The Lord's Supper

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are talking about Passover tonight. I think we’re going to start in Luke 22, and we’ll see if we can get to Gethsemane.

Greg:

Now the feast of unleavened bread drew nigh, which is called the Passover, and the chief priests and scribes sought how they might kill him; for they feared the people.

One of the issues was “This is Passover, there are lots of people here, some are strong supporters, some just don’t want to see a ruckus on this high feast day, so how are we going to get at him? He’s here but he’ll leave, so we’re on a time schedule.”

Now, Jesus has orchestrated all of this. We’ll see more of his orchestrations in a bit, but first there’s a little bit of historical controversy we need to address, and that’s the question of what day was Passover that year, and maybe even what year it was. Rachel has done some research and she’s going to share what she found.

When you go to read this account of the Passover you find Jesus and he’s about to ask his disciples to go and prepare the Passover because he says, “I desire to eat the Passover with you,” before he goes into his final passion in going to the cross. But they also speak of it as preparing for the high feast day, and that the priests are afraid to go in to talk to Pilate because they don’t want to be unclean so that they can eat.

Then there’s also the conflict that Jesus had to be dead for three days, so maybe it’s Wednesday/Thursday. No, maybe it’s Thursday/Friday. Then did Jesus eat the Passover? Did he die when the Passover lambs were dying? How do we put all this together, because we know, believing that Jesus was a faithful son of the law, that he observed what he was supposed to observe, both as an Israelite but then also as the Israelite who is dying as the Passover lamb. What we end up finding is lots of different historical references.

When I went to research this I found every single person had a different explanation. I did not find the same explanation twice. Therefore, I admit from the beginning I am not sure what the answer to this is, other than I am sure Christ fulfilled the law perfectly, so we start with that and then give you many options. Maybe it’s a combo of them.

The first option that came up is in Exodus it says that you should eat the Passover at twilight. Well, it could be the twilight that starts the 14th of Nissan, basically Thursday evening, or it could be the twilight that ends the 14th of Nissan, just before the 15th. That was the first one I came across, so there are two twilights that you could pick from.

The second is that the Pharisees observed a lunar calendar, which is where they would begin the day in the evening and go to the next evening, but the Sadducees had adopted more of a Roman calendar so they had a solar calendar that started in the morning and went to the next morning. Some said maybe that’s why the Pharisees observed it Thursday evening, but the Sadducees on Friday, and that’s when it happened in the temple therefore.

Others said, originally the Passover was supposed to be eaten in homes, so people would eat it in their homes on the 14th in the evening, but then they would have a single Passover sacrifice in the temple for the nation the next day.

Is that substantiated in scripture?

Not specifically. There are people who claim that from historical records this had become a tradition. The challenge again is everybody seems to have different historical records of what they were doing, so I’m questioning what historical records supposedly are really substantial.

And from the little bit I’ve seen, people tend to pick an interpretation based often on some other issue that feeds into this tangentially. They say, “Oh, out of A, B, C, if I pick C, that’s going to lead me to C answers over here. I don’t like C answers over there so obviously C is wrong.”

We know what the text of scriptures says and it does not try to reconcile. The Apostle John, when he wrote, had Matthew, Mark, and Luke in front of him. He knew what they said and he knew he was not contradicting them. He didn’t bother to explain how. Maybe he thought it was obvious and didn’t need an explanation, or maybe he just smiled and left us to solve it.

I did have one additional interpretation that could be maybe more plausible. You may not know, but a lunar calendar is not consistently the same length of days per month. Therefore, when you’re going by a lunar calendar for religious things you have to wait until the moon tells you when the next month is.

At that time with the dispersion of the Jews in many different places, they would often not get the news of when a religious month had started until a ways later. So some have suggested that there was more leeway given to Passover because those coming from a distance wouldn’t know the exact day of the 14th of Nissan because they had to wait for these other months to be communicated to them. So there was a 2-day window to adjust for the distance of travel and things like that.

Again, I don’t know if that’s actually what happened because the scriptures do not say any of those things, so as Greg said, we need to be careful that we’re not picking simply because it supports our favorite idea.

The other thing we should mention as we talk about all these ideas is the re-thinking of the whole week of Passion Week. Traditionally the church has said Jesus ate the Passover on what we would call Thursday evening, and he died Friday afternoon and rose again Sunday morning. But there are those who said, “That’s not three days. That doesn’t work because if you start counting this that and other thing that leads up to it, then it actually should be Wednesday, Thursday, and then Sunday.”

The one I read that was most adamant about this based his entire system on the one verse where Jesus says, “Even as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the earth.” From that one verse he said, “Therefore all these things have to be this way because he has to be in there for three days and three nights.” So Greg, would you like to address that?

That sounds like a great argument, faithful to scripture and all that, until you read the other scriptures that also speak of his resurrection. The one that stands out in my mind is when Jesus is talking to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and it’s Sunday afternoon at least by that point, if not later. The men are saying to Jesus, “This happened…this happened…and besides all this, this is the third day.” Their Sunday is the third day.

They’re not talking about it was the third day that morning but has since become the fourth day, it’s the third day now. If you count back – Sunday, Saturday, Friday – they said, “Our rulers betrayed him. They crucified him and he’s risen…” – they put it within three days total, and they’re still on the third day. We haven’t moved ahead.

There are many other passages where it’s, “…and I will rise again the third day,” which fits the traditional interpretation of the church.

Isn’t it also that they were breaking the legs of the people being executed because they didn’t want them to up for the Sabbath.

The question is which Sabbath? Is it the Passover Sabbath, or is it the weekly Sabbath, or were they the same thing that year?

Oh, they could be different things?

Yes. The other thing – and again this is more subtle and I wouldn’t build a huge argument on it – but we know that Jesus died at the sixth hour. We know he had six trials. What day of the week do you suppose it might have been to give us 6, 6, 6. It’s an indirect argument.

He’s dying for man on what we would call man’s day.

Again, the Bible could have been clearer had God wished to make it clearer. He could have explained how this all worked out, but I think by simply proceeding with what the text says and saying, “And God knows how this works,” we will avoid any doctrinal problems and not satisfy anybody at all.

Fortunately, that’s not our job.

It really isn’t. If this compels people to go do some historical research, then I think our work here is done.

I think some of what can be confusing in all of this is that you have both the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, and sometimes scriptures do use those terms interchangeably, where it can speak of Passover as the whole week. It can speak of Unleavened Bread as the whole time. So sometimes when the scriptures are using either of those terms they may mean a specific day or more of a period, using the singular “Passover” for the whole time.

Again it’s a good study because it made me go back and say, “Wait, what are the differences between those two? And where does scripture use them interchangeably? What’s the importance of them being connected to each other?”

Here’s something else I’ll throw in just to confuse everything. Given the lunar nature of things and reconciling with the secular solar calendar, the Passover was on the 14th. A week later was another Sabbath, and then you start counting Sabbaths to Pentecost.

Were those Sabbaths on fixed days of the week, like Christmas is always the 25th of December? Was the whole calendar rigged that way, and then they simply adjusted for lunar shifts as they needed to, with inter-calendar weeks or months? We’re really not told how they kept the two calendars aligned. They did somehow, but I don’t know of anyone who’s done any extensive research or if there is any extensive information besides the fact that they made it work somehow. If that’s true, then Passover was the regular Sabbath. It was just the one that falls on the 14th because that’s how God orchestrated the calendar. Or maybe not. Let’s go on.

Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the number of the twelve. And he went his way, and communed with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray him unto them. And they were glad, and covenanted to give him money. And he promised, and sought opportunity to betray him unto them in the absence of the multitude.

By the way, I found out long after the last time I taught on that passage that ‘covenanted’ is not really the Greek word there. The translators just thought it fit so well that they used it, and I can’t object to that.

We’re not told why Judas did this. I’ve seen attempts to rehabilitate him. He believed in Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t doing anything. Maybe if he forced the confrontation then Jesus would finally raise up his power and do something. I suspect that’s being overly generous.

Yes. He was stealing from the money purse.

Yes. The Bible has already said he was a thief.

Is it John that sequences Mary’s giving of the fragrant ointment, and the fact that Judas particularly was offended by this because he was an embezzler, and he immediately goes from that event to betraying Jesus.

Yes. I mentioned what I did just because people cannot believe that Judas really is that bad. We never really want to believe the worst of people, even Judas Iscariot it seems, or Pilate, or go down the list.

Isn’t that the current trend in our culture. There are lots of movies that are rehabilitating all the villains of Disney movies, like Maleficent and such. “You just need to understand them and you’ll know why they were such evil people that turned into dragons.”

“It was the first shape that came to her mind.”

So yes, there had been attempts to rehabilitate him and I think they fail. I think sometimes the simple answer is the simple answer. He’s a thief. Jesus is talking about dying. It’s all crashing down. He wanted a seat on the Senate of the kingdom of God, and right now it looks like he’s going to get nothing, so well, 30 pieces of silver, the price of a slave, seems good enough. He probably had completely forgotten the prophecy that said that that would be the price that the priests would demand for the Shepherd of the sheep.

Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the passover must be killed.

There’s a point where they’re more or less synonymous. It’s very clear that this is a Passover day for sure, today when they’re killing him. Are we into the evening and so technically the beginning of the next day?

And he sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the passover, that we may eat. And they said unto him, Where wilt thou that we prepare?

They hadn’t booked the Ramada Inn in advance. The funny thing is, John has a house in Jerusalem. He takes Mary to it later. It was a very wealthy family. They had connections with the high priest. John is able to get Peter into the high priest’s court, so there were obvious options. Probably they expected him to say, “Oh, John’s house, obviously,” but that’s not what Jesus chooses. And they had friends in Jerusalem they could have gone to, but Jesus picks something else. Again he’s taking charge of the situation.

Judas is waiting to know where he’s going to be because he wants to get him away from the crowds. The perfect time – Passover in somebody’s private residence. You get 100 soldiers and we’re done, but he has to know where the house is. So Jesus, rather than listing an address, says this to the two disciples he’s going to send –

And he said unto them, Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you [that means he’s coming toward you and you’re coming toward him], bearing a pitcher of water [not something men usually did at that time, it was women’s work in that culture]; follow him into the house where he entereth in.
And ye shall say unto the goodman of the house, The Master saith unto thee, Where is the guest chamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he shall shew you a large upper room furnished: there make ready. And they went and found as he had said unto them: and they made ready the passover. And when the hour was come, he sat down and the twelve apostles with him.

So Judas does not know where they’re going until he gets there. “You’re going to meet a man. He’s going to have a water jug. Follow him to wherever he goes and ask the master of the house, ‘Where’s the room where we’re going to eat Passover?’”

Judas is sitting there, “That does not help me one bit. I’ll have to slip out later and get word to my contacts,” so he has to go along with all of this and stay with everybody until his departure will not look too obviously creepy, which is to say he ends up staying with them until Jesus actually dismisses him.

Jesus has some things he wants to do, some things he wants to say to the 11 plus Judas, and he doesn’t want to be interrupted, so he’s holding the reins here. He’s making this come out the way he wants it to. Yes, he’s the divine Son of God. He’s already predestined everything, but as a man he’s playing out the role.

I don’t know why this has grabbed me so much for the last couple years, but perhaps because we’re so used to seeing Jesus presented as meek and mild and even wimpy, just sort of a victim of circumstance. It really has struck me how much he is in control of things, and how much every step is a deliberate step.

He knows the cross waits and he knows when he needs to get there, and he’s not going to let it happen too soon or before he’s done everything he needs to do. So they go off to celebrate what we’ve been told two or three times is in fact the Passover meal. In fact, he’s going to say it again.

And when the hour was come, he sat down and the twelve apostles with him. And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer, For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

Technically he’s never going to eat the Passover again, but what it will blossom into in the new covenant he will, but at this point he’s about to swear off wine until his mission is done.

The kingdom of God can mean the second coming. It can mean the destruction of Jerusalem. It can mean the coming of the Spirit. It can mean his resurrection. The kingdom comes again and again in different ways and at different levels, but he’s waiting.

“And he took the cup,” and this is the Passover cup at this point, the last of the cups that the Jews had instituted themselves. This was not required by God to celebrate Passover. He said –

Take this and divide it among yourselves, for I say unto you I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God shall come.

He just took a Nazarite vow, or a modified one. He’s got a job to do and he’s setting himself apart wholly to God’s work until that work is done.

In passing, yes, he just took something that the Jews added to the festival and retro-authorized it. If you go back and look at the original institution of all of these things, the Passover and all the others are called festivals or feasts. You know what happens when you have a feast and you’re a Jew? You drink wine. It doesn’t say they had to, but they took it for obvious. “If we’re going to eat all this stuff, we need something to wash it down. Wine is what we normally have, so wine’s included.”

It makes sense because as slaves in Egypt when Passover was first instituted, they would likely not have had wine as slaves, so they could not have had it at the beginning institution or even probably in the wilderness, so they would not be able to add the wine until after the Lord had fully established them in the land. So it makes sense that it wasn’t part of the original.

That’s a good point. And after they turn away from Canaan in their rebellion in Numbers, God immediately tells them, “And when you get to the land here’s how you’re going to celebrate the sacrifices,” and he includes for the first time a drink offering, “Because when you get to the land then there will be grapes and you can have wine. You obviously don’t have much of it out here.”

They brought back a big cluster of grapes, but that wasn’t going to go very far with a couple million people.

No, it’s not but it’s a token of what lay ahead of them, so God, probably with an eye to that, said “And when you get there you will be making drink offerings to me. You’ll be pouring out wine on the altar along with your cereal offerings.” But that cup is not the Lord’s Supper. That begins now.

And he took bread and gave thanks and brake it and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper…

There’s a distinction in timeframe here. During the meal that was still Passover he begins the transition, but when the supper is finished then he completes the transition with a final cup that goes beyond the last Passover cup.

…saying, This cup is the new testament [or new covenant] in my blood, which is shed for you.

Covenants are sealed by blood. If the disciples were awake and paying attention they are going to remember back to Sinai when Moses took the blood of bulls and goats and put them in basins and sprinkled the book and the altars and all the people and said, “This is the blood of the covenant” – the blood of the old covenant.

And if they’re paying attention they’re going to realize, “Wait, new covenant…oh wait, didn’t Jeremiah say something about God making a new covenant? What’s that all about? He’s going to write his word in our hearts or something?”

“Yeah, he’s going to forgive our sins and be a God to us and everyone is going to know the Lord.”

“Huh. Is that really what he’s talking about?”

The disciples were really bad students. They didn’t ask questions, kind of like some of my students. It is amazing, given how much debate the church has entered into over the Lord’s Supper, how little Jesus says and how simple the ceremony was. When Paul repeats it in I Corinthians 15 he doesn’t elaborate on it. He tells us a few things we might have missed, but he doesn’t expand the ceremony or the liturgy. He keeps it very simple, because that’s kind of what it’s supposed to be. It’s a very simple thing.

The old covenant had very elaborate rituals. At our church in the evenings I’m privileged to speak to the congregation while we don’t have a pastor right now, and I’m working my way through the five Levitical offerings. Details! I thought I knew the sacrifices pretty well. I didn’t and I’m still learning. They were complicated and complex.

Most of us know how to drive a car, but if you want to repair a broken piston, that’s a little more difficult. Or if you want to find the fuse that controls your air conditioning, you take it to a mechanic who has all these fancy books that tell you how to do that.

Leviticus was written for the priests and it’s not so much “Here’s the message of the gospel” as it’s, “Priests, this is how you do this.” We’re left to look and say, “Hmm, well, where else does the Bible talk about this? I’m not getting this right now.”

It’s a very simple ceremony. He says, “This is my body,” but he doesn’t repeat that language. “This cup is the new covenant.” He doesn’t simply say, “This is my blood,” but “This is the new covenant in my blood.”

The language is figurative. That much is not that hard to figure out. Even Rome allows that there’s some degree of figure going on here because, for one thing, as he holds the bread and says of the bread, “This is my body,” it’s his body holding it, so there’s something going on there.

Communion meals go back as far as the garden of Eden, the tree of life. We run into them with Melchizedek, with Passover, with the peace offerings and to a lesser extent the sin offerings where the priests ate the meal. We could go through the Old Testament and find out that many times God calls his servants to eat with him.

Sometimes it’s when the angel of the Lord appears or on some special occasion, but by the time we get to the gospels, the idea that God or his representative may come and eat a meal with you is understood and highly priced. It’s a great honor to be brought into such intimate fellowship with the God who is your Creator and Savior.

There are no long treatises in the Old Testament or in the New about all of the implications. The cup of blessing which he blessed, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? We’re told that those who partake of the sacrifices are partakers of the altar. Even so, those who eat the bread and drink the wine are in communion with Christ.

We have Revelation 3 where Jesus says, “I stand at the door [of the church] and knock. If any man opens the door I will come in and sup with him and he with me.” This supper in the church would be the Lord’s Supper, so it’s a fellowship meal with Jesus, where what he feeds us is himself.

The church during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation killed people over this one. It’s really hard for modern Americans to get ahold of that. “Why would they do that? Does it really matter what you do or what it means? We’re remembering Jesus, so hot dogs and Coke would work.” No, they don’t actually.

All roads do not lead to Rome in this situation.

We’ve lost the sacredness of the communion that is happening there. I would say in the Reformation they were maybe a bit overly zealous because it went very far, but at the same time I think we’ve swung the other direction of not caring nearly enough and not taking it seriously enough or desiring it enough either.

That is one of the things that is sad to me when a church has the Lord’s Supper once a month or less, and you happen to be sick that one Sunday in the month and therefore you lose the Lord’s Supper, or you’re out of town or something that Sunday and so you lose it.

We don’t necessarily have that sense of, “Oh wow, I just lost this opportunity to partake in this covenant meal with the Lord.” There’s not that desiring that we see, even with Jesus desiring to eat the Passover with his disciples, that we should have in seeking the Lord there.

It’s even ironic I think that some churches choose to celebrate the Lord’s Supper less frequently because they’re afraid if they do it more frequently it will feel less special.

Try that with having dinner with your wife and see how that one goes over.

That’s the thing. If this is the whole occasion for our coming, it’s this that makes the rest of the time special. It’s not some extra cherry on top. It’s the reason for being there.

You can miss the specialness no matter how often you do it. That’s your heart issue that’s not preparing. It is more work, in a sense, if you’re having it every week that you have to be aware and diligent to every week prepare even more to go to worship than you potentially would otherwise, which I think is a good thing.

We need to make it right with our brother before we bring our sacrifice to the altar? Whoever came up with an idea like that?

I’m so sorry to cut us short, but we are running out of time. This is a short-ish edition of Halting Toward Zion. Quick closing thoughts, Greg?

For those who are worried about where this conversation will go next, we’re moving on. When we get to the Reformation in three or four years…

We have 1500 years to get to the Reformation, and then we’ll dive into it.

Yes. We’ll talk about the various interpretations. For now the historical fact is this is when Jesus institutes it and institutes the new covenant, at least in its beginning and provisional forms, and it is a turning point in history because, remember, this is a history podcast, right?

That’s right. So let’s wrap up with some recommendations. I’ll go first. I don’t know if I’ve already recommended these, so if I have you can throw a flag and I’ll come up with something else.

I recommend the Frances books for children. I think the OG one would be Bedtime for Frances. Frances is a badger. She has a little badger family and little badger friends and it’s great. Frances just never disappoints. Every book is gold.

When I was a kid I had A Bargain for Frances where she kind of gets swindled out of her tea set and learns something about making deals with friends. The ones that we have with Gretchen right now that we’re especially enjoying are Bedtime for Frances and A Birthday for Frances, where it’s her little sister’s birthday and she kind of has to reconcile her feelings with it being somebody else’s birthday. As she says, “That’s how it is. Birthdays are always the one that is not yours.”

I will jump in with something that kept me at school for about an hour later than I planned. We’re done with drama and so I generally fill in the last few weeks of school with showing the kids some really excellent movies – sometimes adaptations of plays, but sometimes just movies that are fantastic.

I wanted to show them 12 Angry Men, but I wanted to see if I could find it online. I think I have the DVD but it’s easier to access if I can just pull it offline. I found it and I wanted to check and see how many commercial interruptions and things like that because it’s not commercial-free, and I got sucked into it. I had to watch it to the very end.

If you don’t know the movie, a warning – it’s black and white and therefore anybody born after 1990 can’t possibly watch it, so my kids tell me. But the acting is brilliant. The story writing is tight and concise. You’ve got 12 characters. They’re jury men deciding the fate of a young man who’s been accused of murder.

The arguments range all over the place from the detective-style questioning, to reenactment, to racial prejudice, to personal “This reminds me too much of my kid who walked out on me, so I have to vote guilty,” to “I have tickets to a ball game and I don’t want to miss it, so let’s vote real fast.” Everybody’s different and they’re all interacting – 12 angry men, because they get angry but they manage to rein it in, mostly.

There’s interesting social commentary. You don’t have to agree with the perspective of each of the characters, but there’s stuff to talk about, especially with your kids, and it’s clean. It’s just very, very well-done, and even though it’s in black and white, once you get them past that I think they’ll probably all enjoy it.

Mine is another podcast that I listened to this last week that sparked me buying and beginning to read a book. The podcast is another by Elisa Childers and it’s called “Finding Peace in an Age of Anxiety” with a pastor named Jonny Ardavanis. It was one of the best discussions I’ve heard on dealing with anxiety from a Christian perspective.

The book that he has written is called Consider the Lilies: Finding Perfect Peace in the Character of God. Essentially his assertion is that we find peace from anxious thoughts and such by actively meditating on the character of God and the word of God. He referenced taking the nail, and meditating is what drives it home and drives it in and makes it stay.

He also made an interesting point that I had not thought of before. We often simply want to get rid of the anxiety, and we don’t realize that in the scripture there’s always a turning away and a turning towards, so he said we don’t just put the anxiety to death and get rid of it. We have to turn and also actively trust, that that’s a purposeful specific thing we do. For example, if there is a real hormone imbalance or something so you need medication to help, that can only ever stop the negative. It can never cause us to turn and obey.

I had just never thought of it that way, and thought of the two sides of anxiety, because we’re normally like, “I just want to not be anxious about this. I just want to feel fine.”

I’ve felt that a lot in the last months with a new baby, and I never thought about the way that we need to actively turn and obey and actively trust and think through every individual aspect of why you’re worrying and why there’s no reason to worry, because of who God is in very concrete ways. I found it extremely encouraging, very Christ-centered, and I’m now reading his book and so far enjoying it.

Very cool. That sounds great.

Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure, and I look forward to next week when we will maybe actually get to Gethsemane. A big thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.

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Make sure to tell a friend about us. If you’re enjoying the podcast, maybe someone you know will also. Thanks so much for listening and we’ll see you next time.