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Last Supper
00:26:26
The Passover, God’s great act of redemption in the Old Testament, pointed forward to the Lord’s ultimate act of redemption in the New Testament. Today, R.C. Sproul describes the night when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper. Get R.C. Sproul’s...
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R.C. Sproul
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.
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Host
Jesus and his disciples had gathered in an upper room. There was a sense of anticipation as they prepared for the Jewish tradition of the Passover Supper. This is the Thursday edition of Renewing youg Mind, and I'm glad you're joining us. After the bread was broken and passed around, Jesus made an astonishing change to the liturgy of the Passover. A change so drastic that the disciples could not miss the implications. Here's Dr. Sproul on the Last Supper.
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R.C. Sproul
In our last session, we looked at Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem. And we talked about Jesus fulfilling three offices from the Old Testament. The office of prophet, priest and king. And of course, as enthusiastically as Jesus was received by the multitudes. In contrast to that, the rulers of the Sanhedrin and of the religious establishment were outraged by Jesus triumphal entry. And we begin to see the storm clouds starting to gather. And the situation rapidly becomes extremely ominous. And so I'm going to look for a moment at Luke 22, where in verse one, we read the following words. Now the feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called Passover. And the chief priests and scribes sought how they might kill him, for they feared the people. And it goes on to say that then Satan entered Judas, surnamed Iscariot, who was numbered among the 12. And so he went his way and conferred with the chief priests and captains how they might betray him to them. And they were glad and agreed to give him money. And so he promised and sought opportunity to betray him to them in the absence of the multitude. So we're told here that while the Feast of the Unleavened Bread is being prepared, the time of Passover, at that very time, the leaders are entering into conspiracy to do away with Jesus. And they enter into a bargain with one of the 12, Judas Iscariot, that Judas might betray him. And 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. 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. 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. And there's a twofold reference to that hour. There is first of all, the dark and ghastly side of the hour, his darkest hour when he will be crucified. But then he also looks beyond that hour to the hour when he will be glorified. But now the hour of crisis is at hand, and he realizes that his hours of life in his body are numbered. Keep in mind that the celebration of the Lord's Supper that Jesus is instituting here takes place less than 24 hours before his execution. So apart from his post resurrection life, this was his last night alive in the body on earth. And he has this great desire one last time to celebrate the Passover with his disciples. And so he makes these provisions for them to gather in the upper room to celebrate the Passover. 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. And the last and the worst of the plagues, of course, was the judgment that God sent upon Pharaoh and on Egypt with the slaying of their firstborn sons, and not only of their families, but also of their livestock. 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 doorpost 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 the house of a Jewish person and pass over that house. And the people would then who were in that house escaped the condemnation of God. And we know that as a result of that, the greatest redemptive act in the Old Testament took place where God, sparing his children, then delivered them out of the hands of Pharaoh and out of bondage in Egypt and took them aside after the Exodus and made them his holy nation, saying, I will be your God and you will be my people. 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 Paschal 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 Paschal 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 his people literally into the promised land of heaven, into the heavenly Jerusalem, into the heavenly temple. 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 Paschal Lamb. He is the one invested by God with the authority to give a new understanding and new meaning to this Old Testament sacrament, as it were. I'd 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 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 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. Like Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations, Luther pounded on the table, saying, hoc est corpus meum. Hoc est corpus meum. This is my body. Well, everybody knew that's what he said. But he also said, I am the door through which men must enter. And nobody took that to mean that Jesus literally was to be identified with oak and veneer and doorknobs and hinges. You obviously understand that the use of the verb to be can also frequently mean this represents. And when you're going through a liturgy. And Jesus takes an element that had symbolized one thing in the past, now he indicates it symbolizes something new, namely, not the giving of the Paschal Lamb of old, but the giving of his own body, his own life. 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 paschal sacrifice. And that's what we celebrate every time we come together in the church and enjoy the Lord's Supper. Now, you know, the 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 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. Using the categories of Aristotle, who said, every object has both substance and accidents. Not accidents, unfortunate mishaps, accidens refer to the external, perceivable qualities of a thing. My coat is blue, and that blueness is an external quality of the coat. And so Rome used the Aristotelian idea and distinction and said, the formula of this is that in the miracle, the bread and wine, the substance of the bread and wine change into the substance of the body and blood of Christ. But the accidents of bread and wine remain the same. Which means that the bread still looks like bread, it tastes like bread. If you drop that on the floor, it sounds like bread, it feels like bread. For all of the observable senses, it still looks like it's bread because it has the outward qualities of bread, but it's no longer bread. Its essence, its substance is the body and blood of Christ. Luther thought that that involved more miracles than were necessary and was somewhat frivolous. And so he modified it to say that, no, that Christ is present in, under and through the elements, but there's no change of substance and accidents as such. But both doctrines were insisting on the real physical presence of Christ in the Last Supper. 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, where the two natures, the divine nature and the human nature, were joined together and 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 bo, 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. Well, Rome got around that, as did Luther, with the doctrine of the communication of attributes, namely that the body of Jesus, his human body, is able to be all these places at the same time. Because the divine nature communicates the power of ubiquity or omnipresence to the human nature. I'm convinced that that's a serious violation of Chalcedon and represents a deciding view of Jesus and completely destroys the reality of the human nature of Christ. Now, we believe in our Church that Jesus is truly present, but he's present by his divine nature. His divine nature isn't separated from the human nature. The human nature is in heaven, so is the divine nature. But the divine nature is also here. And we are connected to the whole Jesus by virtue of the presence of the divine nature, so that he's here. Others have said and argued in history that epoxy on all of those houses, that it's all just simply symbolism and that the sacrament simply represents Jesus and there's no sense of any divine or transcendent presence of Christ in the sacrament. 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.
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Host
The Lord's Supper is a vivid reminder of our own need for Christ, isn't it? Our bodies need nourishment to live. And Jesus made it clear that he is to be our source of spiritual food. R.C. sproul taught us about the life of Jesus today on Renewing youg Mind. We're glad you're with us. With Good Friday tomorrow and Resurrection Sunday coming, we've been spending this week thinking about the ministry of Jesus and what some call Holy Week. If you'd like to learn more about Jesus and the significance of key events in his life, we're making the entire 12 message DVD set, what did Jesus Do? Available to you when you give a gift of any amount@renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. We'll also send you a new hardcover book from Dr. Sproul, Holy Week the Week that Changed the World, two resources, along with digital access to the what Did Jesus Do? Series and study Guide. So call us today at 800-435-4343. Go online at renewingyourmind.org or use the link in the podcast Show Notes. This offer ends tomorrow, so don't delay. Tomorrow is Good Friday, and we'll conclude this series with Dr. Sproul with a message on the Crucifixion. So join us tomorrow here on Renewing your Mind.