Matthew 26

¹⁷ Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Where will you have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?” ¹⁸ He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and say to him, ‘The Teacher says, My time is at hand. I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.’” ¹⁹ And the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the Passover. ²⁰ When it was evening, he reclined at table with the twelve. ²¹ And as they were eating, he said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” ²² And they were very sorrowful and began to say to him one after another, “Is it I, Lord?” ²³ He answered, “He who has dipped his hand in the dish with me will betray me. ²⁴ The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.” ²⁵ Judas, who would betray him, answered, “Is it I, Rabbi?” He said to him, “You have said so.” ²⁶ Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” ²⁷ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, ²⁸ for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. ²⁹ I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

It is not uncommon for food and meals to be at the center of very significant moments in the development of stories. Think of the books you have read and the movies and shows you have watched. I bet right now you could think of a number of important moments involving food in these. One list of “The 20 best food scenes in film” offers these examples:

The dogs eating spaghetti in “Lady and the Tramp.”

The meal in “Babette’s Feast.”

Audrey Hepburn eating breakfast outside of Tiffany’s in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Peter Clemenza’s recipe for pasta sauce in “The Godfather.”

The meal in “Beauty and the Beast.”

Remy the rat preparing ratatouille in “Ratatouille.”

Some of these are winsome and some of these are poignant. All of these examples are at least interesting.

I firmly believe that our culture oftentimes reenacts the contours of the Christian faith without knowing it, because our culture originates form a largely Christian framework. The Christian story is, in a sense, in the DNA of our culture, even if our culture seems to be trying desperately to move past Christianity.

It is not surprising, then, that food and meals oftentimes arise at seminal moments in the development of plots and narratives. It does so in the Christian story as well. In fact, in our text, it is at a meal that a number of profound truths begin to coalesce under the tutelage and revelatory power of Jesus. Jesus reveals the heart of the gospel in its fullest form in a meal and, in so doing, establishes that meal itself as a powerful signpost to the reality of the kingdom of God and of Himself, Jesus, the King.

In the unfolding of Matthew’s gospel, we have now worked our way to a most significant meal. A meal now takes center stage, because it is a meal that is more than a mere meal. It is a meal that reveals, that explains, that depicts, that challenges, and that calls us to believe.[1]

Jesus is the Passover lamb.

We begin with the timing of this meal. The gospels situate it either on or in the immediate vicinity of the Jewish observance of Passover.

¹⁷ Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Where will you have us prepare for you to eat the Passover?” ¹⁸ He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and say to him, ‘The Teacher says, My time is at hand. I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.’” ¹⁹ And the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the Passover.

I would like to acknowledge that there is a long and interesting debate about the exact timing of the Lord’s Supper. Basically, the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—appear to put it on Passover and John’s gospel appears to put it the day before. And all of this is tied up, of course, with questions concerning the exact chronology of the events of the passion. Many proposals have been put forward as to how to best harmonize this. I commend the discussion to you. It is interesting and relatively important. Yet, only relatively so. The significant point is not the harmonization of the accounts to our satisfaction but the event itself, the meal itself, and what it means. For that reason, we will proceed with Matthew’s account in our consideration.

Whether or not the Last Supper was precisely and exactly and literally on Passover, this much is clear: Jesus situates it in the vicinity of it and frames it as a Passover meal. And this is extremely important. Why? Because, in doing so, Jesus was situating Himself and the events that were about to unfold—the cross and the empty tomb—into the original Passover story. He was redefining it around Himself, or, rather, showing that the Passover had always been about Him.

Recall the original Passover as recorded in Exodus 12. In verses 3–6, the families of Israel are told to take lambs “without blemish” and kill the lambs “at twilight.”

⁷ “Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. ⁸ They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it. ⁹ Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. ¹⁰ And you shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. ¹¹ In this manner you shall eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s Passover. ¹² For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord. ¹³ The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

A lamb.

Blood.

Salvation.

No judgment.

Exodus.

Deliverance.

The contours of the gospel are embedded in the Passover. Jesus’ positioning of the last supper at Passover is not accidental. He is aligning the two stories. The New Testament will make the connections clear.

In 1 Corinthians 5, in the context of Paul instructing the Corinthian believers to remove an immoral person from the church, he writes:

⁶ Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? ⁷ Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. ⁸ Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

This cannot be plainer: Christ is “our Passover lamb.” He “has been sacrificed.”

The blood of Christ needs to be applied to our lives. If we are under the protection of the blood, we will not fall beneath the wrath of a holy God but will, instead, be saved. This is the truth that Jesus is stressing by placing His last supper in the neighborhood of Passover.

“By identifying his own mission with the Passover,” writes Craig Keener, “Jesus indicates that he has come to enact the new redemption and new exodus promised by the biblical prophets.”[2] Indeed!

The Lord’s Supper is a picture.

This last supper is also a picture of the kind of sacrifice the lamb of God, Jesus, will make.

²⁰ When it was evening, he reclined at table with the twelve.

Craig Blomberg writes of this “reclining at table”:

We are not to envisage, with Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Renaissance portrait of the last supper, one long rectangular table with the people sitting on chairs on either side of it, but rather the triclinium. This was a square-cornered, U-shaped combination of three cushions, on which people would recline, lying on their sides with their bodies perpendicular to the cushions and stretched outward away from the center of the room. The food was placed in the middle of the “U,” in between the couches.[3]

At table, Jesus reveals that He will be betrayed. As we have just dealt with Judas in some detail, we will simply note the presence of the betrayer, as Jesus does.

²¹ And as they were eating, he said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” ²² And they were very sorrowful and began to say to him one after another, “Is it I, Lord?” ²³ He answered, “He who has dipped his hand in the dish with me will betray me. ²⁴ The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.” ²⁵ Judas, who would betray him, answered, “Is it I, Rabbi?” He said to him, “You have said so.”

Then we come to the words of institution, the words we continue to say to this day when we observe this meal.

²⁶ Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” ²⁷ And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, ²⁸ for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Here we see the ways in which the main elements of the gospel coalesce in this meal: The bread is Jesus’ body. His breaking of the bread is a picture of the cross upon which His body will be broken. The wine is His blood. As the bread was broken, the wine was poured out, just as Jesus’ blood will be poured out upon the cross.

More controversial than the exact time of the last supper is the exact meaning of these words of institution. The Roman Catholic church appeals to these words and those of John 6 to argue for its doctrine of transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and the wine become body and blood. Others have argued that Christ is present in a real if non-literal sense. Others have argued—and this is likely the dominant view of Baptists in America—that the signs are merely symbolic.

I believe that the best way to read these words is to see them as non-literal in a wooden sense but actual in what they promise: nourishment. In other words, there is a sense in which we are spiritually nourished and strengthened as we partake of the bread and the wine or juice.

The problem with a woodenly literalistic reading is that it creates numerous problems with the other areas in which Jesus says that He “is” this or that object: “I am the vine” (John 15:5), “I am the door” (John 10:7, 9), etc. The problem with a reductionist symbolic view is that it reduces the observance of the supper to something merely cognitive, as if the point of the supper is a mental exercise: “Do your best to think about the cross while you eat and drink this!” But the language surrounding the meal suggests that more is happening here than a simple exercise in memory. A  reductionist, memorialist view struggles to account for Paul’s warning about some being sick and/or dying because of eating and drinking unworthily in 1 Corinthians 11:30. What is more, the language of “remembrance” in scripture usually means much more than a mere mental exercise.

The bread remains bread. The wine/juice remains wine/juice. But Jesus does meet us in the meal in a powerful way. And I believe that most Christians who observe the suffer know this experientially. Something powerful, something nourishing happens to us when we gather under Jesus’ words and take the signs. The picture is painted for us once again of the great love of God in Christ, laying down His life for us on the cross of Calvary.

There is one other word we dare not skip over in our consideration.

²⁸ for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

That word covenant is powerful. And, specifically, Jesus is connecting His coming and His passion to the words of Jeremiah 31.

³¹ “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, ³² not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.³⁴ And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Jesus and His cross and His empty tomb and the salvation He wins for and offers the world fulfills the promised “new covenant” of Jeremiah 31. Through the indwelling Holy Spirit, the law of God is now “within” us, “on our hearts.” And we are now in relationship with God! And we “know” God, through Jesus, and our “iniquity” is now forgiven. Amazingly, because of Jesus, and because of His work which is pictured in this meal, our sins are remembered “no more” by God!

What an amazing picture this meal paints!

The Lord’s Supper is a prophecy.

And there is a prophecy here as well! Jesus says:

²⁹ I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

Michael Card makes an interesting point about the Jewish observance of Passover, the meal that the last Supper evokes.

The final Passover toast was, “This year in Jerusalem, next year in the kingdom.” Jesus modifies that toast, saying he won’t drink again until they are together in his Father’s kingdom.[4]

This is a continuation of the new covenant’s promise, fulfilled in Jesus, that we will know God and be in relationship with Him! Through the crucified and risen Christ, a new family is made, a family of redeemed brothers and sisters!

The key words in verse 29 are “with you.” Jesus will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until He does so “with us.” Where? “In my Father’s kingdom!”

These words are a prophecy because He is pointing to our forever home, Heaven, and our eternal union with Him there. He is saying that, because of what He is about to do, the doors of the kingdom will be opened and whosoever will may come!

Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola are correct when they write:

Jesus’ body is laid out twice in the Bible: once on a table, and once in a tomb.  The body on the supper table is eaten not with family but with friends.  But these friends become Jesus’ new family, and they would soon become His new body.[5]

That is so! And that “new body” is called, in scripture, the church!

The church, then, consists of those all around the world and throughout time who have come under the atoning power of the broken body and shed blood of the crucified Christ and the victory of the risen Christ by grace through faith. It consists of kingdom citizens, blood-bought children of God, those who remember and those who are remembered! It consists of the partakers of the new covenant, those upon whose hearts the law of God has been written and those in whom the Spirit of the living God has been placed.

We are the followers of the Passover lamb!

We are the followers of the crucified and risen King!

We are pilgrims, together, possessors of life eternal, walking in and toward the kingdom unending of our King unconquerable, Jesus!

 

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-20-best-food-scenes-in-film-a8811826.html

[2] Craig S. Keener, Matthew. The IVP New Testament Commentary Series. Ed., Grant R. Osborne. Vol. 1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), p.367.

[3] Blomberg, Craig L. Matthew. The New American Commentary. Gen. Ed. David S. Dockery. Vol. 22 (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1992), p.388.

[4] Card, Michael. Matthew. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), p.228.

[5] Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola, Jesus Manifesto (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010), p.153–154.