The Last Supper

There’s no passage in the New Testament more often repeated in Christian worship than this one. On the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus 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, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” That’s Paul, recounting in 1 Corinthians 11 what he says he himself received and passed on. Some version of those words is read aloud in Catholic and Orthodox liturgies daily; in Anglican, Lutheran, and many Reformed churches every week; in evangelical and free-church traditions on a regular cycle that varies by community. Christians have heard these words, and said these words, more times than they can count.

The familiar reading is straightforward. Jesus, on the night before he died, gave his disciples bread and wine, identified them with his body and blood, and told them to keep doing it in his memory. That’s what the church has done, in every age and on every continent, for two thousand years. And it has been good.

But here’s something easy to miss, because the institution narrative is so familiar.

when this was happening

The night Jesus took the bread and the cup wasn’t an ordinary night. According to the synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — Jesus and his disciples were in Jerusalem because it was Passover. They were eating a Passover meal. Luke makes the framing explicit: Then came the day of Unleavened Bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed… And he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” (Luke 22:7, 15, NIV). Matthew and Mark agree. Whatever else is happening at this meal, it’s happening inside the most important annual festival of first-century Jewish life — the night Israel remembered being delivered from slavery in Egypt, the night a lamb was sacrificed at the Temple and eaten with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, the night every Jewish family in Jerusalem was reciting the story of the exodus around tables much like this one.

This isn’t background. This is the room the words were spoken in. The bread Jesus took was matzah, the unleavened bread of Passover. The cup he took was a cup of wine drunk at the Passover meal. The phrase he used over the cup — the new covenant in my blood — was a phrase whose every word carried weight in the religious imagination of his disciples. What a first-century Jewish hearer would have heard at this meal is layered in a way the modern English-speaking Christian ear, hearing the institution narrative at communion two thousand years later, often doesn’t catch.

what the Passover meal actually was

Before we go further, a careful note. The Passover meal that Jews celebrate today — the formal Seder, with its Haggadah (the printed book that guides the meal), its four cups of wine, its hidden afikoman, its order of fifteen specific steps — is a beautiful tradition. It isn’t, in its fully developed form, the meal Jesus ate. The careful Jewish historical scholarship of the last half-century, including Jonathan Klawans (an American scholar of ancient Judaism at Boston University) and Baruch Bokser (whose 1984 book The Origins of the Seder (University of California Press) is the foundational study), has made clear that the full rabbinic Seder we know today was codified after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD — about forty years after Jesus died. Before 70 AD, Passover was centered on the Temple sacrifice. Each family bought or raised a lamb, brought it to the Temple courtyard on the afternoon before Passover, where the priests slaughtered it according to the law in Exodus 12, and then carried it back to where they were staying in Jerusalem to roast and eat that night with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.

So when we say Jesus’s last meal was a Passover meal, we mean: it was the meal eaten that night, in Jerusalem, with lamb and matzah and bitter herbs, while the family remembered the exodus. Some elements of the later formal Seder were probably already in place — wine, blessings over bread and cup, some retelling of the exodus story — but the fully codified liturgy came later. Honoring that history protects us from anachronism, and lets us see what was there with more clarity.

What was there, at Jesus’s Passover meal, was this:

The lamb. Slaughtered that afternoon at the Temple, eaten that night around the table. Every family in Jerusalem doing the same thing at roughly the same time. The unleavened bread, matzah. The bitter herbs. The wine. The remembering. The story of Egypt and the angel of death and the blood on the doorposts and the long walk into freedom.

And one more thing. The covenant.

The Passover wasn’t only the memory of deliverance. It was also the night on which God had begun to make a people for himself. Three months later, at Sinai, Moses had taken the blood of sacrificed animals and sprinkled half on the altar and half on the people, and said, This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words (Exodus 24:8, NIV). The Passover and the covenant at Sinai were two ends of the same arc — the night Israel was delivered from Egypt and the morning, weeks later, when Israel became God’s covenant people. Both involved blood. Both involved a meal. Both were remembered together.

And the prophets had promised, centuries later, that there would be another covenant. The days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah… (Jeremiah 31:31, NIV). The exiles of Babylon had clung to that promise across centuries. By Jesus’s time, the hope of a new covenant — a renewed relationship between God and his people, written on the heart rather than on stone tablets — was a live element in Jewish messianic imagination.

So when Jesus, at his Passover meal, took the bread and broke it and said, This is my body, he was speaking inside a meal whose every element was already loaded with meaning. And when he raised the cup and said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, the disciples around the table would have heard, in that one sentence, the echoes of every layer the meal was already carrying. The blood of Passover, painted on the doorposts of their ancestors. The blood of Sinai, sprinkled on the people. The new covenant promised by Jeremiah. And, behind all of it, the lamb — the lamb that had been eaten at this meal, every year, since the night their fathers had walked out of Egypt.

The American Catholic scholar Brant Pitre — Distinguished Research Professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute (and Professor of Sacred Scripture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans when the book was published) and author of Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist (Doubleday, 2011) — has traced these layers in detail. Pitre is openly Catholic, and the conclusions he draws toward the end of his book about Eucharistic theology land in a specifically Catholic direction. Christians of different traditions will land in different places on what the Eucharist is. But the Jewish background Pitre traces — the way Jesus’s words at the Last Supper sit on top of Passover, covenant, lamb, and new-exodus expectation, all at once — is mainstream scholarship across the traditions. It belongs to anyone who reads the institution narrative carefully. It isn’t Catholic property; it’s the first audience’s hearing.

the recovered reading

So when we read the institution narrative again — On the night he was betrayed… he took bread… he took the cup… this is the new covenant in my blood — we can hear what the disciples around that table heard.

This was a Passover meal. A first-century Jewish hearer would have understood the bread on the table as the bread of affliction their ancestors ate when they came out of Egypt. They would have understood the cup as part of the wine of the Passover, the cup over which the family blessed God for redeeming Israel. They would have understood the lamb on the table as the sacrifice that, according to the law in Exodus 12, was the center of the night. And then their teacher — the rabbi they had followed for three years, the one they had hoped was the Messiah — took the bread and called it his body, took the cup and called it the new covenant in his blood. He wasn’t inventing something out of nothing. He was doing something with what was already on the table. He was taking the long story of his people — the lamb, the blood, the deliverance, the covenant, the promised renewal — and pulling it forward into himself. This is now me. The lamb is now me. The blood of the covenant is now my blood. The new covenant is happening tonight. Eat. Drink. Remember.

The earliest reading of the institution narrative — Jesus giving his disciples bread and wine on the night before he died — isn’t wrong. It is the heart of Christian worship. But once you can hear the Passover meal underneath the bread and the cup, the familiar reading becomes layered. The institution isn’t the start of a new ritual cut loose from history. It’s the moment a centuries-old meal — a meal that reached back through the prophets to Sinai and back through Sinai to Egypt — turns a corner. The deliverance from Egypt becomes the deliverance Jesus is about to perform on a cross the next day. The blood on the doorposts becomes the blood about to be poured out. The new covenant promised to Jeremiah is opened, here, at this table, with this bread, with this cup.

What Christians across every tradition can say together — what Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, and Baptist readers can all hold — is that something happened at this meal that the church has been doing in every age since. Do this in remembrance of me. What exactly this means, what exactly the bread and the cup are in the moment they are received — those are questions where the traditions have differed for centuries, and this chapter isn’t going to settle them. What we can say is that the meal itself hasn’t stopped. The bread is still broken. The cup is still poured. The Passover that Jesus took into himself, on the night before he died, is still being eaten by his church.

The earliest Christian prayer over the bread and the cup that has come down to us, outside the New Testament itself, is in a small first- or early-second-century document called the Didache — the Teaching — which records how some of the earliest Christians prayed when they gathered for what they were already, by then, calling the Eucharist (Greek eucharistia, “thanksgiving”). The prayer is short and astonishingly tender:

We thank you, our Father, for the life and knowledge that you have made known to us through Jesus your Servant. To you be the glory forever. Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills, and was gathered together and became one, so let your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom; for yours is the glory and the power, through Jesus Christ, forever.

The image is rich — wheat scattered on a hillside, harvested, ground, kneaded, baked, broken, eaten; the church scattered across the world, gathered, made one, in the breaking of the bread. The early Christians who prayed this prayer weren’t standing at a distance from Jesus’s Passover meal. They were inside it. Two thousand years later, we still are. The bread is still being broken. The cup is still being poured. The lamb has been slain, and the meal goes on. Thanks be to God.