unpack the Word

In my second blog, I want to focus a bit on the Lord’s Supper and the ways that we think about the practice. For me, I struggle sometimes to contextualize the Lord’s Supper in the same way that I think the early church and the culture of the first century church would have actually thought about the practice.

In this blog entry, I want to unpack the layers of meaning around the Lord’s Supper (or Communion) through the lens of the context of Jesus’s ministry. I think too often we fail to see the early church as the early church would have been, something I’ve picked up from very slowly reading through N.T. Wright’s works on the history of the New Testament church. We view Communion as a Christian act of worship and as part of our relationship with our Savior, but there is so much more meaning beyond our modern Christian point of view.

What exactly is a modern Christian point of view, anyway? Well, what I mean when I say that is that we often view the church (and Scripture Old and New) through the lens of the modern church, a church has thousands of years of hindsight and time to think about what we do and why. When we perform the Communion, in our context, it is a profoundly Christian thing, and that’s how we often view it. But, in doing so, we overlook the context that the Lord’s Supper would have had for the first Christians, and I think that is worth unpacking.

At its core, the Lord’s Supper was instituted during the Feast of Unleavened Bread (the Passover) by Jesus right before his betrayal and crucifixion. At its core, the meal that was shared by Jesus and His disciplines was a part of the Jewish feasts and the history of the Jewish people. When Jesus took the bread and the fruit of the vine, He specifically reframed what would normally be a Passover staple by telling His disciples, “do this in remembrance of me.”

The Passover that Jesus was reframing was one of the most important points in Israel’s history. In Exodus 12, God told Moses to have the Israelites sacrifice a lamb, taking the blood and putting it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of their houses. The lamb was to be eaten in a state of readiness along with unleavened bread. This sacrifice would be a protection to the people of Israel from the final plague, allowing them to be passed over by this plague.

The choice of the bread being unleavened was no accident. Later, in Deuteronomy 16, The Passover’s ongoing shape is described, with Israel told, “Do not eat it with bread made with yeast, but for seven days eat unleavened bread, the bread of affliction, because you left Egypt in haste—so that all the days of your life you may remember the time of your departure from Egypt.” This was a meal of remembrance of God’s mercy and protection of His people.

Jesus, at the end of His ministry, takes the Passover meal and tells His followers to use it to remember Him. In doing so, He shifted the narrative of the Passover meal and framed the meaning of His own death. The Israelites in Egypt were to eat the Passover lamb (and whatever was left was to be burned). The lamb and its blood protected them. Jesus instead told His followers that He was the bread and the fruit of the vine was His blood, the blood of a new covenant. No longer would Passover be a time when God passed over His people with a final plague, but instead something more, when God passed over all the world’s sins because of the sacrifice of a new, permanent sacrificial lamb: Jesus. Hebrews 10 tells us this directly: our High Priest offered Himself to God as a single sacrifice that was good for all time.

When we take the Communion, we aren’t just partaking of a Christian tradition. The Lord’s Supper began at Passover, and it reflects the Passover of the people of God transitioning to a Passover for all mankind. That extra context, for me, is valuable in reflecting how our faith is not just a blip that started in 1st century Israel, but instead part of an ongoing journey of faith and love, with our Creator planning across centuries and longer a way to bring a stubborn, rebellious creation back to Him by offering them peace through His Son.

It can be tempting to simply see the Communion or Lord’s Supper as something we do at church because we are Christians, but I hope in the weeks to come you’ll reflect a bit on the nuanced way that this meal is part of the story of God and His people and how our eternal salvation is the culmination of so much that came before.