Jesus and the New Covenant
1 Corinthians 11.23-26 & Luke 22.15-20
William Willimon tells of a dinner he once had with old high school friends. Willimon had not seen most of them in 15 years. Life had sent them in many different directions. “We had spread to the four corners of the world,” Willimon recalls, and thus in some ways they had become strangers to each other. Now, a high school reunion had brought them back together and they found themselves sitting around a table in a Chinese restaurant. As they ate, the conversation turned into storytelling, sharing memories of the past, remembering times shared together.
Willimon remembers: “One by one, we told stories of past events, funny memories of evenings spent together. Before long these ten virtual strangers were close friends once again, brought together by memories and stories and laughter and communion around the table. That’s often the way it is with stories—they remind us where we have come from and where we are and where we are going.” [Willimon, Sunday Dinner: The Lord’s Supper and the Christian Life, 13-14]
On the night before he was crucified, Jesus sat a table with his closest friends to share the Passover meal. Passover is a Jewish celebration of God’s deliverance of the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. During that meal, the story of the Exodus is remembered: how God sent Moses to demand that Pharoah let the people go; how when Pharoah resisted, God sent plagues to convince him; how the people were delivered from the final Plague—the Angel of Death—by marking their doorposts with blood of sacrificed lambs; how Pharoah relented and let the people go but then pursued them; how God at last led them through the parted waters of the Reed Sea to dry land and freedom and safety from Pharoah. As Willimon observes, when Jews celebrate this meal and tell these stories, the “past becomes present; the present generation become active participants in the Exodus”…they “remember not only who they were but who they are:” the people of God, chosen and delivered. [Ibid, 14]
It is in this context of memory and present reality that Jesus takes bread and cup and blesses them. Susan Robb points out in our Lenten Study that during the Passover meal there are traditionally four cups of wine. The third cup, which is drunk near the end of the meal, is called “the cup of redemption.” Robb suggests that this may be the cup which Jesus blesses and gives to his disciples saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Thus, Robb says, “the cup that once remembered the blood of the Passover lambs, delivering the firstborn Hebrews from death, now becomes the blood of Christ, God incarnate, poured out in love to overcome our slavery to sin and death.” [Robb, 104-105]
In addition to connecting his mission and coming death to God’s deliverance of the people from Egypt, Jesus employs covenant language, thus connecting himself to the long history of God’s gracious work of calling a people into relationship with God. Just as earlier covenants were ratified with the blood of a sacrificed animal, so would this new covenant in Jesus be ratified with the pouring out of his blood. Further, Jesus is invoking Jeremiah’s “new covenant” written on the heart. As Robb writes, “In effect, Jesus is saying, ‘I am delivering on my unbreakable promise of love to you through the outpouring of my own life’s blood….’ [Thus,] we may understand what happened [during Holy Week] as less [the enacting of a] new covenant than as a renewal of God’s unilateral promise of love offered to all people.” [107] In Jesus, God’s promise to Abraham that he and his descendants would be a blessing to all people is coming to fruition, for God is promising to forgive sin, give life abundant and eternal, and pour out Divine love so that our hearts may be transformed.
It is not surprising that Jesus makes a meal the symbol of this covenant. Throughout the Gospels we find Jesus at the table, eating with others, and often playing the role of the host. Jesus eats with religious authorities and with the common people. But often, we find him eating with tax collectors and sinners, thus scandalizing many of the religious leaders. To eat with someone is an act of intimacy, an act of sharing, an act of community, and act of welcome. And Jesus welcomed many folks to the table, saints and sinners, rich and poor, social elites and outcasts. Indeed, his practices of table fellowship are so radically inclusive, so boundary destroying, that one New Testament scholar observed that we might accurately say that in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is killed because of who he eats with. [I heard this claim made in a sermon in a youth worship service at the 2000 joint Disciples and UCC General Assembly/General Synod in Kansas City. I do not recall the preacher nor the scholar (a friend’s seminary professor) he was quoting.]
This radical, gracious welcome continues at the Last Supper. There, we see Jesus again hosting the meal. We see him serving Judas who would betray him, Peter who would deny him, and the other disciples, all of whom would abandon him. He was serving those whom he knew would turn their backs on him in his time of greatest need. Such is the love of God revealed in Jesus. In his words and actions he testifies to the wideness of God’s love and the openness and inclusivity of the community of the new covenant that love creates. The Lord’s Supper calls us to remember who God is: the Covenant Maker, the Builder of Community, the Forgiver of Sins, the Friend of Outcasts, Love Itself. And in remembering God’s identity, revealed in Creation, Covenant and Christ, we recall who we are: the People of the Covenant, Children of God, Disciples of Jesus.
Meals are of course not only community building occasions. Their primary purpose is nourishment of the body. The bread and wine Jesus takes and blesses are ordinary means of nourishment. They bring health and keep the body alive. But in the context of this meal, they come to symbolize spiritual nourishment. They represent and make tangible the grace that is greater than our sin, the love that transforms our hearts and minds, and the Divine presence from which nothing can separate us. In their concrete physicality, they make that grace as real as the bread we eat, that love as sweet as the cup we drink, that presence as visible as the Table, the Divine voice as audible as the prayers and Words of Institution.
Our hearts, souls and minds need this nourishment. As Augustine reminded us last week, God has made us for God’s self, and our souls will know no rest until they rest in God [Confessions, 1.1] Baron Fredrich von Hugel observed that we all have been born with a God shaped hole in our hearts. Though we try to fill it with many things—possessions, accomplishments, experiences, other people—only God can ease the ache and fill that void. Jesus is the one who meets the longing of our hearts for the God for whom we have been made, the one who leads us into true fulfillment by enabling us to love God with all that we have and are, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. At this Table of love, at this meal of the new covenant, we are nourished by the love and grace of God so that we might grow ever in the likeness of Christ, so that we might find the strength to live as God’s people.
The grace and welcome that makes us one in Christ, that creates a new community built on the covenant of love, is exemplified in an experience Susan Robb had while part of a tour group in Greece. Among the places they visited was the Isle of Patmos, the place where the prophet John was exiled sometime around the year 90. It was there that, on the Lord’s Day, he received the series of visions which he recorded in the book of Revelation.
On this dry, somewhat desolate little island, there is a small cave, up in the hills, where John is said to have lived. To Robb’s surprise, a small chapel was attached to the cave. Robb recalls that she and her fellow tourists, “sitting contemplating the sights in the cave, could also look across on this Sunday morning to see and hear a Greek Orthodox priest chanting the liturgy of a Communion service, in Greek, to Greek worshippers. There was the tourist side—the ‘cave’ side—and the Greek Orthodox worshipping community ‘chapel’ side. We tourists respectfully stayed on our side.” [114]
But of course, they could see and hear, in Greek, everything that was going on in the service. Robb, recalling a little Greek from seminary, was able to make out a few familiar phrases. She recognized the repeated chant of Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison: Lord have mercy; Christ have mercy. Hearing those words she “was unexpectedly overwhelmed by the sense of Christ’s presence.” She wept as she realized that on that very island, almost 2000 years before, John had encountered the Risen and Glorified Christ and received a message of hope. As she wondered at this fact, she was drawn into an awareness of the communion of saints that transcends time and place. She recalls, “I couldn’t help but sense the presence of all the saints who have gone before,” and, as in John’s vision, they were “singing praises to God.”
Her attention was drawn back to the liturgy by more familiar words and she soon discovered she wasn’t the only person among the tourists deeply affected by the place and the communion service. Robb remembers, “As the priest repeatedly snag the words Soma tou Christou—the body of Christ—while pressing bread into the open hands of the worshipping crowd of the chapel side of John’s former home, a young teenage boy, clearly on the tourist side of the cave, physically expressed what most of us were hungry to do. He spontaneously jumped up, ran across the open space between cave and chapel, saying, ‘I want some! I want some!’ We tourists held our breath waiting to see what would happen, and then…the priest smiled, lifted a piece of bread, and gently pressed it into this young foreigner-become-family member’s hand, welcoming him to Christ’s table to receive the Bread of Life.” [115]
This youth seemed to express the feelings of many of the tourists—they were “hungry for the lasting taste and fullness of [God’s] love and acceptance.” [Ibid.] And at the table of Christ he found welcome and community, love and grace. He found a place in God’s family, God’s community of love, and a call to live as one of God’s people embodying the love of Christ in his words and deeds.
As we come to the table this day, let us remember the great works of God who, “Out of compassion and love …‘remembers’ God’s people,” [Robb 112] making covenant and delivering us from slavery and exile, from sin and death, so that we may know life in all its fullness. And let us remember who we are: the people of God, called embody love and enact compassion, as we remember and celebrate God's covenant of love in Christ which binds us to God and to one another.