This meal is at the heart of the covenant; misunderstanding here has repercussions throughout the Christian life. Please stay with me and view this meal through the lens of the covenant.
Even a surface reading of the writings of the apostolic and church fathers of the first centuries of the church make it plain that they gave a place of prime importance to the meal. The martyrs and heroes of the first three centuries considered the Holy Communion as central to their worship and life of the Christian community.
Covenant Meals in Scripture
Every covenant ended with a meal that declared that the covenant was valid and now functional in the lives of the parties to it. The meal showed the covenant as the two representatives would eat of the same bread and drink of the same wine, telling the world that they were one. (Genesis 26:28-31; 31:44-46.)
The covenant that God made with Abraham came into effect with a covenant meal, at which time Abraham killed the calf and Sarah baked her cakes; the Lord, in the form of a Man, and two angels ate and drank the meal Abraham and Sarah had prepared. (Genesis 18:6-8.) The meal was the signal, for the covenant promise made long ago was about to be fulfilled and ancient Sarah would have her miracle son.
The Israelites were delivered from Egypt and slavery in fulfillment of one of the promises of the covenant with Abraham, but the deliverance was in fact a little covenant that centered in the Passover meal. (Exodus 12.) The door of each home had been smeared with the blood of the lamb that they were about to eat. As they walked through the bloody door, they were declaring their covenant status with God, sheltered by Him from the judgment that was to fall on Egypt; by eating the lamb, they became one with the covenant sacrifice. Their being taken from Egypt and formed into the people of God took place in a covenant meal.
The covenant made at Sinai, which we now call the old covenant, recorded in Exodus 24, came into effect when the covenant meal was eaten with God. The amazing sight is recorded in verses 9-11 of that chapter, which tell us, Then Moses went up, also Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel...So they saw God, and they ate and drank.
God and man sat down and ate together! This was the making of the old covenant, and we must anticipate something even far more wonderful in the new and better covenant.
On the eve of His death—or, if we use the Jewish method of counting days, on the same day as His suffering and death— Jesus instituted the covenant meal of the new covenant.
And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” Likewise He also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you.”
Luke 22:19,20
As we have seen, the expression “new covenant in My blood” is better understood as “new covenant ratified, or validated, in My blood” It was a meal that declared the coming into being of the new covenant with all of its promises.
The Meal of Fellowship
Upon first hearing, it sounds strange to our ears to be commanded to eat bread and wine in order to remember Him. It does not sound like a spiritual activity; it is too physical and disconnected from our ideas of what one should do to remember and draw close to Him. To remember Him is understood by many as a spiritual or mental pursuit and therefore would be best pursued by a Bible study, a convention that expounds the deeper Christian life, or at least a prayer meeting. Where do a table with a white cloth, a chalice of wine, and a piece of bread fit in?
Yet Jesus said that in the eating and the drinking of bread and wine, we would remember Him; in the experience of the disciples in the Emmaus meal, He would make Himself known to them in the breaking of bread.
Meals have tremendous significance in all cultures, less so in the cultures of the West, but still there. We mark each of the significant events in our lives with a meal. Celebrating our anniversaries, weddings, and birthdays—all involve eating together. More business deals are closed and contracts signed over a meal than in any office. In all probability, many of your dates with your spouse involved some form of eating.
I remember living in Brooklyn alongside the Italians, who would never allow a job to be finished without sharing with the carpenter, electrician, or painter a small glass of wine and food of some kind. It was the way they declared a job was finished and all parties satisfied.
In Africa, I have sat with paramount chiefs and eaten with them, knowing that as I shared a piece of the bread from a common loaf we were bound in a strong brotherhood. He would use all his powers to protect me and give me safe passage in his tribal territories. To hurt me in any way would be to declare war on the chief!
Jesus, God incarnate, is known for His eating and drinking: the wedding of Cana; the feeding of the multitudes; and of course His eating with tax collectors and sinners, horrifying the Pharisees—many such examples fill the pages of the Gospels. When He met the woman of Samaria, He asked for a drink of water; and His method of evangelism with Zaccheus was to announce that they would have dinner together. Risen from the dead, He first spoke to the gathered disciples to ask if they had something to eat; He proceeded to eat bread and fish before their wondering eyes. He met them in Galilee and cooked a breakfast of fish for them over an open fire.
Peter pointed to eating and drinking together with Him as one of the proofs of the resurrection: ...witnesses chosen before by God, even to us who ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead (Acts 10:41).
The parables of Jesus are full of references to eating and banquets—especially the parables of Luke 15. Each parable of that chapter speaks of ecstatic rejoicing at the lost being found; but when Jesus tells of the lost son being found, the rejoicing takes the form of killing and eating the fatted calf, as well as the music and dancing.
“‘And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.
“‘It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.’”
Luke 15:23,24,32
The father told the elder brother that “it was right” that they should have such a feast with music and dancing at the homecoming of his brother. The Greek word can also be defined to mean “it is necessary in the nature of the case”: The inclusion of the son into the family demanded a covenant meal; he could not be welcomed home merely with a smile, a handshake, and a cheese sandwich!
Such hints of the covenant meal are also found in Old Testament Scriptures. Psalm 90:14, apart from a covenant meal in which the participant partakes of God Himself, makes little sense: Oh, satisfy us early with Your mercy, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days! The word “satisfy” is a word that describes eating to the full, being filled with food, satisfied with a meal, even to the point of overeating. The word “mercy” is the translation of the covenant word hesed, which we have seen is the word of covenant love, lovingkindness or steadfast love. The psalmist longed to feast at a banquet where the food was the covenant love of God. Though shrouded in the Old Testament twilight, this certainly anticipated a day when the covenant people would do exactly that in the Holy Communion.
Psalm 23 is quoted the world over, but few realize that there is a brief reference to the covenant meal hidden in it.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; You anoint my head with oil; My cup runs over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Psalm 23:5,6
Has it never struck you as a little odd that the climax of the psalm is in David’s eating with his divine Shepherd? The psalm reaches its climax with God and man eating a holy meal of victory, for his enemies look on but are defeated and afraid to attack in the presence of the Shepherd. His head is anointed with oil, which is always a symbol of the Holy Spirit’s
coming upon us; and his cup of covenant blessing overflows. The last verse describes him being pursued by mercy, and again the word is hesed, the steadfast love of the covenant.
What sounds awkward at first hearing actually fits the human/divine fellowship perfectly. The covenant demands more than a private inner faith; we celebrate our union with God with our entire person and that includes a meal, as did every other covenant. The meal is fitting to our makeup as humans. The bread and wine is a door between two worlds, a point of contact with the world of the spirit. We are not pure spirits but spirits that exist in and through a physical body; the meal is the point where not only our spirits but also our physical beings meet with Spirit even as Spirit comes to us through physical bread and wine.
In Remembrance of Me
To understand the meal, we have to understand the word “remember.” The question I wrestled with as a young believer was how we could “do this in remembrance of Me” when we had not been there two thousand years ago. Remembering surely means thinking about and reconstructing an event in the past. I did not see how we could think about and reconstruct the events of His death and resurrection when we had not been there! It would be like someone saying, “Do you remember that vacation we had in Hong Kong?” when I had not been with this person when he’d gone to Hong Kong years before my birth! His question would make me ask if he was senile.
The only way that I could make sense of it was to take out the word “remember” and substitute it with “imagine”! Surely, remembering being impossible, I was left to imagine what His suffering and death must have been like. But I knew that was not the answer, and I was left confused and frustrated.
The word “remember” had a totally different meaning to the people of both the Old and the New Testament than it has to us in the Western world in the twenty-first century. In one sense, the word meant the same to them as it does to us; it meant and means “remember.” The vast difference in meaning is in how that remembering is achieved, the kind of activity that is understood to be going on when the word is used.
“Remember” in the West describes a mental activity, a recall of an event with the mind, to think about a past event. It describes the mental exercise of digging around the cobwebs of memory to put together again that vacation in Hong Kong, assuming you were there. If that is what the word meant to Jesus and those disciples around the table with Him, then, at best, the meal was meant to be a (rather strange) aid to their devotional imagination. But His words could only truly be obeyed by those men gathered around the table, for they were the only ones there who could at a future time cast their minds back and remember.
But to the Greek and Hebrew mind of the first century, “remember” described something totally different. First, it was not only a mental activity, a “thinking about” a past event, but an activity of the whole person—spirit, mind, emotion, and body. Second, it meant to do the past event, not merely to think about it. To remember meant to re-create the past event, bringing it into the present moment by reenacting it, employing rituals and symbols to do so. Third, to remember meant that the persons remembering totally identified with and participated in all the powers and effects of the original event.1 Every year the people of God in the Old Testament “remembered” their deliverance from Egypt in exactly this fashion, reenacting it in the Passover meal.
Remembering could be understood as a bridge in time that effectively brought the past into the present, almost a kind of time warp. It was a dramatically played-out “you are there,” so that even if you had not been at the original event you immediately encountered it and participated in it. The emphasis was on the doing again the past event, not merely thinking about it, which explains the words of Jesus “Do this in remembrance of Me”—not merely “think this about Me.”
Let me try to sum that up in a working definition: Remembering is never to be understood as thinking about the past. It is always an active participation in the historical reality of the past by reenacting it, and in so doing realizing the powers released in that past in such a way as to shape the present moment.
This definition of “remember” means that at the celebration of the holy meal we do not look back to the cross and empty tomb. In this remembrance His finished work is brought forward into the present moment, even as He in His glory is uniquely here, present with us in the rite. We receive in the present moment all the effects of the covenant; in this now moment we rejoice in our redemption achieved, that the burden of sin and guilt has been sent away from us, and we are now declared righteous in Christ. We glory in our deliverance from the domain of darkness and in the eternal life that we partake of. All the terms, promises, and blessings of the covenant are here now in this present moment and released to us by the Spirit in the meal of remembering.
It might help us to understand the two ways of thinking by using a wedding as an example. If I were to say to a Western couple, “Let’s remember your wedding,” the response would be a mental reconstruction of the event, groping through memories for the guest list, the minister who performed the ceremony, what happened at the celebration afterward, and so on. If I said the same thing to any couple of the New Testament days, the response would be “Let’s do it!” It would be the only response they would be capable of making, for remembering to them was a matter of doing, not only thinking. They would go back to the synagogue where they had been married or one that was much the same, try to find the rabbi who had married them, and invite as many of the guests who had been there as possible. If the original guests were not available, the couple’s present friends would be able to join right in because in this remembering one did not have to be at the original event; it would be re-created in rite and symbol. Of course, the couple would not get married a second time, but the original vows would be renewed with a new depth and mature love; all the powers of the original wedding would be present at this reenactment and renewal.
Thus, we see that Jesus was saying, “Reenact this meal; do it again. In whatever moment of time you are, this moment will be present to you; you will be here at the ratification of the new covenant and immediately present to Me, the Mediator of the new covenant.”
The Spirit and Remembering
How can this be? All four gospel writers relate the events that took place on the night of His sufferings and death, including all that took place in the Upper Room, each with his own unique contribution. Matthew, Mark, and Luke relate the institution of the meal and His command to remember Him. John omits the meal but supplies us with everything He said that night as the twelve sat around Jesus with the meal before them. The first three Gospels tell us He said that in the meal we must remember Him, but it is John who tells us how such a miracle would take place:
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.
John 14:26
The word “remembrance” is from the same word that Jesus used when He instituted the meal. It is the Holy Spirit who achieves the remembering of Jesus. This takes the whole matter out of the hands of the dreary and futile efforts of our minds to imagine His sufferings and death. This verse assures us that the Holy Spirit will achieve the “remembering”; we set the table with bread and wine, but it is He who brings the past into our now time and brings about our being immediately present to the Lord Jesus, the guarantor of the new covenant.
It should also be noted that the subject of our remembering is not only His sufferings and death. He said “...in remembrance of Me”—the oceans of glory wrapped up in “Me” from the Incarnation to His exaltation to the right hand of the Father, which of course includes His sufferings and death but from the perspective of the glory that followed.
I believe that Luke deliberately recorded two meals, the one in the Upper Room the night of His sufferings and death that Matthew and Mark and Luke record, and then the Emmaus meal that is unique to Luke’s gospel. Compare the description Luke gives
of the two meals; he uses exactly the same words to describe the action of Jesus.
And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” Likewise He also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is shed for you.”
Luke 22:19,20
Of the meal in Emmaus, he writes,
Now it came to pass, as He sat at the table with them, that He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.
Luke 24:30
In both cases, Jesus took, gave thanks or blessed, broke, and gave the bread to them. The night of the institution of the meal was overshadowed by the enormous cost of ratifying the new covenant: sufferings, bloodshed, and death. The meal in Emmaus was the celebration of the triumphant Jesus, who had achieved the covenant; He was made known to them in the breaking of bread, and the disciples were filled with unspeakable joy and burning hearts.
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 16
