The Cup and the Covenant

1 Corinthians 11:23-26

We live in a world of contracts. Every time you drive through McDonalds and get a cup of coffee, you enter a contract. The image of the coffee cup on the drive thru menu with its price, signifies that McDonalds agrees to purchase the coffee beans from Columbia or wherever they source them in South America. McDonalds agrees to pay to have those coffee beans shipped internationally and across the country to the local restaurant. Then McDonalds agrees to pay their employees to grind and brew the coffee and pour it into a paper cup and give it to you all in exchange for a couple dollars. When you think about all the different elements that must fall into place to get that simple cup of coffee, this is a pretty remarkable contract. Then you are handed a receipt as proof that the terms of the contract were met by both parties. This daily mundane interaction is really the tip of the iceberg. We enter into all kinds of contracts every day. When you buy a new phone, you enter a contract. When you download an app on your new phone, you enter a contract. You enter contracts with your employer, with the local power and water companies, the cable or internet company, with the bank or mortgage lender, and the car dealership. The list goes on and on.

Since we live in this world of contracts we may be tempted to think that a covenant and a contract are the same thing. It’s true that there are similarities between contracts and a covenants. But they also differ in significant and substantial ways. Contracts and covenants share these three characteristics: Each include two or more parties, some type of promise to be fulfilled, and terms and conditions of fulfillment. Here is where they differ: In a contract, typically goods and services are exchanged—Think of that cup of coffee from McDonalds. However, when God promised Moses that he would covenant himself to the people of Israel and deliver them from Egypt, he said, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.” In a contract, good and services are exchanged. In a covenant, persons are exchanged. A contract may create a bond between businesses, or a business and their customer. However, covenants create family bonds. This is why we call marriage a covenant, because two people promise to give, not just their time or their material goods to one another, but they give their very selves to one another. That is what God promised to do for his chosen people Israel.

This raises a question: What were the terms and conditions of this covenant promise, and how did Israel enter into this covenant agreement with God? In Exodus chapter 24, we read that Moses gathered the people of Israel and he confirmed God’s covenant with them, as the mediator acting between the two parties. The first thing Moses did was have the young Israelite men offer sacrifices of bulls and oxen. Why did Moses do this? On one hand, those sacrifices served to cleanse the people of their sins. But, we must also consider, what happens if the terms and conditions of the covenant are not met? The sacrificed animals served as a symbolic reminder of the conditional curse the people put themselves under, were they not to fulfill their end of the covenant agreement. The flip side of the promise is the curse. Today we call vulgar speech curse words or swearing, because to put yourself under a curse is to swear an oath. We the remnants of this in our speech today. For example, and pardon my French, people say very flippantly all the time, “I’ll be damned,” if… The men of Israel slaughtered sacrifices before entering covenant, in essence, to say to God, “The fate of these animals will be our fate if we do not keep our end of the covenant.” After the animals had been sacrificed, Moses took the book of the law, also called the book of the covenant, and he read to it the people. After Moses described the terms of the covenant, the people of Israel responded, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” They swore an oath to keep the covenant. Moses then took blood from the sacrifices and he dashed it on the people, saying, “Here is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.” Then Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu along with the seventy elders of Israel ascended Mount Sinai, and they saw God. The text says, “Under his feet there was something like a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.” When they ascended the mountain, Moses and the elders of Israel shared a meal with God, because we read, “God did not lay his hand on the chief men of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”

We see in this passage, the various elements of what it takes to enter into a covenant: Sacrifice, blood, a promise and an agreement, and a shared meal. We see these same elements in our reading from the Apostle Paul this evening. Just as Moses and elders of Israel sat down and shared a meal with God, Jesus sits down to eat with his disciples on the night of his betrayal. Jesus takes bread and wine. Specifically, this was bread and wine, common everyday food, but bread and wine from the Passover meal—the meal that was a remembrance of God’s deliverance of his people from Egypt. Jesus takes a loaf of bread and offers thanks for it, and he breaks it. He tells his disciples, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Likewise, he took the chalice, and told his disciples, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” Jesus instructs his disciples to remember him, in the same way that Israel remembered the Passover. The Passover meal was not merely a kind of reminiscing on an event of the past, but it was a kind of reenactment. Eating the Passover meal in some mysterious way—we could say in a sacramental way—brought God’s redemption of his people from the past into the present moment! Jesus is saying, when you eat this bread and drink this cup and do so in remembrance of me—in the act of remembering in a mysterious and sacramental way, I will be there with you. In fact, the Apostle Paul says this very explicitly. He writes to the Corinthians, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” When we come to this table, it is not merely bread and wine that we share. We participate in the true body and blood of Christ. He has promised to be here at the altar and to give us his the redemption that he accomplished for us!

Jesus says the cup, which is his blood, is the blood of the New Covenant. Why must there be a new covenant. God promised to be God to his people Israel, but the people of Israel, as we read throughout this book, continually failed to live up to their promise to be God’s people. At Mt. Sinai the people exclaimed, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.” In fact, the people were not obedient. The people did not do all that the Lord had spoken. They broke the covenant. They did not fulfill the terms and conditions of the agreement. God’s people suffered the fate of the sacrificial animals. They were “slaughtered” by their enemies, their cities and the temple razed and looted by pagans, and they were taken off into captivity. First, the nation of Israel was led into captivity to Assyria, and later Judah was led into captivity to Babylon. Despite the repeated failures of Israel, God was committed to the salvation of his people. He was committed to be their God. God spoke to the Prophet Jeremiah: “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says 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.”

On that fateful night when the Lord Jesus was betrayed, the prophecy of Jeremiah was fulfilled. The Lord Jesus inaugurated a New Covenant, a better covenant. When Moses ratified the old covenant with the people of Israel, the men had to offer sacrifices. Yet, on this night, the Lord Jesus presented himself as the sacrifice to be offered. Moses read from the book of the covenant, and the people entered into the covenant by agreeing to follow all of God’s command. It was a covenant of works. Under the New Covenant, Jesus fulfils the requirements of the law on our behalf. Under the Old Covenant, the people had to put themselves under a curse if they broke the covenant. Under the New Covenant there is no curse! Scripture tells us, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” If there are no sacrifices to offer or oaths to swear, what must we do to enter this new covenant? Jesus simply says take eat and take drink, this my blood of the New Covenant. To enter this covenant, there is nothing you can do, you can only receive what Jesus has already done for you. There is no carrot at the end of the stick. There is no favor or forgiveness for you to earn. St. Matthew adds, to his version of the Words of Institution, “This is my blood, poured out for the forgiveness of sins.” Under this New Covenant, forgiveness is conditional only on receiving. God loves and accepts you, not based on anything good in you. His acceptance is not conditional on your ability follow and do all of his commandments. You are accepted and loved by God, because Jesus has promised, covenanted, to be your righteousness before God. The only condition to receive this unmerited and unconditional love and acceptance is simply by faith receive. Take and eat. Take and drink.

This evening, Jesus invites you to receive. He invites you to take bread, which is his body, and the cup, which is his blood, and receive him by faith into your life. He promises you the forgiveness of all of your sins. He promises you eternal life. All you have to do is receive it.