1Cor 11:23-26 - The Eternal Passover

23-26 For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 24 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.” 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Paul will not commend the Corinthians, but reproves them instead. And the reason for the reproof, and for the seriousness of it, is explained by the "for" of this section. "I do not commend you, because..." - "for this reason" is the reason explained in verse 23 and following.

So what is the "because"? It is because the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper was given by the Lord Himself, confirmed independently to Paul, and left as a solemn memorial for all who would follow because of Him. I don’t mean solemn in the sense of heavy and sad or dour. It is more in the sense of earnestness and sincerity, but with sense of gravity.

The ordinance represents something profound - more profound than we are able to take in fully. It memorializes the centre of history - redemptive and otherwise. It represents the Ineffable doing the unimaginable for the incorrigible. It displays at once truth, love, grace, righteousness justice and mercy in a mystery revealed in the Person of Christ. It is a mystery that can be known only through revelation to the heart by the Spirit of God, for it is the revelation of Jesus Christ and His work that the Spirit has come to effect both to and in we who are being saved.

It is an ordinance left for the church by the Lord Himself. It is not some cheap ritual to be half-heartedly followed or to be treated casually or carelessly. This is serious stuff. It is serious because all true Christians know what the cross means. They know how to discern the body of Christ. They understand both the human and the spiritual realities involved. They may not have the fifty dollar words like "penal substitutionary atonement," but they have an understanding of the meaning behind them. They know they have been passed over for judgement and that it is only due to Christ that this has come to pass. They know He loves them with a love that cost an immeasurable amount. In time they will see more and more deeply the grace of Jesus Christ and the depth of their own need, and their gratitude and worship will grow and abound.

But is this what we see at Corinth? No. We see selfish, unthoughtful, uncaring, insensitive behaviour with no real regard for the true meaning and import of the ordinance. Perhaps they need instruction, but Paul is reminding them that they have already had delivered to them right teaching concerning this matter. They have no excuse and they cannot claim ignorance. They are, in fact, in grave danger of incurring God’s demonstrative displeasure.

Now, the body which is broken is a true human physical body, prepared for God the Son, in which He lived a perfect life as a man, without ever being less than fully God. It was a body made for sacrifice. And the body had great similarities to the body of the paschal lamb, foreshadowing the real thing which came in Christ. John MacArthur got into trouble in some circles a few years ago by intimating that the body and the blood in and of themselves did not have magical properties. The value was in Whose body and blood they were and what manner of Life was contained in them. It was Eternal Being, emptied of His rightful glory, veiled in mortal flesh. It was Life Himself Who died. That was what he came to do, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. It was decreed from eternity and He came to walk in that decree.

So the old Catholic beliefs about the nature of the elements of the Lord’s Supper (and the half way house of the Lutheran position) have always seemed odd to me. I have always seen the elements as representative of something in the heavenlies worked out in time and space. It is the values behind the visible - the underlying realities - just as much as the physical realities that make the atonement what it is. Mel Gibson’s film (The Passion of the Christ) played almost exclusively to the physical and the temporal at the expense of the eternal and spiritual realities, which you would expect from a religion high on ritual and with a bent for works based justification - and in a medium that is made to be visual, but not necessarily theological.

We must not deny the physical nature of His sufferings or we deny His humanity. But we must not ignore the eternal, spiritual handiwork that was being wrought by God in Christ at the cross - or we are in danger of missing His deity. Who is it and what is He doing in redemption? The answers are more profound than we can know, yet so simple a child can receive them.

Why does the Lord’s death need to be proclaimed? Why not His life and His resurrection? Well, the Lord’s Supper was given before the resurrection for a memorial of His death. True it was alongside the anticipation of His resurrection, but the disciples proved themselves to be incapable of absorbing and believing that promise until it actually happened. Remembering Christ’s death ought to remind us of a number of things; His boundless love and our profound need; His righteousness and our utter corruption; His condescension (humility and grace) and our grasping self-serving mindset. We see ourselves in His death as the cause - the necessitator - and we must welcome that thing which, above all other things, ought never to be. That the righteous suffer for the unrighteous. That perfection take on the afflictions and punishments of imperfection. That He Who knew no sin was made to be sin on our behalf. We must lay our hands upon the head of this Sacrifice in ownership of the sin that made it necessary and as thankful recipients celebrating the God of all grace Who freely made it.


And this New Covenant represented by the blood, symbolized by the wine is a covenant of grace. The Old covenant was one of law. Yet even under the old covenant people were only ever saved by grace through faith. The law could only condemn. God, in promising to honour all those that kept his laws was busy saving those that believed in His provision for sin. All those who believed that they could, by law-keeping, atone for themselves were lost.

See, the Eternal Life and purity of God is represented in the life-giving blood of the Lamb of God - and then that blood is represented by the wine of the Lord’s Supper. Three levels of meaning from a Triune God. In order to live forever in holiness and righteousness (without which no one will see God) we must have the very Life and Spirit of God Himself in us. Eternal Life was poured out to meet and to satisfy the eternal punishment that was justly due to we rebels - and proved sufficient to cover our sin and to impart life to us eternally, as finite creatures.

But there is also the body, as well as the blood. The blood is the life of a thing - but the "thing" is that in which life is manifested. Life manifested in humanity - true spiritual and eternal life - life which is defined as knowing God - took its purest form in Jesus Christ, the man. His humanity typified and exemplified that Eternal Life, which is and which must come from God. God taking on human flesh and living a human life. God dying a human death. And all this took place in a fully human body, prepared and offered up as a sacrifice by Him Whose body it was, specifically for the purpose of the redemption of His church.

So we must not lose the significance of the exchange which took place in the godly dying for the ungodly. He who knew no sin became sin for us, His church. We are the bartered bride, bought from the wrath of God by the love of God in Christ. Elect, chosen people from eternity rescued from the common end of all the world as they, like we were wont to do, careen willingly and rebelliously downwards toward hell, suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. And the significance is in the example. It is no longer we who live, but Christ lives in us; we are not our own, but have been bought with a price; we have been saved by grace through faith unto good works that we should walk in them; we have passed from death to life by the grace of God through the death of Christ, and on account of that marvellous confirmation of His resurrection, when the grave could not hold Him because He suffered as the just for the unjust. He took the real and due penalty for His church, but because He took it in perfect obedience and submission to the Father, and in perfect love for God and man lived out in the flesh, he was declared (confirmed, agreed, acknowledged - not "made") to be Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of Holiness, by His resurrection from the dead. {Ro 1:1-4}

And the symbolism of the real body, along with the symbolism of that real blood, by being eaten is the partaking of the life of Christ through the acceptance, assimilation and absorption of His character into the very fibre of our beings. He is the gift. He is imparted to us by the Spirit through the Word. We are born again once for all, but we grow in grace and in the knowledge of our God and Saviour through partaking in Him. His body is food indeed and His blood is life indeed - not as transubstantiated matter, but as symbols of the heavenly reality that He is both our life and food.

The blood has more than a single significance. It was always the means by which a covenant between two parties was sealed. But who are the parties? It may be surprising to know that the covenant is between the Father and the Son; the Son, including His bride, the church - which is made up of individual believers in Christ. It is between God and those who are in Christ, on account of Christ. Do we get it? As redeemed sinners we are not of ourselves signing the covenant, as if we were parties in our own right. We are included as a bride is included because she belongs to her husband. Love cannot be removed from the equation - for it was love by which the groom chose and sanctified his bride through union with him. But the agreement - the covenant - is primarily between Father and Son. The Son agreed to come and redeem those who the Father gave to Him. He came and did all that was required, up to and including death and receiving the wrath of the Father’s judgement upon their sins. And He now sends the Spirit to work in and prepare them, until they are ready for the formal marriage.