A Timeless Table

Luke 22:14-23

Introduction

When I think about my time growing up in church, it is interesting to note what stands in my mind. It is not so much Sunday school lessons as it was going to the altar to receive communion, or as we called it, the eucharist. I was raised Anglican and we celebrated the eucharist every week. In fact in that tradition, communion was more central to the service than the preaching of the Word. Even though I didn’t fully understand it, there was something powerful about that experience.

Most Christian traditions highly value the receiving of communion, whether weekly, monthly, quarterly or some other schedule. It is a spiritual act that touches all of our senses.

While we might appreciate communion, we should not see it just as one moment in time, that act of eating the bread and drinking the cup at a certain point in the worship service. It is actually an event that ripples through time, touching points in the past, present and future. That is what we are going to look at we examine Luke’s account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper.

Passover

If the disciples had day-timers or calendars and we took a peek at what they had written down for this particular evening, it would not have said, “Institution of the Lord’s Supper.” They were expecting something but it was not the start of a sacrament that would be celebrated by the Christian church for thousands of years.

What they were anticipating and what was taking place was a Passover meal. And it was a meal, not just bread and wine. Only a few parts of the Passover meal are brought over into communion.

But what is Passover? It goes back to an event over a thousand years before Jesus gathered with his friends. The Hebrews had been slaved in Egypt and God raised up Moses to lead them into freedom. It was a specific miracle that pushed Pharaoh into letting them go. God caused the death of the first born male of every Egyptian family. But how would the angel of death know what was an Egyptian and what was a Hebrew household? They were to slay a lamb and spread the blood over the door. It was by the blood of the lamb that they would be saved. 

That is exactly what was about to happen with Jesus, the one whom John the Baptist called “the Lamb that takes away the sins of the world.” Now none of this lamb imagery is found in this passage, but it is the subtext. The parallels wouldn’t have been lost on the disciples.

Jesus took parts of the Passover meal, the bread and the cup, this probably being the third of the four Passover cups, and used these images of redemption to illustrate what he was about to do. This time the move was not from physical slavery but from spiritual slavery. And all this by the broken body and shed blood of Jesus.

New Covenant

Jesus makes another Old Testament reference in this passage. He speaks of the new covenant. That is not as familiar to us as the Passover but it is just as important. The great prophet Jeremiah spoke these words: “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah.” (Jeremiah 31:31) Jeremiah was active around the time the people of Judah were being conquered by the Babylonians and being sent into exile. Jeremiah preached the unpopular message that this exile was because of the people’s sin. But this was not the end, restoration was coming. Part of that restoration was that the law would be put on the people’s heart. Living for God wouldn’t just be a matter of following the rules, it would be the result of life transformation from the inside. Jesus connects this with the sacrifice he was about to offer on the cross. The people were about to enter a new chapter, one foretold centuries before by Jeremiah.

The Cross

So far Jesus has pointed back. He has looked to the Passover at the time of Moses and the prophecy of the new covenant by Jeremiah. Now he looks to events closer in time. This was happening the night before Jesus was to die. And this would not be any execution. This would be a crucifixion. When we think of the cross, we automatically think of Jesus. But many thousands of people died on the cross. The disciples would have seen many people dying on a cross. They may have passed some as they entered into Jerusalem. Crucifixion was designed to be the maximum discouragement to getting on the wrong side of the Romans. Would they would have saw on those crosses would be broken bodies and shed blood. 

Jesus took the bread and the cup from the Passover meal, food that normally brings joy, and he used it to point toward the cross. What would happen to the bread and wine is what would happen to Jesus’ body. None of the disciples wanted this to happen but it was why Jesus came to Jerusalem, why he came to earth. It was going to be through the cross that salvation would come.

The Kingdom

Jesus points to what would happen the next day but then he points farther in the future. He connects this meal with the fullness of the kingdom of God.

Now the kingdom of God began to appear with the ministry of Jesus. Each miracle and healing, each message to the crowds, was part of the coming of the kingdom of God. The church today continues in the spreading of the kingdom of God. But it doesn’t take a theologian to notice that God’s reign is not complete on earth. There are far too many things that go against God’s will. Too much injustice and suffering.

The kingdom of God will only come in fullness when Jesus returns. This event, both in the Gospels and in Revelation is described using the imagery of a meal, of a wedding feast.

Jesus says, as he gave them the cup, that he would no longer drink of the cup until the kingdom of God comes in fullness. 

I mentioned that the cup that Jesus raises in this passage is probably the third cup. The fourth cup in the Jewish tradition represents the end of days. This is the cup that Jesus is waiting to drink, the cup that will be available when he returns.

We may not think about it when we celebrate communion but this meal is closely tied not just to the cross but to the return of Jesus. When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we are testifying that we believe that Jesus will return and make things right in this world.

Conclusion

We have seen that this table ripples through time. There is one more point in time that I want to draw your attention to. That is right now. We are about to receive the bread and cup from this table. If we wish, it can be a mindless ritual, something we just do traditionally on the first Sunday of the month. But that would be unfortunate.

We can also choose to see in this table a picture of God’s plan of redemption, going back thousands of years to the exodus, touching us now and being fulfilled when Jesus returns. We can allow this event to wash over us, transform us, inspire us and encourage us. We can rejoice that we participate in the new covenant and that we work together for the kingdom of God. We can find comfort in know that someone loved us enough to allow his body to broken like a piece of bread, his blood to be shed like wine being poured out of a cup. This table is not just something tagged onto the service, it is the reason we have to be worshiping God in the first place.