The New Passover

When Jesus and his disciples gathered in the Upper Room to celebrate the Jewish Passover they were very familiar with the Exodus account that it was “a day of remembrance” of God’s deliverance from Pharaoh’s oppression.  The Passover was observed every year in the spring, normally in March or April.

The detailed prescriptions about the selection of the unblemished lamb or goat and its sacrifice reflect a careful liturgical formula.  The liturgy is to be performed in the home rather than in a public place.  The description of the blood on the doorposts may echo a very ancient rite used as a sign to ward off evil in the family dwelling.  In addition, the liturgical act provides life for the first born of the Israelites.  In this context, the term, “Passover” denotes protection and freedom to live.

The Israelites were instructed to roast the Passover lamb “over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.”  This reflected the open fire of a semi-nomadic people, a people who are on the move when they need to be.  It was their custom to use unleavened bread and the wild plants of the desert to flavor the meat.  God commanded that they would eat this meal with “your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly.  It is the Passover of the Lord.”

The Passover meal Jesus had with his disciples in the Upper Room was not an ordinary Passover celebration.  In the book, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, the author Brant Pitre says that Jesus saw the Last Supper as a new Passover. “In order for there to be a new exodus, there needed to be a new Passover….”

“Jesus reconfigured the Passover around his own passion…. By commanding his disciples to repeat what he had done he deliberately perpetuated this new Passover – both sacrifice and meal – down through the ages.  By means of these actions, he set the new exodus in motion.  What mattered now was not the flesh of the Passover lamb that had been slain in Egypt, but his own flesh and blood that would be sacrificed on the cross…. He offered himself as a sacrifice, because he saw himself as the Passover lamb.”

“Jesus’ identification of himself as the new Passover lamb is the only historically plausible explanation for what he said to his disciples in the Upper Room.”  He knew “that the Passover sacrifice was not completed by the death of the lamb.  It was completed by a sacred meal.  You had to eat the lamb.  And not just a symbol of the lamb – but its actual flesh.  Ultimately, that is the only way Jesus the Jew could have ever said to his Twelve disciples: ‘Take, eat; this is my body.’”

“At the final supper, Jesus miraculously transformed bread and wine into his own body and blood.  In doing so, he gave the disciples a share in both his bodily death and his bodily resurrection.  In doing so, he gave the disciples the ‘supernatural bread’ that would sustain them each day on their journey toward the new promised land of the new creation, a foretaste of the reality of the life of the world to come.”

Later, sometime after Jesus’ death and resurrection, St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Corinthians, that he “received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.”

Paul reminded his readers that the first Eucharist took place on the “night when [Jesus] was betrayed.”  The sacred formula of taking the bread or the wine, of giving thanks, of breaking the bread and offering the cup, of eating or drinking, and doing these acts “in remembrance of me,” suggests that the Eucharist occurs as a unified and communal thanksgiving to God.  There can be no discrimination in the sacrament of the Eucharist.  Those who offer “thanksgiving” to God as a community are to be united in love. 

The Eucharist is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.” It is the love that belongs to everyone because of the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”  The death of Jesus represents a complete and selfless act of love for his followers.  Therefore, just as the Corinthians did, and as all Christians throughout the centuries ever since Jesus’ death have done, we remember his self-giving love in the action of sharing in this miraculous meal of bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ.  As a result of this action we are to treat one another and everyone with selfless love and compassionate concern.  Amen.