The Last Supper: Christ's New Covenant and Sacrifice

Now, while all of that's going on over here, at the same time, Jesus is making provisions to celebrate the Passover with His disciples. And we read the text, "Then came the Day of Unleavened Bread when the Passover must be killed, and He sent Peter and John, saying 'Go to prepare the Passover for us that we may eat.'" And then it tells the story of those preparations. And verse 14 said, "When the hour had come, He sat down and the twelve apostles with Him, and He said to them, 'With fervent desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I say to you, I will no longer eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.'" [00:02:16]

Here we note that Jesus is beginning to enter into what's called His passion. He's aware of His impending execution. He's aware that He is going to be betrayed. He's aware that He will also be publicly denied by Peter. And all of this comes out at the celebration of the Last Supper. But there's a word here in the text that I want to pause on for just a moment, when it said, "When the hour had come." Throughout the ministry of Jesus, multiple references are made to His hour, and on occasion He will say, "My hour is not yet come." [00:03:25]

Now, you remember why this celebration was so important to the Jewish people that God commanded that they observe it every single year without fail because in the first instance, the Passover commemorated God's redemptive action in saving His people at the time of the Exodus. You remember the various plagues that God visited upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt, and the command to Pharaoh when He said, "Let My people go." Let them go that they might come out into the desert to the mountain and worship Me there. [00:05:45]

And so God appointed this avenging angel, this angel of doom to come and to bring death upon the Egyptians and on the house of Pharaoh. However, He took again intricate provisions to spare the lives of His own people and of their children and their livestock. And you know what He did. He gave the instructions that each family would select a lamb without blemish and kill that lamb and take the blood of that lamb and affix it to the doorposts so that when the angel of death came, He would see the blood of the lamb smeared on the doorframe and know that that was a house of a Jewish person, and pass over that house, and the people then who were in that house escaped the condemnation of God. [00:07:03]

And so every year the Passover Seder was celebrated in every home, and the father was required to explain to the children why they were celebrating the Passover meal. Now, as I said, the first reference of the Passover was to celebrate something that had taken place in the past. It was a call to remembrance. Don't ever forget how I redeemed you from the Egyptians through the blood of the Pascal lamb. But not only did this event look backwards in time, but in the economy of the providence of God, it was looking forward to the future, to the final Passover, to the perfect Passover when the perfect Pascal Lamb would be sacrificed, ending the sacrificial system once and for all, that in the blood of this Lamb the people would be experiencing a greater exodus, not simply an exodus out of the bondage of Pharaoh, but out of the bondage of Satan itself, out of the bondage of death, because this exodus would take them, His people, literally into the Promised Land of heaven, into the heavenly Jerusalem, into the heavenly temple. [00:08:44]

And so Jesus gathers His disciples in the upper room, and as He's going through the Seder, as He's going through the liturgy of the Passover, He changes it. And can you imagine how significant it was for any Jew, after the Passover was originally instituted, to have the audacity to change the liturgy of it. Well, the only person in the world who had the authority to make such drastic changes to the liturgy was Jesus Himself because the Passover was about Him. He is the Pascal Lamb. He is the One invested by God with the authority to give a new understanding, a new meaning to this Old Testament sacrament, as it were. [00:10:15]

I might also add before we look at those changes in the liturgy, that what is happening here in terms of the work of Christ is not simply the fulfillment of Passover, but it's the end of the Old Covenant because in that upper room the New Testament church was born. Most people think that the church was born on the day of Pentecost. I don't. I think the church was born there in the upper room when Jesus institutes the new covenant. And when covenants were instituted, they had to be ratified by blood, and the ratification of this new covenant that Jesus institutes in the upper room takes place the following afternoon when the covenant is ratified in Jesus' own blood. And so He announces this new covenant. [00:11:35]

After He took the bread, and He changed the meaning of the bread by saying, "This is My body." Now there's an endless controversy about what Jesus meant when He said, "This is My body." Was He identifying that bread with Himself? Was the verb "to be" there used as a copula, meaning an identification, that this bread is identical to My body. Now, there are lots of people who think so. Luther took the position in the debates and discussions among the reformers about whether or not the bread was literally the body of Christ. [00:12:34]

And then we are told that in like manner, after they had supped, He took the cup. They drank the cup four different times in the Seder. On this occasion, Jesus again changes the liturgy, and He said "This is the cup of the New Testament which is in My blood, which is shed for the remission of your sins. And as oft as you eat of this bread and drink of the cup, you show forth My death until I come." And it's interesting to me that in the early church, the Christians met weekly and celebrated this new covenant sacrament, not just once a year, but once a week because it was understood to be so vitally important in communicating, in demonstrating the importance of the cross and of the new covenant, and of the Lamb who was slain, the Lamb without blemish, the perfect Pascal sacrifice. [00:14:12]

Now, you know that churches are hopelessly divided in their understanding of what happens in the celebration of the Lord's Supper. And the disputes are not only long, lengthy. They can become acerbic because the passion is so great. Everybody understands. This is an extremely important thing that we're doing here. And so what is actually happening? What is Jesus' connection to it? In the Roman Catholic Church, the church developed a doctrine of transubstantiation, which I'm sure you've heard of. And the doctrine of transubstantiation simply teaches that in the miracle of the mass, the body and -- excuse me -- the bread and the wine, the elements of bread and wine, are changed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ, so that Jesus corporeally, physically is there in the body and blood. [00:15:46]

Calvin, of course, had a great problem with that, going back to the church's Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century in 451 when the church declared that in the mystery of the incarnation were the two natures. The divine nature and the human nature were joined together in perfect unity, that that union was without mixture, confusion, separation, or division, each nature retaining its own attributes. That is to say, that in the incarnation, the human nature of Jesus is not deified. The human nature retains its human attributes. And the divine nature retains its divine attributes. And so the divine nature can be in Pittsburgh, and Chicago, and Boston, and Orlando all at the same time, but not the human nature. The human nature is limited in space and time by the natural limitations of humanity. [00:18:34]

But these debates go on and on and on, precisely because the church does understand that when Jesus the night before He died celebrated the Passover for the last time, was fully intending to establish a sacrament that would enrich His church and would cause His people to remember what He accomplished by offering that perfect sacrifice, by being the Lamb without blemish, but also look forward and prefigure the ultimate banquet feast in heaven at the marriage feast of the Lamb, when we sit down with Him at His Father's banquet house in heaven. So Jesus would not allow Himself to be taken, would not allow the soldiers to come too soon to interrupt or to abort the establishment of this most significant sacrament. [00:21:03]