giving us Your Son, the Lamb of God, to take away the sin of this world. During this time of Lent, we pray that You would help us by Your Holy Spirit, to keep our hearts and minds fixed on You. Not only during Communion, but every time that we eat or drink, help us to remember Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice of His death on the cross. Help us to remember so we can respond with love and thanksgiving. Please work in us all that is pleasing to You. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
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