The Lord's Supper

Today we are going to take the Lord’s supper. Before we do I want you to understand what we are doing. The roots of this sacrament go back to the Jewish Passover and their rescue from the bondage of Egypt by the hand of God.

When Jesus instituted this practice it was on the day of Passover during the passover meal.

Luke 22:7–13 NASB95

Then came the first day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. And Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover for us, so that we may eat it.” They said to Him, “Where do You want us to prepare it?” And He said to them, “When you have entered the city, a man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water; follow him into the house that he enters. “And you shall say to the owner of the house, ‘The Teacher says to you, “Where is the guest room in which I may eat the Passover with My disciples?” ’ “And he will show you a large, furnished upper room; prepare it there.” And they left and found everything just as He had told them; and they prepared the Passover.

Jesus sent his disciples to prepare for the passover meal, something that is still done by Jews today. Now when a Jewish family prepares for the passover meal they spend the day prior to the passover cleaning house. Not just making it neat and tidy so that it will look good but a true deep cleaning of the entire house. They might pull out the stove, clean out the fridge, sweep under the fridge, scrub and polish everything, especially the kitchen. They do this to remove any trace of leaven from the house. Every little speck must be removed because leaven represents sin and there there must be no sin in the house on passover.

there is a tradition today that after all leaven has been removed from the house and everything has been prepared the parents will hide 10 pieces of leaven in the house and send the children to look for them. The children will be rewarded for each piece they find but the parents don’t make it easy, sometimes they are unable to find it all. Once it is all found by the children or gathered up by the parents it is destroyed.

This ceremony is used to teach the children that we must work especially hard to search out the sin in our lives and eliminate it. The parents hide it well to show the kids that sin can be hard to find and hard to weed out.

I wonder if Paul had something like this tradition in mind when he wrote about examining yourself before you take communion to make sure you can take it in a worthy manner.

1 Corinthians 11:23–32 NASB95

For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is My body, which 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. Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep. But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are disciplined by the Lord so that we will not be condemned along with the world.

We should make a special effort to ensure that we have confessed any and all sin and make sure that our hearts are completely cleaned and nothing stands between us and God before we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. That is why we observe a time of prayer before we begin the ceremony so that everyone can ask God to cleanse their hearts and to show them if there is anything that they need to confess, we want to come before God with a clean heart. We want to be sure that we have confessed all of our sin and our hearts have been made spotless. We want to do a deep clean, a spring cleaning on our hearts like the Jews do on their houses before the passover to make sure that we are ready.If all we had accomplished during the Lord’s Supper was to take time to cleanse our hearts as a church it might well be one of the most important things we ever did, but there is more.

Once the passover meal had been prepared there was a very ordered and detailed ceremony involved. Every part of the passover meal was designed to remind the Jews of some part of what God had done for them or who God is. There was lamb to remind them of the passover lamb sacrificed for them, there were bitter herbs to remind them of their bitter enslavement, the herbs are dipped in salt water before being eaten to remind them of the tears shed by their forefathers over the enslavement. They ate horseradish until they themselves cried to remind them of the tears shed during the Jewish captivity. They had special songs to sing and each family member had a part to play and certain words to say at the appropriate time. Every part and everything at the table was done to help them remember who they were and what God had done.

What I want to focus on today is the parts of that meal that Jesus changed forever when he fulfilled the passover meal and instituted the Lord’s Supper.

Luke 22:14–23 NASB95

When the hour had come, He reclined at the table, and the apostles with Him. And He said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I say to you, I shall never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He said, “Take this and share it among yourselves; for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes.” And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood. “But behold, the hand of the one betraying Me is with Mine on the table. “For indeed, the Son of Man is going as it has been determined; but woe to that man by whom He is betrayed!” And they began to discuss among themselves which one of them it might be who was going to do this thing.

You may have noticed that Jesus began by blessing a cup and passing it around to the disciples. After he had broken the bread and they had eaten it he also took another cup and passed it around.

In fact the passover meal has four cups or four toasts as we might call them today involved in the meal. The passover meal begins with a cup or a toast that is meant to officially start the meal. It is called the cup of sanctification and it is accompanied by a kind of praise or worship song or poem to God. This may well have been the first cup that Jesus blessed and began the meal.

Shortly after the first cup and the opening blessing the bread was taken up by the one leading the passover meal and some of it is broken off and placed in a napkin to be put aside and used at the end of the meal. The rest of the bread is used during parts of the meal but this special bread is set aside. In fact it is the custom today that this bread is hidden somewhere in the house and toward the end of the meal the children are sent to find it. It is not hidden especially well since it is intended to be found quickly and the child who finds it brings it to the leader of the passover feast who pays them for it with coins and explains that he is redeeming this bread in the same way that the Jews were redeemed by God.

That point in the meal is probably where Jesus broke the bread and gave it to his disciples. For thousands of years this bread had been understood by the Jews to represent redemption, the fact that they were bought with a price. Now Jesus, the ultimate fulfillment of that redemption told his disciples that they were being bought with a price. When the firstborn of the Jews were redeemed from the angel of death it was done by the sacrificing of a lamb and now the ultimate sacrifice by the true lamb of God was about to be made. Jesus said this is my body which is given for you do this in remembrance of me. The symbolism of the passover lamb was about to be fulfilled for all time, and Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper to remind us of his sacrifice in the same way the passover reminded the Jews of how they had been redeemed.

The second cup is the cup of deliverance which represented the coming out of Egypt. which had already been drunk but third cup was the cup of redemption. This cup reminded the Jews of the blood of the lamb that was sacrificed to redeem the firstborn of Israel from the angel of death who killed all of the firstborn of Egypt. This cup was drank right after the hidden bread was eaten. This cup must have been the one about which Jesus said this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

The last cup was the cup of praise. This cup closed the passover meal and it represented a commitment of the Jews to continue to follow God and be his people.

Today we celebrate the fulfillment of the passover feast, the Lord’s Supper. Much like the first cup of passover we begin with a prayer praising God for who he is and what he has done for us. The bread we eat reminds us of Jesus’ body, it reminds us that he was spat on, beaten, whipped, tortured and crucified. The bread that the Jews use today is prepared so that it has stripes in it that represent the whip marks prophesied in Isaiah, it also has little holes in it because Isaiah prophesied that he would also be pierced. When we eat this bread we remember that he was beaten, pierced and sacrificed for us.

When we take the cup and drink the juice we are reminded that salvation really isn’t free, oh it was free to us, but it was fully paid for by Jesus. He paid with his blood, he paid with his life. Not just any life but a perfect life, a life that deserved no pain and no punishment, a life that was everything a life should be and Jesus gave up that life for someone like me, and someone like you.

When we take the Lord’s supper we are remembering, and honoring the sacrifice that Jesus made. It is not much, but it is something we can do to show Jesus that he is not forgotten, that we remember and that we are grateful. That is what we are doing when we take the Lord’s supper and we are doing something else too. We are being bound together as a church, as believers, as a group of people who all owe a debt we cannot pay to a God who loves us more than we can imagine. No matter what else we might or might not have in common we will always have that, Jesus made sure of that, he paid for it in full.

If you are not redeemed, if you have not been bought with a price then we ask that you not participate, it would have no meaning to you, you cannot be grateful for something you do not have, you cannot honor someone for something they have not yet done, at least not in your life. If you have been redeemed, if you are a child of God then we ask that you prepare your heart and that you honor Jesus with us now. We owe him so much, we cannot pay our debt, but we can show our appreciation, we can do this in remembrance of him.