What is Communion? Passover, Peace Offerings, and Participation in Christ - Pastor Tom Loghry
Pastor Tom digs in to the meaning behind the practice of communion, exploring parallels between the old covenant and the new covenant as well as our participation in Christ.
Transcript:
Good morning. Today's scripture reading is from Mark 14, 16 through 17 and 22 through 25. The disciples left, went into the city and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. When evening came, Jesus arrived with the 12. While they were eating, Jesus took bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples saying, take it.
This is my body. Then he took a cup and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them and they all drank from it. This is my blood of the covenant. Which is poured out for many, he said to them. Truly, I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.
When I go out to eat, I like to sit in a booth. I like booths better than just open tables. I find that it has a way of setting apart the space so that you can really focus on sharing a meal with someone. I'm not a huge fan of sitting at the counter or the bar. You can be inches away from someone you don't know, eating right next to them, but you're not really eating with them.
Now that could be changed, of course. Maybe you could order a large pizza and offer to share it with them. And if you did that, something would happen. You'd be sharing a meal. You'd no longer just be sitting next to each other. You would be with each other. You would have formed a relationship, however fleeting it may be, in which you share in the presence of another.
Now I want to ask this. Do you think of the Lord's Supper in that way? Now, in my experience, it seems like Christians very often think of this supper as merely a ritual of remembrance. A mental exercise that we perform to honor Christ's sacrifice with gratitude. Other Christians may think of the supper as a sort of spiritual supplement, perhaps part of a regimen that otherwise includes multivitamins and fish oil.
But between today and next Sunday, I hope we can piece together a clearer understanding, a full understanding of the full meaning of this meal. That while remembrance and spiritual benefit are certainly included, there is also something far more personal that God offers us in it. And this passage from Mark 14 sets the table for us.
Now, we're not going to cover everything that could be possibly covered here, because we'll be leaving some room for next Sunday. What demands our attention most immediately is the context of the Lord's Supper. The context will give us the meaning that we seek. So, Jesus has this meal with his disciples.
It's the night on which he's going to be betrayed. It's the night before the day on which he will die. And it's also the time of Passover. And so this meal that he's sharing with his disciples is to be a Passover meal. Now If you've been a Christian for a while, perhaps you have a clear understanding of what the Passover is about.
But, we would not be doing our due diligence if we didn't actually look at, well, what is the Passover? Passover is a meal in which the Jewish people remember God's deliverance from the enslavement of the Egyptians. You'll remember that there is, they were enslaved by the Egyptians for hundreds of years and God delivered them through a series of plagues, ten plagues, culminating in a final plague in which the first born of the Egyptians were killed and Pharaoh finally relented and let the Hebrew people go.
And what God is doing through this deliverance is making clear to the Jewish people that He is their God and that they are His. When we go to the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 verse 2, God says, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. That's how He IDs Himself to the people.
So, going to the time in which that meal was instituted, we go to Exodus 12, verses 1, and we'll look first at verses 1 through 7. There, God gives this instruction to Moses and Aaron. It says, This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month, each man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household.
If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year old males without defect.
You may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the door frames of the houses where they eat the lambs. There's a number of details of instruction there in terms of, you know, each household having a lamb, but also sharing with another, if there's, depending on the amount of lamb that you have and the need, but something that should stand out to us in particular was that this wasn't to be just any old sort of lamb.
This was to be a lamb that was without blemish, a perfect lamb, a pristine lamb. And what God commands them to do with that lamb is interesting because it seems to have some sacrificial sorts of qualities about it. Now we don't see a mention of an altar here, and an altar is a pretty essential part of offering a sacrifice.
I saw at least one commentator suggest that maybe there was some localized altars in the area that might have been used in the slaughter of these sheep. But otherwise, just based on what the biblical text tells us, the main thing that kind of stands out as saying that this is something more than just slaughtering animals going on here, is that they are told to apply the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of their house.
Now, some of you might think that sounds really gross. It's kind of like, why would you? Some of you probably want to take out the bleach and say, you've got to clean that off and stuff, it's not very sanitary. But In the ancient world, among the Hebrew people, blood represented life, not death. Usually we think of blood and think, ooh, death, murder, that kind of thing.
But blood represented life. And so what they were doing was they were covering their household with the perfect life of the lamb, represented in this blood. Now we could just dwell on the blood itself, but there's also more going on here than just blood. Applying the blood. God didn't tell them just to, okay, get blood, apply it, and then just toss out the lamb.
He has more to say. Picking up in verse 8. It says, They are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs and bread made without yeast. Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire, with the head, legs, and internal organs. Do not leave any of it till morning. If some is left till morning, you must burn it.
This is how you are to eat it, with your cloak tucked into your belt, with your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste. It is the Lord's Passover. On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals. I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt.
I am the Lord. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt. This is a day you are to commemorate for the generations to come. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord, a lasting ordinance.
And so, based on that last piece of instruction, that's how you get to the place where Jesus himself and his disciples are celebrating this Passover. They are celebrating this Passover in order to remember God's deliverance of the Hebrew people. But isn't it interesting that part of the instructions include how they are to eat the lamb.
That's to be roasted over a fire. And they're not to leave any of it left over. Now, what we see here, all together, the meal with the blood, is that what God is providing the people with is a sign to them of his protection and deliverance of them through the provision of this lamb. It's acting as a sign for them and for God that they would be spared in the judgment that he was bringing upon Egypt.
And in terms of God using signs, it kind of brings to mind the covenant that God made with Noah and how he put a rainbow in the sky and said this is a sign that I'm never going to flood the entire world. The blood is acting as a sign that God is going to shield and protect his people. That the people of Israel is God's chosen people.
Later on in Deuteronomy 7, verses 7 through 9, God reminds them of his commitment to them. Not on the basis of who they are, but on the basis of who God is. It says, The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors, because of God's love and his faithfulness, that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God. He's the faithful God keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commandments. So in one, when we speak of God redeeming the Hebrew people from Egypt, we're talking very literally about God delivering them from slavery and God saying, you're mine.
You are my people. This is drawn out more explicitly when we go to Numbers 3, verses 11 and 13, when we see God choose from among the Hebrew people, the Levites, to be those that would serve in the tabernacle. And it's interesting because it goes back to God's deliverance of the people as a whole from Egypt.
It says there, The Lord also said to Moses, I have taken the Levites from among the Israelites in place of the first male offspring of every Israelite woman. The Levites are mine, for all the firstborn are mine. When I struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, I set apart for myself every firstborn in Israel, whether human or animal, they are to be mine.
I am the Lord. So God, you can almost think of this like as concentric circles. God has chosen the people of Israel, but he had chosen especially the Levites that they would serve in this special capacity. But the point of both the selections, the selection of the Levites and the selection of the Hebrew people from Egypt was God marking them out as, you're my people.
And in Exodus 19 we see what that actually meant in terms of God's purposes for them as a people. In Exodus 19 verses 4- 6, God says, You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles wings, and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession.
Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words you are to speak to the Israelites. So God had chosen the people of Israel in order to be this kingdom of priests, a set apart people from all the peoples of the world.
Even though the whole world belongs to God, God can say, mine to everything. God was especially picking them out for this relationship, for this fellowship that he would share with them. So, with this context in mind, we have some meanings applied to the supper that Jesus is going to be instituting here for his disciples.
Clearly, Jesus is aligning himself with the Passover lamb. He shields believers from judgment. Everyone is worthy of God's judgment, because we're all sinners. But by putting faith in Jesus Christ, by being covered, by the blood of Jesus Christ, remember, that's not a gruesome, ugh, yucky thing. That's the life of Jesus Christ being covered by the life of Jesus Christ.
We are shielded. We are protected. But more than this, just as God redeemed and claimed Israel as His own, Jesus redeems and claims believers as His own. Peter tells us, in 1 Peter 1, 18 19, For you know that it was not with perishable things, such as silver or gold, that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.
So through Jesus, God is lifting us into his arms and saying, You are mine. Still, there is more to unpack here. All this might be said just through the blood of the lamb on the doorposts. But why the Passover meal? And why does Jesus frame our relationship in terms of eating his blood, body, and drinking his blood?
We're going to explore that now by turning to 1 Corinthians 10, verses 14 through 21. This is Paul's letter to the Christians in Corinth. And he tells them this, starting in verse 14. Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry. I speak to sensible people. Judge for yourselves what I say. It is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks, a participation in the blood of Christ.
And it is not the bread that we break, a participation in the body of Christ. Amen. Because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body, for we all share the one loaf. Consider the people of Israel. Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? Do I mean then that food sacrificed to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything?
No. But the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons, too. You cannot have a part in both the Lord's table and the table of demons. It's pretty interesting stuff there. Most of us haven't probably thought of eating at the table of demons.
So, what is the Apostle Paul talking about? Well, what he's doing here is he's giving some instruction to the Christians in Corinth in a context in which lots of people are participating in pagan feasts. And what these feasts would consist of is eating the meat that was offered and sacrificed to these pagan gods.
Now, elsewhere, Paul explains that if you bought some meat that happened to be offered to, you know, one of these idols, that you're not restricted from eating it. Like he says here, meat is meat. But that's different than actually participating in the ritual meal itself, in which everyone there is like, yeah, this is a sacrifice of Zeus, and we're all here celebrating Zeus, and we're eating this meal together.
And so, what's so interesting here, though, is that this prohibition against Christians participating in this meal provides a clarification to us of the significance of the Christian feast, the Lord's Supper. So, kind of working backwards, Paul says you can't participate in these pagan feasts, because this means that you are participating with demons.
He says, you know, the pagan gods, they're not really gods, but there is a power there, and the power is demonic. And to eat those meals, you're having, basically, fellowship with demons. And this conflicts with the Lord's Supper. In the Lord's Supper, you're participating in the blood and body of Christ. And in so doing, what you're doing is you're partaking in fellowship with Jesus Christ.
You're fellowshiping with God. Now, this idea of eating sacrifices and having this sort of participatory fellowship relationship wasn't a foreign concept to the people of Israel, to the Jewish people. In verse 18, notice that he says, Consider the people of Israel. Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar.
Now, I don't know about you, but I know kind of earlier on when I thought about sacrifices, I didn't think of people eating them. I just kind of thought they just they sacrificed the animal, they threw it on, and it got burned up. It's a little bit more complicated than that, in fact. When you read Leviticus, you see that most often the meat is eaten by the priests.
But usually the people don't eat the meat. Those who are just bringing the sacrifice themselves. Except in a select case, which we'll look at shortly. But just to this question of this relationship between the altar, the altar is this touchstone between God and human beings. We see in Exodus 29, verse 37, it says, For seven days make atonement for the altar and consecrate it.
Then the altar will be most holy, and whatever touches it will be holy. And interestingly, Jesus, in Matthew 23, verses 18 through 19, he says, If anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing, but anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath. And he's quoting the Pharisees here. He's critic, criticizing, a teaching that they have.
And he responds to them by saying, You blind men, which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So what, between what we have in Exodus and what Jesus is saying here is that, in the offering of these sacrifices, what was once common is now made holy, and it's made significant. And in participating in those sacrifices, you're entering into the very presence of God.
You're participating in something that is holy. Now there, like I said, there's many different types of sacrifices. You have burnt, guilt, sin offerings. The offering, though, in which there the common people, the people who are not the priests, could actually eat the meat was called a fellowship offering.
Or a peace offering. Or sometimes a thanksgiving offering. Sometimes the translation varies on the basis of what translation you have for your Bible. So we want to take a closer look at that. We turn to Leviticus 3, verses 1 through 5. First it says, If your offering is a fellowship offering, and you offer an animal from the herd, whether male or female, you are to present before the Lord an animal without defect.
That, that's the standard across the board. You don't offer animals to God that have blemishes, that have, that are defective. You're, you're to offer your very best. You are to lay your hand on the head of your offering, and slaughter it at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. Putting the hand on the animal signifies, this is my animal, this is the one I'm bringing to you, Lord.
It says, Then Aaron's sons, the priests, shall splash the blood against the sides of the altar. I want you to tuck away that detail in your mind. They take the blood, they like collect it, and splash it against the side of the altar. Then it says, From the fellowship offering, you are to bring a food offering to the Lord, the internal organs and all the fat that is connected with, to them, both kidneys with the fat on them near the loins and the long lobe of the liver which you will remove with the kidneys.
Then Aaron's sons are to burn it on, on the altar on top of the burnt offering that is lying on the burning wood, is a food offering, an aroma pleasing to the Lord. So, what God, the demand that God always makes upon the people is that the blood belongs to me, the life. And the fat belongs to me, because it is identified as like the best portions.
So that's how the sacrifice is to proceed, in that fashion. Now here comes the participatory piece, in which the people actually eat the meat that is offered. Leviticus 7, verses 15 through 16, says, The meat of their fellowship offering of Thanksgiving must be eaten on the day it is offered. He must leave none of it till morning.
If, however, their offering is the result of a vow, or is a freewill offering, the sacrifice shall be eaten on the day they offer it. But anything left over may be eaten on the next day. So we have all those details in mind. They remember the procedure. They splash the blood against, against the altar. They offer the fat portions to God, they eat the meat, and they're really supposed to eat the meat that day.
In the case of making a vow, they can offer it the next day. Now let's bring this into comparison with Passover. Now I don't want to say that we can reduce Passover to a fellowship meal, to a fellowship offering. It's more than that. But it seems to include the meaning that we find here in these fellowship offerings.
In 2 Chronicles 35, verses 7 and 10 through 11 and verse 13, we have a record of the celebration of Passover during the reign of Josiah. And it was a very notable one. It was a very large celebration. It says, that Josiah provided for all the lay people who were there a total of 30, 000 lambs and goats for the Passover offerings.
and also 3, 000 cattle, all from the king's own possessions. The service was arranged, and the priests stood in their place with the Levites in their divisions, as the king had ordered. The Passover lambs were slaughtered, and then notice this, and the priests splashed against the altar the blood handed to them, while the Levites skinned the animals.
They roasted the Passover animals over the fires prescribed, and boiled the holy offerings in pots, cauldrons, and pans, and served them quickly to all the people. Now, it seems like it was kind of standard practice for many of the offerings that they would splash it against the side of the altar. But, we see that continuity there, that parallel there.
And we see the fact that the people take and eat the meat that is offered. So nothing is going to waste here. There an offering is made unto God, the Passover meat of, of these lambs is eaten by the people. They serve it out quickly to them. What's going on here is the people are, in fact, communing with God.
They're entering into God's presence. When we look to other places, in Exodus, in Deuteronomy, we, we see how eating these sorts of meals are, represented in that sort of fashion of being eaten in the presence of God. And next is 18:12. We find Jethro, Moses father in law. It says, He brought a burnt offering and other sacrifices to God.
And Aaron came with all the elders of Israel to eat a meal with Moses' father in law in the presence of God. Now, he doesn't say that there's a fellowship offering there, but it says that there was other sacrifices. So it's fair to assume that a fellowship offering was presented. And they, as they ate, they were sharing in the presence of God.
Deuteronomy 27, verses 6- 7 People are instructed, Build the altar of the Lord your God with field stones and offer burnt offerings on it to the Lord your God. Sacrifice fellowship offerings there, eating them and rejoicing in the presence of the Lord your God. Now, kind of on the flip side of things, in terms of trying to avoid participating in the presence of anyone other than the one true God, we find the Prohibition in Exodus 34: 15.
Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land, for when they prostitute themselves to their gods and sacrifice to them, they will invite you and you will eat their sacrifices. So once again, the eating of sacrifices is a very common practice, and God's concern is, I want you to be in communion with me.
Not with these false gods, not in fact with these demons. So in the case of Jesus, we go back to the night of the Last Supper. He tells his disciples, after breaking, taking the bread, giving thanks, and breaking it, he says to them, take it. This is my body.
He invites them to eat his body, represented in this bread. He invites them to drink of his blood, represented in the cup. Now, this isn't the only place in which Jesus speaks of bread and cup in this sort of fashion. When we go to the Gospel of John, in John 6, verses 53 through 56, and an audience much larger than just The Twelve, including other disciples who were following Him, Jesus says this, Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.
Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For My flesh is real food, and My blood is real drink. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood remains in Me, and I in them. Now that sounds kind of weird, and a lot of his disciples thought that was weird.
And so some of them left Jesus because they weren't willing to stick around to try to understand what he was teaching. But going back to 1 Corinthians 10, we have a clear teaching as to what Jesus meant. Remember what Paul says. He says, when we take of, when we give thanks. It says it's a participation in the blood of Christ and the bread that we break, that it's a participation in the body of Christ.
Now what, once again we can ask, well what does that mean? Are we saying then that the bread and the cup, are they actually transformed, like substantially, so that they actually become Jesus' body and his blood? No. We don't have any good reason to believe that. We can understand that Jesus is speaking in a figurative manner, but also a realistic sort of manner.
He talks about how his body and blood is true bread and wine. It's that true sustenance. So that in fact, we might actually say that the bread and the cup are signs of that true bread and cup, which is found in Jesus Christ. And we find Jesus talking in figurative ways elsewhere. We think about Matthew 5, in which he calls us, the salt of the earth, the light of the world.
Now, is he saying that we're actually salt? Like, would you, if you tested me, would you, like, find salt crystals in me and stuff? Maybe you would. I don't know how the body's composed. But that's not what Jesus is trying to get at. He's not saying you all are a bunch of salt shakers. He's speaking figuratively, that in a real way, more real than real salt and material salt, I mean, that we are truly the salt of the earth.
And in the same way he's talking about himself in this way. We're not talking about a magical sort of transformation here. We're talking about a spiritual reality. We think about the water we use in baptism. It's not any special holy water. The power is not in the water. The power is spiritual. It's in the ordinance.
It's in the sacrament which it is. It's a means of faith. If I just took one of you and I threw you in the baptismal, you wouldn't be baptized. Because you wouldn't have faith necessarily. But it becomes baptism as you put your faith in Jesus Christ. And the bread and the cup, it Become an encounter with Jesus Christ as we have faith in him.
So it's a spiritual form of consumption. And Dr. Gavin Ortland, you can find him on YouTube, he has this channel called Truth Unite. He talks about this as, it's a sort of spiritual encounter with Christ in the meal as a whole. So we're not saying like, it just looks like bread, but actually, you know, there's been some change in the substance.
It's that these are the means for us to spiritually encounter Jesus. And so there's a benefit in it. And that we are actually communing with Jesus. We are actually communing with God. Just as the Israelites were sharing in fellowship with God as they ate of these sacrificial meals. And we can understand how that would be spiritually beneficial, but we can also think just to our common relationships that it's beneficial to any relationship if you sit down and eat with someone.
I, it's probably about every other weekend I see my parents, and every other weekend we see Sara's parents, and we sit down and we eat together. It's good for our relationship that we do that. We want to maintain communion and fellowship with them. But what we're talking about here in our fellowship with God far outstrips any natural relationship.
Now Jesus speaks about our need to be in communion with him, to be abiding with him elsewhere. In the gospel of John in John 15: 4, he says, remain in me as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. And you go back to John 6 and notice what he says there.
He says, whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me. And I in them. So we're not going to say that this meal, that we can reduce remaining in Christ entirely to this meal. Remaining in Christ includes the whole compass, encompasses your life as a whole. But it is a core part of our remaining in Christ and being in communion with Christ.
And it's part of the reason why we should want to share in this meal on a weekly basis. The grace that we receive from God in Christ is found in our fellowship with Him. Paul characterizes it this way earlier in his letter to the first Corinthians. He says, I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.
He will also keep you firm to the end so that you'll be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. So that grace that we receive in Christ is found as we are in fellowship with him as we remain in him. Now, Jesus also speaks of the cup as his beloved covenant, and this is another important aspect of this meal, but it's one that we're going to unpack next week, because we, we've had plenty to chew on right now in just what we've covered.
To the question of what is communion, we can say this so far, it is the Christian Passover, the meal in which we remember that Christ has shielded us from sin, from judgment, redeeming and claiming us as God's own. More than mere remembrance, is the meal in which God invites us to commune with Himself through Christ.
Fulfilling the fellowship offerings of the Old Testament, we eat in the presence of God and enjoy true fellowship with Him through Jesus. So the meal is a real spiritual encounter. It's not a construct of our imagination. When shared in faith, it brings us real benefit. Not in the elements themselves, but in Christ.
All the benefits that are to be found in Christ. We are assured of forgiveness. Given the hope of forgiveness, deliverance from death, and given the fruit of a transformed life that comes from abiding in Christ. All that comes from abiding in Christ. And so we should desire it and we should eat it and enjoy our fellowship with God as we have faith in Christ.
Let's pray.
Dear Father, we thank you for the wonderful gift of your son, who by the sacrifice of himself, has made it possible for us to be claimed as your own, and to enjoy fellowship with you, Father. And not just in an abstract sort of way, but in a real way. In our daily lives, Father, but in especially as we share in the meal of the Lord's Supper.
Father, when we share in this meal, please impress upon us the reality of the grace that we receive as we are communing with Christ and enjoying fellowship with you. And may you use the grace that you pour upon us to bear fruit in our lives. So that we do shine forth as the light of the world. And so that it can truly be said that we are the salt of the earth.
We ask this, Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Hey there, Pastor Tom here. I hope you enjoyed this sermon I offered to Rockland Community Church. Rockland Community Church is located at 212 Rockland Road in North Scituate, Rhode Island, just around the bend from Scituate Public High School. We invite you to join us this Sunday, as we wrap up our series on the question “What is Communion?”
It's our joy to welcome you into our community.
Intro/Outro Song
Title: River Meditation
Artist: Jason Shaw
Source:http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Jason_Shaw/Audionautix_Acoustic/RIVER_MEDITATION___________2-58
License:(CC BY 3.0 US)