The Institution of the Lord's Supper

The Third Cup, and what Jesus Changed

Bavinck judges that Jesus instituted the Supper after the lamb had been eaten, "after the supper" (Luke 22:20), in connection with the third cup, the cup of thanksgiving (Bavinck, 2008, vol. 4). Allison locates the cup saying at the same point and notes that the third cup was "associated with redemption" (Allison, 2012). The full Passover liturgy behind this is set out in Eating in the Presence of God.

Standard procedure called for the leader to express thanksgiving over the unleavened bread, presumably in the traditional form: "Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth." Jesus then breaks and distributes the bread, and to this entirely customary action "appended a startling statement: 'Take, eat; this is my body.'" The effect, Allison argues, was to change the meal "from a remembrance of the hasty departure of the people of Israel at the outset of their miraculous liberation from affliction in Egypt (Ex. 12:17; Deut. 16:3), to an anticipation of his sacrificial death on the cross of Calvary for the sins of the world" (Allison, 2012).

Christ kept the old liturgy but changed what it was about.

Why the Gospel Writers Report the Boring Parts

John Nolland makes an observation about the Matthean that in any Jewish text reporting a meal, the taking, blessing, breaking and giving "will be largely assumed and are never formally reported as a set." And yet, Matthew reports every one of them, and does so "in the midst of an account of a Passover meal, an account which is notable for leaving totally unreported the main elements of the Passover liturgy (notably the eating of the lamb and the questions and answers about redemption from Egypt)" (Nolland, 2005).

Why report the ordinary and omit the distinctive? Nolland's answer is that the reports "step us through the immediately connected parts of the standard action in order to be able to mark precisely what is different." The Gospel writers are showing us the frame so that we can see the substitution.

Nolland also proposes a fascinating reading of the bread saying. The unleavened bread was the "bread of affliction" of Deuteronomy 16:3. Putting "my body" in its place may "implicitly relocate the affliction from those who eat the bread (identifying with the affliction of their ancestors) to the one who is the bread (anticipating his coming Passion)" (Nolland, 2005).

So, the affliction moves off the congregation and onto the Christ. Cool gospel message.

Four Narratives, Two Streams

Four accounts of the institution survive: Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-25, Luke 22:19-20 and 1 Corinthians 11:23-25. Fee sets them in parallel columns and observes that they preserve two distinct forms, one represented by Mark and Matthew and the other by Paul and Luke (Fee, 2014).

Fee draws two judgments from this. Both traditions are rooted in the same history, since their common features are the essential ones and are very similar. And the most significant differences lie in the cup saying and in the appearance of the remembrance motif in Paul and Luke. His contextual argument is that Paul repeats the words of institution precisely because the Corinthians are not keeping this tradition, and that Paul's own interpretive addition in verse 26 gives us "our best clues as to where Paul's present concerns lie" (Fee, 2014).

On the transmission itself, Fee notes that "received" and "passed on" are technical terms from Paul's Jewish heritage for the handing on of religious instruction, and argues against reading "I received from the Lord" as a claim to direct revelation. The Last Supper material "is not the kind of thing that belongs to 'revelation', but to the church's ongoing tradition from the time of its inception" (Fee, 2014).

Bavinck presses the historical consequence, and it is worth having ready for anyone who thinks the Supper was a later church invention. Paul's reception of this tradition "undoubtedly coincides with the time of his conversion (Acts 9) and is therefore only a few years removed from the last night," which places the church's celebration of the Supper as a dominical institution "above all reasonable doubt" (Bavinck, 2008, vol. 4).

What the Copula Can and Cannot Carry

Everything in the Reformation debate ran through two words (copula = connecting word), and this is where five hundred years of argument concentrated.

Zwingli, following a suggestion he received through Cornelius Hoen, held that est in hoc est corpus meum ("this is my body") should be read as significat, "signifies." His argument was that Scripture is full of figuratives: "in John 15 Christ says 'I am the vine'… Similarly, in John 1 we read 'Behold the Lamb of God'… Christ is not literally a lamb." He concluded that "there are innumerable passages in Scripture where the word 'is' means 'signifies'," and therefore that Matthew 26 should be taken the same, in tropice (Zwingli, On the Lord's Supper, 1526, quoted in McGrath, 2012).

Calvin's version of the argument is more careful. He observes first that the transubstantiationist reading collapses on its own literalism. Christ took bread into His hands, and it was that which He called His body, so "who does not perceive, then, that that to which this pronoun referred was bread still?" He then notes that using est "to signify a transmutation into another substance, is a thing never heard of, in any country or in any language" (Calvin, Institutes, IV.XVII.XX).

Calvin then turns on the Lutherans with the same blade: "there is a wide difference between these two assertions, that 'the bread is the body,' and that 'the body is with the bread'." If the words must be taken with strict literal precision, then those who say "in, with and under" have already abandoned them.

Calvin's positive account is metonymy, and he grounds it in the sacramental usage of the whole canon. Circumcision is called "my covenant," the paschal lamb "the Lord's passover," the rock in the desert "was Christ." The name of the thing signified is transferred to the sign, "in a figurative sense indeed, but by a most apt analogy" (Institutes, IV.XVII.XXI). And he insists this concedes nothing to emptiness, because the sign "is not a vain and useless memorial… but also a true and real exhibition of it." He cites Augustine: "Christ did not hesitate to call it his body, when he gave it as the sign of his body."

The most useful modern treatment is D. A. Carson's, because it refuses to let either side settle the question by lexical assertions. Carson sets out the standard classification of copula uses and adds a fifth, fulfilment. He engages G. B. Caird's argument that since the elements cannot be identical with the living body of which Jesus' hands were part, "is" must be metaphorical, and that the traditional objection about "mere symbols" fails because "many symbols, such as a kiss, a handshake and the presentation of a latchkey, are a means, or even the means, of conveying what they represent" (Caird, quoted in Carson, 1996).

Carson's response is the honest one. He grants Caird's point about symbols, then presses a disanalogy: "bread is not simultaneously a symbol for and a part of Jesus' body in the same way a kiss is a symbol for and a part of love." His conclusion is methodological (and it's where I land): "even when 'is' is correctly identified as to type of copula, all further discussion is not thereby foreclosed" (Carson, 1996).

That is the finding I want to press on both sides.

The real case for real presence sits elsewhere, in Koinonia - Participation in the Body and Blood and Anamnesis - Remembrance and the Lord's Supper, and the real case against a local bodily presence sits in The Ascension and the Presence of Christ.

The New Covenant in My Blood

The cup saying carries the most importance, and it often gets the least attention.

Nolland traces "blood of the covenant" to Exodus 24:8, where Moses splatters half the sacrificial blood on the people with the words, "See the blood of the covenant that Yahweh has made with you." The blood, shared between altar and people, "binds God and the people together, with the people aligned with the holiness of God, and with solemn commitment on both sides." He adds a second echo in Zechariah 9:11, given the weight Zechariah carries in the passion narrative, where God promises on the basis of covenant blood to set prisoners free (Nolland, 2005).

The word new is important. Nolland observes that "a fresh sealing in the blood of the covenant implies some kind of failure of the covenant," and locates the background in the prophetic insistence that Israel's covenant failure produced the exile, with Ezekiel 16:59-63 mapping the steps from breach through judgment to a covenant God will "establish… forever" (Nolland, 2005).

Matthew Barrett makes the same connection to Jeremiah. The cup is the new covenant "in my blood" because, unlike the blood of the Passover lamb, "the blood of this Lamb will definitively take away sins," ratifying Jeremiah's end note: "For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more" (Barrett, 2020).

Barrett's most impacting observation: "in Matthew 26, the blood and the Mediator are one: as the new Moses, Jesus spills his own blood for the forgiveness of the people." Moses handled someone else's blood. Jesus handles His own.

Jeremiah 31:31-34 is "vitally important to New Testament writers," cited by Jesus at the Supper, by Paul as the mark of what Christians do when they take communion, and by Hebrews 8:8-9:22 as the interpretive key to Christ's death (House, 1998). John Stott states the upshot in his own register: here is "the truly fantastic assertion that through the shedding of Jesus' blood in death God was taking the initiative to establish a new pact or 'covenant' with his people, one of the greatest promises of which would be the forgiveness of sinners" (Stott, 1986).

What the Institution is Actually a Memorial of

Jesus was, on His last evening, giving instructions for His own memorial. And what that memorial dramatises "is neither his birth nor his life, neither his words nor his works, but only his death. Nothing could indicate more clearly the central significance which Jesus attached to his death" (Stott, 1986).

He had one night to tell His church what to keep doing, and He gave them a meal about His execution.

Then He attached an oath to it: "I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom" (Matt 26:29), which opens the gap every Communion since has been eaten in. That thread is picked up in Eating in the Presence of God.

See also: Anamnesis - Remembrance and the Lord's Supper | Koinonia - Participation in the Body and Blood | Holy Communion

Sources

• Allison, G. R. (2012). Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church. Crossway.
• Barrett, M. (2020). Canon, Covenant and Christology: Rethinking Jesus and the Scriptures of Israel. New Studies in Biblical Theology. IVP.
• Bavinck, H. (2008). Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (J. Bolt, Ed.; J. Vriend, Trans.). Baker Academic.
• Calvin, J. (1559/1845). Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume 2, Books III-IV (J. Allen, Trans.).
• Carson, D. A. (1996). Exegetical Fallacies (2nd ed.). Baker Academic.
• Fee, G. D. (2014). The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Revised ed.). NICNT. Eerdmans.
• House, P. R. (1998). Old Testament Theology. IVP Academic.
• McGrath, A. E. (2012). Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
• Nolland, J. (2005). The Gospel of Matthew. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Eerdmans.
• Stott, J. R. W. (1986). The Cross of Christ. IVP.