Communion

COMMUNION
JESUS AND PASSOVER FEAST
The first Communion service ever was when Jesus shared the Last Supper with his disciples. Like many other Jewish groups and families in Jerusalem they were sharing the Passover meal that night, as that was the custom on that special day before the Feast of Passover for every family to eat of the Passover lamb. Israel shared this meal each year to celebrate the miraculous deliverance of Israel out from Egypt where they had been in slavery under cruel oppression for 400 years.
On that Passover day that they fled out of Egypt each home was instructed to take a lamb for each household and to kill the lamb and apply the blood of that firstborn lamb on the doorposts and lintels of the house so that the angel of death would ‘pass over’ them, and the firstborn son of each family was spared from death, and the firstborn son of every Egyptian family died.

To this day Orthodox Jews as individual households all over the world celebrate this Passover feast. They come together for a traditional meal called the Seder, which means “order”, because everything is done in a particular order.
The whole theme of the special meal on the Seder night is to remember the exodus of Egypt as if they were there and that is what happened to them, so it is experiential for them and educational for the children and visitors…
The Seder plate includes a variety of foods, and they are symbolic.
The lamb bone represents the blood of the lamb that was applied to the doors of the Jewish people as God passed over them; the maror (bitter herbs) represents the bitterness the Jews had to endure as slaves; there was a sweet, brown concoction/paste that represents the mortar used to build the Egyptian pyramids; and the dipping of parsley into salt water represents the tears of the enslaved Jewish people. And there is the Matzah, the unleavened bread that is eaten at Passover. They have to eat this because according to the Book of Exodus, the Israelites left Egypt in such a hurry that their bread didn’t have time to rise.
It is traditionally viewed as the bread of the poor, and is therefore consumed to remind Jewish people of the hardships their ancestors endured. During their Passover ceremony, many Jewish children play a game in which there are three pieces of matzah, like mini cakes on a plate, and one piece of matzah, the middle piece, is hidden. The child who finds that middle piece off matzah at the end of the meal wins what is called the ‘ransom’. I remember asking my host what this signified and he wasn’t sure. I explained to him what I thought and he respectfully listened.’.

Jesus brought himself to the first ever communion table as that firstborn lamb at the Passover meal on that Passover night. He was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, but the disciples did not fully understand the awesome significance of that truth on that night. Jesus had been bringing himself as that lamb down through the ages in the prophetic symbolism of the feasts and sacrifices as mentioned so many times in the Old Testament, from Genesis 22 when Abraham said that God would provide a lamb for the sacrifice when he was told by God to offer Isaac upon the altar. Then there was Exodus regarding Passover and in various lamb sacrifices in Leviticus and Numbers, and also in prophetic words of the prophet Isaiah in ch.53:7 – led as a lamb to the slaughter.

Jesus brought himself to the world throughout those years that he walked the earth as the Son of Man and the Son of God, and he knew that night of the Last Supper that he was about to bring himself to the very altar of the cross where he would be that lamb slain for the sins of all the world. Jesus knew exactly what he was doing and what he was saying. He was going to bring humanity out from slavery to the world and that message was contained in the message of bringing Israel out of Egypt..

Jesus had said earlier during his ministry ‘unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will not have life in you I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’ The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat’. When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
It is a hard saying. And I have thought the same to myself. But Jesus took them to task for taking offense at what he had said and told them that they were getting stuck in looking at the outward form of what he said and were missing the deeper inner meaning of how we would take his life into us as our life us and our lives would be in him in the new Kingdom order that he was bringing in through his death and resurrection. He told them that he words he had spoken were spirit and life, and not to think of the natural or flesh perspective of what he said.

Even on that night of the last supper when Jesus took the bread and the wine and said the most amazing words to his disciples, those words remained a puzzle to them all except for John, who stood with Mary the mother of Jesus at the foot of the cross when he was crucified at Calvary. John seems to have grasped some understanding of New Kingdom order when he relates to us in his Gospel that The Father and Jesus would come to make their home within us after the Holy Spirit had been sent.

Paul was not one of the apostles then of course but he received a revelation from Jesus about these words of Spirit and life and he passed these on to the Corinthians in the only epistle that describes the Communion table.
1Corinthians 11:23 For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same
night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” In the same manner He also took the cup after supper, saying, “ This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.

Jesus had come as the Passover Lamb to them from of old, and also as the lamb being consumed at the table that night, and also as their servant leader as he washed their feet, and the servant of mankind throughout his life, and then as the bread and the cup also at the Last supper. So while Jesus was always coming TO humanity throughout the ages as the Lamb slain, he had now arrived at his appointed time and destination to fulfil his destiny on the earth.
At that time Jesus was still coming to us in earthly natural form and everything he said and did regarding the Lamb and the Passover meal and the bread and the cup was part of the story of how God in Jesus was sent to us. he celebrated that symbolically at the Last Supper and had Communion with his disciples and then went to the cross and died and said ‘It is finished’.
What it meant for him to break the bread and drink the cup on that night, and what he wanted it to mean for us was not just that he had come to humanity at that time to fulfill past history but that he was also coming to us on earth as the bread of life and the cup of the New Covenant in his blood to fulfil the future of mankind as ‘God with Us’.So while Jesus did come physically to us as literal body and blood at that time, through his life on earth, the spiritual reality has been realised – We share life with the risen Jesus – the words that he spoke to the disciples about his body and his blood have now become Spirit and life.

Now we go through the bread and the wine by faith, into the person and presence of the risen Jesus and there we have communion with him and with one another. He has sent his Spirit and he has left for us the Communion table to celebrate in remembrance of him.
Since his resurrection the communion meal is a time of spiritual revelation of Jesus to us as we open our hearts and sit in his presence. We open our hearts and he opens our eyes.

After dying on cross and saying It is finished Jesus came to 2 disciples on the road to Emmaus and when he sat and broke the bread and had communion with them at the inn their eyes were opened and they knew him.

When we see Jesus at Communion we receive ALL spiritual blessings from God through what Jesus has done for us. Jesus has become our salvation and redemption, our peace and our wisdom, our healing and provision. Communion is a time when our eyes can be opened with a special focus of faith and an anticipation to see Jesus as Paul did when he said ‘It is no longer I that live, but it is Christ that lives in me’.
The Bible also says there will be an ongoing opening of our eyes to the revelation of him to us when he shares the final promise of communion ‘in the Kingdom’ with his disciples (Matt 26 - I will not drink this wine again until the day I drink it new with you in my Father's Kingdom). Our Kingdom life here in this here and now life on earth turns our day to day natural old creation life into a spiritual new creation life where things continually become new, with a new hope and new faith and a new reality – the experience of ‘God with us’