Teaching Tuesday: Be the Church - What a Difference a Meal Makes

Series: Be the Church
Sermon: What a Difference a Meal Makes (11.24.24)

I think we’re pretty good at recognizing that the communion meal of bread and juice symbolizes Christ’s broken body and shed blood. Because of tradition and repetition, we understand well what Jesus said these elements now mean.

But I don’t want us to miss the importance of what this meal did mean to those in the upper room that night, because knowing what it was helps us more fully appreciate what it is.

Jesus gathered his disciples together to celebrate the Passover meal. The week-long Passover festival was (and is still, for observant Jews) a sacred tradition for the Jewish people. It commemorated God sparing his chosen people from the plaque of infant death and rescuing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt some 1,300 years before the time of Christ.

Jesus and his disciples were serious, practicing Jews. The Passover holiday would have been a big deal to them. Which makes it all the more interesting and meaningful that Jesus uses this occasion to inaugurate his new covenant and repurpose the old, cherished tradition of symbolic bread and wine to signify his new kingdom.  

The way I see it, Jesus is doing two things here:

First, he’s using this meal to interpret his death in a way that his followers will later understand. They would have been intimately familiar with the sacrificial system which required the offering to God of slain animals for the purpose of atoning for humans’ sins.  

As I preached on Sunday, life requires death. Everything we eat had to die in order to sustain us.

Jesus as the Lamb of God serves to represent the lamb that was slain to save the Israelites from the tenth plague in Exodus 11. In a very short time after this last supper, Jesus himself will be offered as the ultimate sacrificial lamb who died to atone for the sins of the world and to redeem believers and offer them a new life.

The bread and the wine are reinterpreted to be symbols of his body and blood; dead and shed, but not for long.

Second, the whole meal is also symbolic of the coming messianic banquet. Jesus through his death and resurrection opens the door to life everlasting. He ascended to heaven to “prepare a place for us” (John 14:2), and he will host the great heavenly feast (John 14:15) for those who live and die in the faith.

Perhaps what is most significant about this whole scene (as found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and 1st Corinthians) is the fact that Jesus repurposes the most important sacred meal of the Jewish tradition, the meal which reminded the Jews of God’s greatest act of redemption in the past (the Passover) - an act that defined their self-identity - and turns it into the meal that represents God’s even greater act of redemption through Christ.

At the last supper, the Lord’s Supper now becomes the regular sacred meal which tells Christians who they are because of what Jesus did, and it points to the great banquet at which those who eat of “the bread of life” (John 6:35) will be, finally, satisfied forever.

To know Him and make Him known!
- Pastor Brady