Mark clearly makes Jesus’ last supper with his disciples a Passover meal. In gathering for this festal meal, Jews then and now remember and celebrate the event that founded Israel as God’s people — their exodus out of slavery into freedom. They celebrate the exodus in story, song, psalms, and symbols.
Bitter herbs remind every generation of Jews that celebrates the feast of the bitterness of slavery. Lamb recalls for them how the angel of death passed over the houses marked with lamb’s blood but killed the firstborn in every other home in Egypt. Unleavened bread recalls how the Hebrews escaped so hurriedly their bread had no time to rise.
The Exodus story tells us how God the Creator saves Israel when Pharaoh sends soldiers to recapture his slaves. As the soldiers corner the slaves at the sea, the Holy One, who in the beginning separated the waters from the dry land, now opens a dry path through the sea for Israel’s escape.
At the Passover meal Jews bless and share both bread and wine as they retell the story of their salvation. As part of the prayer, they pray the hallel psalms (113-118), praising God’s steadfast love throughout their history. Hallel is the Hebrew word for praise; it is the same word that begins allel-uia, which means praise God.
- Share any experiences you have had of eating Passover meals with Jewish families or Christian friends.
- How do you picture the last supper in your mind? What influence is art on how you picture the gospel scene?
Christians from the beginning have gathered together, celebrated in Jesus’ memory, and given a familiar form to the story of Jesus’ last supper. In Mark’s story — as in Paul’s account in his first letter to the Corinthians, written early in the A.D. 50s (11.23-26) — Jesus takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to his friends. Then he takes a cup of wine, gives thanks, and gives it to his friends. These are the actions Christians continue to reenact in every eucharist.
At the last supper, Jesus makes bread, broken and given, a sign of his body — of himself. Through this sign his life nourishes ours. This sign calls us to turn into bread for others, to become what the sign signifies.
Jesus makes wine, poured out in a common cup, a sign of his life blood and of a new covenant between God and humankind in his person. This gesture links the outpouring of his life with the blood of the lambs that saved the early Hebrews. The cup of wine Jesus blesses at the meal also anticipates the cup of suffering he drinks in his passion. Jesus keeps this new covenant pledge unto the end on the cross.
On the way to Jerusalem James and John pledge to drink the cup that Jesus drinks. They want seats at Jesus’ right and left in his kingdom. At the last supper James and John with all Jesus’ disciples share the cup of wine Jesus pours out, blesses, and shares. Nonetheless, Peter, James, and John fall asleep after the meal while Jesus prays in agony in the garden that the cup of suffering pass him by.
The outpouring of Jesus’ life in his suffering and death is the cup he blesses at the Passover meal, the cup he pledges will inaugurate God’s kingdom. Peter, James, and John drink Jesus’ cup in the post-Easter Church when they pour out their lives for the sake of spreading the gospel.
- What pledges have you kept in your life?
- How do you keep the pledge that sharing Jesus’ cup expresses?
- What turning points in your understanding of Eucharist can you identify?
- What do you see as the value of receiving communion under both species?
My parish priest’s insistence that we kids in his high school religion class go to daily Mass during Lent drew me slowly into a life commitment in the Church. Lent ended, but I kept going to daily Mass. These eucharistic gatherings became a school of transformation for me.
Jesus Christ is never the only teacher in eucharistic communities. Everywhere I have ever joined in eucharistic celebrations, Christians in the celebrating community have called me to become like them and to continue the outpouring of our lives we all know Jesus’ signs represent. Bread broken and shared. Wine poured out. A common cup. Nourishment for service.
Wheat and grapes go through many transformations on the way to becoming the bread and wine that Jesus makes signs of his self-giving. John’s gospel compares Jesus’ death and resurrection to the life cycle of a grain of wheat. Like a seed, Jesus in his death falls into the earth and dies but rises to produce life a hundredfold.
The actions of making and baking bread profoundly reshape the wheat that has become flour. One of Jesus’ parables in Matthew pictures God as a woman making bread. “The kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (13.33). Bakers knead bread dough over and over, shape it into loaves or rolls, and bake it — each step a transformation.
Grapes, too, are first crushed and then fermented in the process of making wine. Wine, like bread, is the end product of many transformations. The bread and wine Jesus makes signs of his total self-giving call us into the continuing process of becoming the sign we celebrate.
- When have you been planted, ground, reshaped, baked, crushed, fermented?
- How does your participation in Eucharist continue to transform you?