Biblical and Cultural Sources of the Lord's Supper

Biblical and Cultural Sources of The Lord’s Supper Rev. Dr. G.P. Wagenfuhr Old Testament Foundations: Passover or Pesach (Exodus 12) The first major foundation of the Lord’s Supper is the event and later festival of Passover. Passover commemorates the liberation of the people of God from slavery in Egypt when the angel of death passed over the houses of the Hebrews who had painted their doorposts with the blood of a lamb. The Passover lamb, it must be remembered, is not a sin-offering. Passover is not a celebration of forgiveness for personal moral wrongdoing, but the liberation of a people from slavery to a major world empire. The lamb’s blood provided a barrier of protection against the wrath of God. This festival was established as a “memorial day” (12:14). It was, like July 4, 1776, a day when a nation’s founding is celebrated by its independence from a former power. The people of God were to retell the story of the exodus every year and use symbols to help explain its purposes. The Passover is not a sacrament. There are no sacraments, so called, in the Old Testament. 1 But the Passover is a holy day, or set of days, with consequences enumerated for failing to keep the feast rightly. And so, the Passover was to be reenacted or retold in each household, with children being integrated into the story of Israel by their inquiring about the reason for the feast. Each Jew was to recite the Seder of Pesach so that he or she was made to feel as though they had personally come out of Egypt. The elements of the festival were supposed to be explained since their purpose is entirely symbolic. Nothing about the Pesach offers union with God or actual liberation from bondage. Nevertheless, each person should join in the community’s story and see in the story of Egypt their own personal story. It was this memorial day Jesus was celebrating with his disciples in the upper room. The bread that he broke was unleavened bread, matzah, as they would have been retelling the story of the liberation of God’s people from slavery. The disciples would believe that they had personally come out of Egypt in union with God’s people. The radical point Jesus was making here is that he was and is their liberator. A new exodus was beginning in him. His death as the Passover Lamb was the means by which freedom would come to those who have his blood. His blood would cover his people from the wrath of God unveiled upon a wicked people that enslave his people and creation. 2 1 This suggests that sacraments properly belong to a later period of time with the incorporation of Hellenistic ideas. 2 See Revelation 19. Sources of the Lord’s Supper 7 Old Testament Foundations: Covenants God made covenants with his people throughout their history, according to means that made sense to them in their time. The first explicit covenant in the Bible is made with Noah and the whole creation. God does not explicitly make a covenant with Adam. The covenant of Noah in Genesis 9 is that God will not destroy his creation with a flood again. The sign of this covenant was the rainbow. It served as a visual reminder of the agreement made, and potentially the consequences of breaking the agreement. The second covenant God made was with Abram/Abraham that established his tribe as the people of God. This covenant was first made in Genesis 15, and the signs that accompanied its ratification sound odd to us—the division of animals. However, it seems as though this were an implicit threat, that breaking the terms of the contract would result in being divided (as Israel was in its civil war, and Jesus’ flesh was in crucifixion). God alone passed between these divided animals suggesting that the covenant of Abraham was unconditional on Abraham, only on God. But the covenant of Abraham is restated in Genesis 17 with another sign, that of circumcision of all male Israelites. This sign of the covenant was permanently part of the flesh of these men and a constant reminder. Perhaps it was also a threat of disobedience, that God would not make Abraham’s offspring numerous if the covenant was broken. Thus, this sign also sealed the covenant, confirming it with a permanent mark. The third covenant God made was with Israel through Moses on Mt. Sinai. This covenant is by far the longest and is what is referred to by the title “Old Testament.” The sign of the ratification of this covenant was with blood. Blood was put on the altar and sprinkled on the people in Exodus 24. This was to indicate that their very lives were put on the line in this covenant. Hence, the book of Hebrews understands Jesus’ death as the blood that fulfilled this covenant. God’s blood shed for us fulfilled the terms and so it was no longer binding. 3 The blood here was both a sign and a seal, for it sealed the terms of the agreement. Although we talk about the “Davidic Covenant” the promise of God to David in 2 Samuel 7 and 1 Chronicles 17 lacks many of the features of other covenants, including a sign and seal. The New Covenant Israel’s disobedience and continued idolatry broke the covenant of Moses. Because of this violation of the agreement, the promised land was taken away and the people of God were exiled. It is within this context that a cry came out for a renewed covenant, one that would be better than the one made with Moses wherein God would be known personally and the law of God would become the natural expression of the people. 4 This was the covenant Jesus was claiming to be making at the Last Supper. And here the link between Passover and the covenant 3 4 8 Cf. Hebrews 9. See Jeremiah 31. is made more clear. Passover was the founding event of liberation, the Israelite’s Independence Day. And Passover led to Sinai, where the covenant was made through Moses that constituted the relationship between God and his people. Think of it like the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America. One established the fact of a separate nation, the other established the terms by which it would be governed. As Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples he would soon ascend Golgotha and there seal the new covenant with the shedding of his blood. It was both an act of liberation from sin, conclusion of the Mosaic covenant, and inauguration of a new people under a new commandment sealed with Jesus’ blood. Old Testament Foundations: Eating Flesh but not Blood The Torah contains a number of laws against the eating of blood, or meat with blood still in it. Uncommonly it also gives the reason for this, the blood is where the life (nephesh is also translated as “soul” or “self”) resides. 5 The OT’s understanding of a “soul” is not the same as medieval or modern Christians. That is a complicated topic for another time. So also at the Passover meal, the lamb which was slain had its blood drained and used for the purpose of sign-marking. The flesh of the animal was eaten, though only roasted. At other times, the Jews were permitted to eat meat whose blood had been drained onto the ground. It is curious, then, that Jesus commands his followers to not only eat his flesh but also drink his blood, something expressly forbidden in the Torah. Eating his body symbolized by the bread separately from the wine representing his blood shows that feast is also a service of Jesus’ death, for the blood has been “poured out,” signifying death. The blood carries the nephesh 6 of Jesus, and so drinking the wine symbolizes the life of Jesus being given to us. Also, the reunion of the body and blood within us therefore symbolizes the resurrection within us, as life is being returned to dead flesh. Cultural Background: Greco-Roman Feasts7 The early church’s practice of the Lord’s Supper were nearly identical in format to traditional Roman banquets. 8 The meal that Jesus ate with his disciples and the early church 5 6 See Deut. 12. Nephesh does not mean “spirit” but “soul” or life-essence. Blood carried nephesh while breath carried ruach or spirit. 7 This section, apart from the analysis, is a summary of Streett, R. Alan, Subversive Meals. Members of the SBL “Meals in the Greco-Roman World” have a consensus view that Christian meals were similar, if not identical, to Roman meals. The distinctions came in who was included and how. Streett, R. Alan, Subversive Meals, 7. 8 Sources of the Lord’s Supper 9 shared with one another bear almost no resemblance to our contemporary practices of the Lord’s Supper. Our modern practices have been far more shaped by a later turn or return to sacrificial logic and ceremony. Roman feasts were many course meals with people reclining in specific places according to social status. They were one of the major social institutions that modelled and reinforced the social structure of the Roman Empire. Rome was built upon a system of patronage in which the wealthy would become patrons (from Latin patronus, related to pater or father) of the lower classes. In exchange for service, work, and honor, the patron would provide the lower class with financial help and gifts. These feasts followed a conventional format with a full meal first, a deipnon (or supper), followed by a transitional libation (drink offering to a god or gods like a toast), and then to the symposium or dessert part with entertainment and drinking. The entertainment could be musicians, philosophers and guest speakers, local celebrities, or just discussion about specific predetermined topics. Meals such as this would have a symposiarch (leader of the party) and a host. The libation would often include a hymn sung to one or more of Rome’s gods, or an ethnic god. There were no secular feasts, and in the first century these feasts were required to include a hymn or offering to the emperor. All social classes held these feasts for various reasons: weddings, funerals, coming-ofage, religious occasions, send-offs of family members, or to host a guest like a travelling philosopher or orator (or prophet or preacher, like Paul). The lower classes would gather together in associations or collegia. Nearly every craftsman (women were generally not allowed) was part of some guild, and these guilds would hold a these feasts once a month for their members. Other associations existed too, like religious cults organized around ethnic gods that helped preserve the ethnicities of exiled peoples, funeral societies that operated a bit like burial insurance cooperatives, and even volunteer fire departments. These feasts served as the major meeting place where these kinds of business were conducted. Many modern scholars who have investigated Roman practices see that the earliest churches, as with the Jews, followed this standard dinner format. Christian worship seems to have originated here. The earliest Christian acts of worship, then, were shared meals in private homes. Thus, it is likely that the “Lord’s Supper” referred to this deipnon-libation-symposium format of a meal celebrated by Christians in honor of Christ. Although Christians probably did not perform a libation to Christ in the same way pagans did, there certainly was a hymn and a toast to king Jesus that took the place of praising Caesar. Rather than the meal being a small part of a singing-preaching-praying service as it is for us, the singing, preaching, and praying were integral elements of the primary thing: the meal. Christian meals like this would be used to distribute wealth and provide for the widows, orphans, and the poor, but without creating patron-client relations! 10 Thus, early Christians adapted a standard Roman cultural format while radically changing the content of the feasts. The Jews before them had long done this too. Jesus’ Last Supper was probably a big festal meal like this. They reclined and ate. After they ate the deipnon Jesus took the cup just as a Roman would for a libation. But Jesus, instead of dumping some of it on the ground in honor of a pagan god, explained that this cup was his blood which would be poured out for his people. This was an act of declaring himself divine. We know that Paul in 1 Corinthians 11, is addressing a church in which the wealthy who didn’t have to work would come to the feast early, eat most of the food, drink a fair amount, and leave little for the poor when they could come after work. The Lord’s Supper was to be a place where dividing walls of human hierarchies would be broken down and a new people would be forged under the headship of Christ. Older scholars had argued that the Lord’s Supper was distinct from the love-feasts Christians shared. Many more modern scholars argue that they were the same thing, both from historical evidence and from the evidence of Scripture itself, particularly 1 Corinthians 11. Little has been done among sacramental theologians to take account of this Roman background. For one thing, it would radically transform Reformation era debates about the real presence of Christ in the elements. Jesus himself might have poured out a cup of wine onto the floor, as was customary in a libation, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” 9 This is unconscionable to a Lutheran or Roman Catholic. Luther himself is said to have wept and got down on his knees and lapped up wine spilled from a chalice. 10 Jesus was not pouring the cup out to a god, but transforming the practice of libation from honoring a god to confirming a covenant in himself as God. This has raised the question as to whether Jesus was instituting a sacrament as later theologians understood it, or whether sacramentalism was a later development of the church. Jesus was living in and among the people of his day, doing the cultural practices of the day, and investing them with new meaning, as God has done throughout Scripture (including Scripture itself). What was Jesus intending to do with his Last Supper? What did the earliest Christians do with this? We know from Acts 2 that this practice seems to have continued. Much of what the church after Pentecost did was very much in line with other associations in that time, including the sharing and emphasis on equality. But the Christians took this to the extreme, using the meal to overturn fixed Roman social categories and Jewish requirements of not mixing with Gentiles. What we might say is that the early church was formed around the dinner table, as a new family with Christ as the host of the meal. Christ was the only patron Christians should serve. There was no sense in which these meals were sacrifices, or re-presentations of a sacrifice as later Roman Catholicism argued. But Jesus’ Last Supper was a foundational event in which he radically transformed the Passover and the Roman feast by making himself the host and the 9 Luke 22:20. Scaer, “A Lutheran Response to the Reformed View” in Understanding Four Views on the Lord’s Supper, 76. 10 Sources of the Lord’s Supper 11 God who both gave and received the libation or toast. So, sharing in the body of Christ was not simply eating the unleavened Passover bread that is his body, it was the act of coming together in this particular kind of practice that tore down traditional social identities and barriers, where the teaching of the apostles was shared, where hymns were sung to Jesus. Jesus founded the church around the dinner table. New Testament Sources for The Lord’s Supper The Lord’s Supper has four primary places in which it is described as an event. • Matthew 26 • Mark 14 • Luke 22 • 1 Corinthians 11 is Paul’s discussion and expansion of Jesus’ words of institution. Note that Paul adds the line, “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes again.” This teaching comes within the context of discipline. It seems that the wealthy Corinthians were getting drunk at the meal while some were going hungry. Other passages that have significantly influenced the church’s reflection on what the sacrament means include: 12 • Luke 24:13–35: Road to Emmaus wherein Jesus was known in the breaking of bread. • Acts 2:42–47: The post-Pentecost church continues the practice of “breaking bread” together. • John 2: The Wedding at Cana in which Jesus turns the water of purification into wine, thus symbolizing and foreshadowing the meaning of his own death uniting purification and atonement. See ECO’s Baptism book for more on the importance of blood and water. • John 6: Bread from heaven. Here Jesus has a long teaching about how his body is true food and his blood true drink and that all who want eternal life must eat and drink his flesh. • 1 Corinthians 10: comparison of the Lord’s Supper with pagan sacrifices. • Revelation 19: The great marriage feast of the Lamb.