The Last Supper and a New Promise

The feet were washed, the towel was folded, and Jesus lay down at the low table in the upstairs room again. (Twelve pairs of feet were stretched out behind the cushions, and for once every one of them was clean.)

It was Passover night. On the table sat everything God's people ate once a year to remember Egypt: roast lamb, bitter green herbs, and flat bread made without yeast. (Bread without yeast stays flat and crackly. On the night they ran from Egypt, nobody had time to let dough rise.)

When God gave Moses the Passover, he said children would ask, "What does this supper mean?" Then the grown-ups would tell how God passed over the houses marked with a lamb's blood and set his people free.

"I have wanted so much to eat this Passover with you before I suffer," Jesus told them. "I will not eat it again until everything it means comes true in the kingdom of God."

Before I suffer. The friends glanced at one another. He had told them before that he would be killed in Jerusalem, and every time they hoped he didn't mean it.

He took a cup of wine and thanked God for it. "Take this and share it among you," he said. "I will not drink wine again until the kingdom of God comes."

The cup went around, hand to hand. One of those hands belonged to Judas, who had already agreed to hand Jesus over to the chief priests for money. Jesus knew, and he let Judas stay at the table.

Then Jesus picked up one of the flat loaves, gave thanks, and broke it. Crack.

"This is my body," he said, "given for you. Do this to remember me."

The friends stared at the bread. Jesus was telling them, as plainly as a supper could, that he was going to die. His body would be given, like the lamb on the table, so that others could go free.

When supper was over, he lifted one more cup.

"This cup is the new covenant," he said, "in my blood, poured out for you."

A covenant is a promise God makes and binds himself to keep. Six hundred years earlier, God had told the prophet Jeremiah that a new one was coming: "I will write my law on their hearts. I will forgive them, and I will remember their sins no more." Now Jesus held that promise in a cup, and the price of keeping it was his own blood.

Every Passover lamb had died and been eaten, and the next spring there had to be another. A lamb's blood could mark a door and keep death away from one house for one night. Taking away sin for good was a job no lamb could do. So the families ate, the children asked, and God's people waited.

The waiting ended at this table. The hands that broke the bread would be nailed to a cross the next morning. The blood he spoke of over that cup would be poured out on the cross once, and never need pouring again.

His friends did what he asked. After he rose, they broke bread together in their homes, and his people still do, all over the world.

Jesus had said he would not drink from the cup again until the kingdom of God came. So another supper is coming, at a table long enough for his whole family, and Jesus means to share the cup with them there.