meditatio at the water's edge

Much of what we have inherited in the line of teaching on the Lord’s Supper, I have found to be inadequate, and, regrettably, sometimes wrong. I want to share with you what I am convinced is a more faithful understanding of what Jesus was getting at there in the upper room, and what I hope you will find to be a more compelling re-vision for our own practice of communion. These are my brief reflections on some things that N.T. Wright has written in “Jesus and the Victory of God.”

To understand the Lord’s Supper, we have to know the history of Israel, or else risk turning it into a flattened practice of retelling only a part of whole story ( perhaps a bit like retelling the story of one’s life without mentioning one’s parents). So what is the parental idea from which the Last Supper was born? What do we need to understand from the history of Israel to bring a more rounded understanding of what Jesus was up to in that upper room? To begin, we must go back to Egypt.

Israel had been in slavery, in captivity, in exile, in Egypt for four hundred years, but God had heard their cries for help and had sent them a deliverer, Moses, to lead them out of captivity and back to the land promised to their forefathers. God was about to deliver them from tyranny and into freedom. Before the last demonstration by God to the Egyptians that YWHW was God and not pharaoh, God told the people of Israel to do a strange thing. He told them to fix a strange symbolic meal (Exodus 12) of lamb, unleavened bread, and bitter herbs and to place some of the blood from the sacrificed lamb on the doorframes.

Through a remarkable sequence of events, Israel was released from their captivity and headed out toward the land that had been promised to them. As they made their way through the Red Sea on dry ground, into the wilderness, and out of the grip of Pharaoh, they made their way to Mt. Sinai where God made a covenant (Exodus 19-20; cf. Deuteronomy 4-5) with Israel.

Well, you know the story, Israel was rebellious and had to wander through the desert for forty years before they could enter the land, but they eventually did make it there. It was a strange journey with strange twists and turns, but the point of the whole exodus story is that was a return from exile.

Flash forward many hundreds of years to the time of Jesus. Israel was again in exile, but this time it was in their own land. Yes, they had been captives in Babylon some four to five hundred years earlier, and yes, they had returned to the land, but they had been under continuous occupation by foreign powers (Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome). This was a sign to them that YHWH had not yet returned to Israel. They were not free, the Torah was not kept (at least according to some), and this meant that for all practical purposes, they remained in exile—their sins (their acts of covenant unfaithfulness to YHWH) were still being held against them (read Deuteronomy 28-30 for the background to this thinking).

With that very cursory retelling of Israel’s story, we are a bit more prepared to take another look at Jesus and his twelve disciples in the upper room.

Jesus and his disciples were gathered to celebrate a sort of Passover meal. Like all Passover meals, the event was a rehearsing of the story of exodus. To Jews in Jesus’ time, it evoked their longing for a new exodus, for their own return from exile, for the great renewed covenant spoken of by Jeremiah (Jer 31:31-34) and Isaiah (Is 51-66) and the other prophets. The meal symbolized the fact that YHWH no longer held Israel’s sins against her and would rescue her from her enslavement. The meal was all about Israel’s God again becoming king.

It was the tradition in Jewish households that the head of the household would explain the Passover meal. So now Jesus was presiding over this strange meal and explaining the meal with a very peculiar twist. Jesus takes the old story of Israel’s redemption (freedom from bondage) and lays over that story this own story—weaving them together as a re-vised exodus story. He explains to them that the bread is his body, and that the cup refers to the new covenant sealed with his blood that was to be poured out. Jesus was saying, in dramatic effect, that the new exodus was happening in and through him.

So in the upper room, we find Jesus doing much more than giving his disciples a little something to remember him by. We find Jesus redrawing the very symbols that ordered Israel’s life and hope, focusing them now upon himself. It was to be through his fate that the new exodus was about to occur, and it was to be through his fate that YHWH was returning as king.


Well, how does this change things concerning the way we look at the Lord’s Supper? Allow me to suggest a few themes that come right to the fore.

New Exodus: the captives are freed. The Lord’s Supper is about being freed from bondage. With this in mind, passages such as Romans 6 become instantly relevant. No longer are we slaves to the powers and their destructive oppression and corrupting influence, but rather we are bound to God in his restorative justice and covenant faithfulness. We might say that we are now free to live our lives to God.

New Exodus: the exiles have returned. The Lord’s Supper is about coming home. Revelation 19 hints at this with the marriage supper of the lamb (a sort of final Lord’s Supper, if you will). In one sense, that return is something we look forward to, but in another sense, it is already happening as we find that our true home is in the kingdom of God. In Jesus’ re-vision of the exodus story, he is announcing that the kingdom of God is breaking in through his own life, death, and resurrection. We might say that our home has come to us.

New Exodus: our sins have been forgiven. The Lord’s Supper points to the forgiveness of the covenant unfaithfulness of God’s people. YHWH had rejected Israel because they had broken their covenant, but that was forgiven and the proof of it was that YHWH would once again be present among his people. Forgiveness of sins was the forgiveness of covenant unfaithfulness. We see in this theme of covenant relationship that God is present among his people once again, and they are to live as proper members of his family. We might say here that forgiveness points us to life in the new covenant.

New Exodus: God is once again our king. The Lord’s Supper points us to lives lived under the kingdom of YHWH. We look forward to the day when all creation finds itself restored under the kingdom of God, so in the present we are to demonstrate to the rest of creation what that restored life looks like. In this we are ambassadors of the kingdom; signs of hope to the world, examples of life in God’s great new covenant. We might say that this is our opportunity to show the world what life looks like when God is king.