The New Passover

All four gospels recall Jesus’ last meal with his disciples as one with special significance. For the synoptic gospels it was a Passover meal and, during it, Jesus intoned a special blessing over the bread and wine. John differs from the synoptics in that his last supper was not a Passover meal and the symbolic act was one of foot washing. I’ll leave a discussion of John’s last supper to a later time. In this article, I will just focus on what the synoptic evangelists have to say about the last supper.

Passover Preparations

After describing how Judas offered to betray Jesus, Mark then proceeds to the preparations for Passover (14:12-17). Matthew (26:17-19) abbreviates the story, but Luke (22:7-13) stays fairly close to Mark. It is Passover eve, or the Preparation Day in which lambs begin to be slaughtered in the Temple court for use at the Passover supper. Upon being asked where they would celebrate the Passover, Jesus provides some odd instructions. 

He sends two disciples – Luke names them Peter and John – into the city where they will follow a man carrying a water jar. The man will lead them to a house with a furnished upper room where the disciples will prepare for the supper. Since it was typically the woman’s job to carry water, perhaps this particular man was part of a community, such as the Essenes, that did not admit women. It seems that Jesus had already made prior arrangements.

Growing up, I think just about every Catholic home had a framed Last Supper print similar to this. No, it's not da Vinci's famous mural, but a painting done in his style by Austrian artist H. Zabateri (1859-1945).

Reinterpreting Passover

As the supper begins in Mark and Matthew (Mk 14:18-21; Mt 26:21-25), Jesus foretells his betrayal before he blesses the bread and wine. In Luke, he does this after the blessing, most likely in order to add it to his lengthy discourse after the meal.

For the supper itself, Mark (14:22-25) and Matthew (26:26-29) describe the blessing and breaking of the bread, followed by Jesus giving thanks and sharing the cup. In Luke (22:15-20), Jesus shares the cup, breaks the bread, and then shares a second cup. Luke’s longer account deviates from Mark in other respects and can be broken down into two parts. 

In the first part (vv. 15-18), Jesus more clearly ties his supper to the Passover meal, twice asserting (“for I tell you”) his belief that the fulfillment of Passover will occur in the messianic banquet (Is 25:6) of the Kingdom of God:

He said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer;
for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”
Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he said, “Take this and divide it among yourselves;
for I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”

In the second part (vv. 19-20), Jesus reinterprets the signature foods of the meal. In a traditional Passover meal, the head of the house would say, “This is the bread of affliction which our fathers had to eat as they came out of Egypt.” Jesus, instead, identifies the bread with himself:

Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
And he did the same with the cup after supper, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

There is a clear connection between the mentions of Jesus’ imminent suffering and death in the first part of the unit and his body and blood in the second part. His death is salvific because his body is “given for you” and his blood is “poured out for you.” Exodus 24:3-8 described one covenant sealed with blood between God and his people. This will be a “new covenant” confirmed with “my blood.” Being “poured out” is an allusion to the Suffering Servant passage of Isaiah 53:12.

In Memory of Me

The Lucan Jesus instructs his disciples to repeat his actions “in remembrance” of him, just like the yearly Passover meal was repeated in order to make present God’s saving act in the past. Jesus’ own body and blood will replace the Passover lamb as the sign for how the Kingdom of God will be realized from now on.

In light of how important Jesus’ words instituting the Lord’s Supper are, there is disagreement over exactly what those words were. Mark/Matthew present one version and Luke/Paul present another. Luke’s wording is very similar to what Paul hands on in 1 Cor 11:24-25:

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

In contrast, the Marcan Jesus says of the bread, “Take; this is my body.” And, for the cup, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” Mark lacks the explanation that Jesus’ body is “for you” and the command to “do this in remembrance of me.” Mark also misses the allusion to the “new covenant” in Jer 31:31, but does capture that Jesus’ blood is to be “poured out,” something that is missing in Paul. The reference to “many” is another allusion to Is 53:12 where the Suffering Servant “bore the sin of many.” It really means “for all,” not just one or a few.

Matthew slightly alters Mark’s words. The Matthean Jesus doesn’t just tell the disciples to “take” the break but to “take, eat.” Similarly, when it comes to the cup, the Matthean Jesus asks the disciples to “drink of it, all of you.” The cup isn’t simply “poured out” but is poured out “for the forgiveness of sins.” Matthew is attempting to explain that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross forgives sins in the way that the blood of sacrificial animals in the OT forgave sins.

When Jesus tells his disciples that the bread is his body (Greek, soma), he is referring to his entire “self.” As biblical scholar Rudoph Bultmann once wrote, “A man does not have a soma; he is soma.” Jesus is not sacrificing his physical human body, but his entire life, everything he is. When Jesus says “do this,” he is not simply urging his disciples to relive the supper. He is asking them to give of their entire being.

Memories of Pearl Harbor

My father was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. In fact, it was his 25th birthday. He had just finished Mass when the bombing started and he took refuge underneath a truck. He told me about other events that happened to him during World War II, but I never wrote them down or made a voice recording of them. Dad died some years back, so I only have what I remember of his war stories to share with my own son. Maybe one day I’ll write them down, but they’ll be only fragmentary and won't be accurate because Dad’s experiences were not my experiences.

That progression from a lived experience to oral history and finally to written history describes how the individual books of the Bible came to be written. Taking the gospels as an example, we begin with the lived experience of people encountering Jesus of Nazareth, particularly those who became his followers. After his crucifixion, they began preaching and telling others about him and his message. As the generation of those who knew Jesus in the flesh began to die off, it became necessary to record those events in writing.

But there’s no guarantee that two people experiencing the same event will remember it in the same way. During his days in the Army, my dad’s best friend was a man named Jacques. Decades after the war, Jacques looked up Dad and they had a reunion. Jacques recalls taking refuge from the bombing with Dad and Dad was certain that Jacques was not with him when he was hiding under the truck. Who was right?



Dad (on left) and Jacques during WWII

In the Gospel of John, the evangelist points out that when Jesus was condemned by Pontius Pilate, it was Preparation Day, the day before the start of Passover when the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple. The other gospel authors say that the Last Supper on the previous evening was the Passover seder, so the crucifixion occurred on Passover Day. A biblical literalist who can admit of no contradictions in scripture would argue – without any evidence, I might add -- that it was Passover according to one calendar but Preparation Day according to a different calendar. But if we don’t make it an article of faith that there are no errors in scripture, then this inconsistency in separate accounts of the Passion story is easily understandable as a lived event filtered through two different faith traditions. They agree on the larger picture, but not on every single detail.

Similarly with the stories of the Old Testament, although it must be said that the further back you go, the longer the period of time between a faith event and its subsequent written narrative becomes. Just because Genesis is the first book of the Bible and describes the creation of the world does not mean that it was the first book to be written down. Genesis has some old traditions in it, but in its current form, it was finalized around the time of the Babylonian Captivity. And that was centuries after the time of the patriarchs.

The thinking used to be that there was a kernel of historical truth in the stories of Israel’s formation (Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, etc.) but archaeological discoveries over the past 50 years have not only failed to find evidence to support that, but have actually found evidence in the opposite direction. Instead of being a pastoral group who escaped slavery in Egypt and infiltrated a Canaanite civilization, it seems that the people of Israel were Canaanite all along. They overthrew the ruling class and invented a foundation narrative centering around a God to whom they gave credit for their origins.

Indeed, there were probably multiple origin narratives and, at some point, these were edited together to form the first books of the Bible that we have today. A classic example of that are the first two chapters of Genesis. In the first chapter, God (Elohim in Hebrew) creates the world in six days with human beings being the last to be created, yet in the second chapter the Lord God (Yahweh Elohim) creates man first, and then the animals, and finally woman. Different names for God are one clue for identifying the varying source material forming the biblical work.

This editorial process went on for many centuries. A third-century BCE Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint) shows a number of significant differences from the Hebrew text we have today, shorter in some places and longer in others. This is evidence that the source material was still being shaped by editors.

The takeaway from this is that the Bible did not come about because God whispered into the ears of Moses and others, who then dutifully wrote down the words to form the texts we have today. Neither did inspired authors record historical events as it happened or shortly after the fact. Instead, it is a more complicated process of oral transmission, theological reflection and editing. If we want to refer to the Bible as “the Word of God”, we also have to recognize that it comes to us in human words, subject to the foibles and limitations of human minds.