Broken For You: The Last Supper

So the gospels are kind of like biographies…and kind of not. Scholars have compared them to other biographies of the day, and they compare pretty well. They have many of the marks and convention of first century biography. But there is one major way that they differ from the genre of first century biography…they each devote between 1/3rd and ½ of their content to the final week of the life of their subject. With today’s passage, which has often been called ‘The Last Supper’ we are getting to the events of the final couple days.

So we have been in Luke’s gospel since the beginning of the year. The gospel is winding down…and so is the series. We will only be doing 5 more weeks on Luke, wraping it up around Easter (I know, very clever planning by Dan). After that we will wrap up with a topical series about living in light of the resurrection. And with that, Let’s dive into the passage we call ‘The Last Supper.’ There are three major themes that I’d like to get from this text:

1. Jesus Explains the Reason for His Death
2. Jesus Prescribes a Sensual Experience of Worship
3. Jesus Teaches a Brief Seminar on Leadership


1. Jesus Explains the Reason for His Death

So we were Christmas and Easter church attenders when I was a kid. We went to this church in a small town from one of what we call the ‘high church’ Christian traditions…so there was an alter in the front. My favorite think to do at church was to squint my eyes as I looked into the light. If you do this, you can get the appearance of discrete rays of light radiating out from the light. My favorite church activity was to contort my face just right so that the squinty beam of light lazered through the bonnet of the lady in front of me or split the bald head of the guy talking in the front. But one other way I spent my time early on was trying to figure out the mosaic that decorated the alter at the front of the church. It was a lamb, with a disturbingly anthropomorphic face, that sat on a book and held two flags. It seemed like a total noe-sequiter to me. Why was our church decorated with a sheep with a disturbing face. (Here is the closes image I could find to it)

And it turns out that this is a really common subject in ancient Christian art

But if this sheep showed up at the Jefferson County State Fair back home it would get the blue ribbon in creepyness.

On top of that, their is a curiously named Hard Core band called Lamb of God, who sometimes tap into Last Supper themes.

So I asked my mom and she told me it was because Jesus was sometimes called the Lamb of God, but she could not tell me why…so it became even more disturbing, because this ugly fluffy critter was supposed to be Jesus. I ended up trying not to look at it and opted to spend all of my time lazering the lady.

But it turns out that there is a pretty profound reason that Jesus has historically been called the ‘Lamb of God.’ The creepy art might be ill advised, but the title is apt. And it turns out, that it emerges from today’s passage:

Luke 22:7-27

The initial observation we should make about this text is that the Last Supper was first and formost a Passover meal. It is mentioned 4X .That is an incredibly important detail. Jesus starts by saying ‘"I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” There is not a good English word or phrase for the word (επιθυμία) translated “eagerly desired.” It is literally, ‘With desire I have desired.” It is such a strong and passionate word that, elsewhere, it is sometimes translated as ‘lust’.[1] You have to understand that Jesus didn’t just want to have a ‘last meal’ with his closest friends like a death row inmate. He wanted to share the Passover meal with them before he died because this ceremonial meal had a very specific and clear purpose that he appropriates in explaining the purpose for his death.

Jesus hopes to use the intimacy and the imagery of this celebration to share with them why he had to die. He tells them his body would be broken and his blood spilled ‘for you.’ But does not go into the details of why or how…to understand that we have to understand why he did this on the Passover.

The Hebrews were being exploited and Oppressed. They were slaves and were being literally worked to death. They called out to God for justice

The night of Passover, after many confrontations between the enslaved Hebrew people and the Egyptian rulers…after God repeatedly demonstrated his hatred of slavery and that the Egyptians were opposing him by their continued claim to own an entire ethnicity and profit off their suffering, he came against the oppressing society with what the Scriptures call wrath.

The night of the Passover, for a brief time and in a small, finite, location[2], the people were exposed to the white hot consuming justice of God. This is what we call wrath. But its is a misunderstood word. Wrath is simply the exposure of unjust humans that exploit and extort each other to the unbending, unyielding, unwavering justice of God…they are consumed by it

There is a story in the Bible where Moses seems to get tired of just hearing instructions from God and so he kind of naively asks to see him. ‘Show me your glory.’ He asks. God says no. He essentially says ‘If I revealed myself to you fully, it would obliterate you.’ Moses is a pretty impressive guy, if anyone could bear to experience the unmitigated justice of God, it seems like it would be him, but he is made of the same stuff as us. The human condition…that strange admixture of nobility and wickedness…of just actions and self serving intentions…of kindness and pride…of beauty and lust…simply cannot survive the pure justice of God

“I had no doubt at all that I was seeing an eldil (angel)…My sensations were true and in some ways very unpleasant…All those doubts which I had felt before as to whether these creatures were friend or foe…had, for the moment, vanished. My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call ‘good,’ but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” as much as I’d supposed. This is a terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it is also dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live and your very comforter the very person who makes you uncomfortable... Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.”

Now, of course, this is entirely speculation…but Lewis is taking as his cue that the vast majority of accounts, in the scriptures, where a person encounters an angel…even a ‘good person,’ they are terrified. Because an angel reflects God’s unmitigated good, it is just a taste. We are not sure we can bear it…but we can…it just scares the crap out of us. When we come face to face, however, with the ultimate source of pure good, unwavering justice, we can not bear it.

So the Hebrews were told that day, the day God exposed that place to his consuming good, to do something that seems really strange, to slaughter a lamb…and here is where it gets a little gross…they were supposed to take some of the blood, and paint their door post with it…then they were supposed to eat the lamb and wait, ready to leave. That night horrible things happened, but the hoses with the blood on the doorpost were ‘passed over.’ They were spared the wrath…they were not exposed to the consuming justice of God.

Jesus holds up the bread and the wine of this cherished…centuries old Passover tradition but then he says something shocking…he says, ‘It is all about me…and it always has been.’ Jesus is called the Lamb of God, because his death provides us a means of escape from God’s final wrath in precisely the same way the blood of the Passover lamb protected the Hebrews huddled in their homes that night.

We will each, eventually be exposed to the white hot evaluation of God’s justice…and none of us can stand up under it…we will be consumed. But, as with the Passover Jesus is telling us, there is shelter under the blood of a substitute. At the heart of Christianity is the idea of Atonement. Atonement is all about exchange. We all exploit and extort to some degree. We all use other people in one way or another for our own purposes. When all of creation is finally subjected to evaluation of God’s justice, the inescapable evaluation of his holy requirements, we will find ourselves exposed and without recourse…the weight of undiluted good will crush our mixed souls. That is what the Bible means by wrath, when we face God and are overcome by the unbearable force of his unmitigated good.

Just like that night, in Egypt, the only survivors will not be those who are good enough…because no one is, we all give injustice, lust, greed, and pride safe harbor in our hearts. No, just like that night, the survivors will be those who come under the protection of blood. Atonement is about EXCHANGE. When Jesus said that his blood would be shed for us on the cross, what he means is that he, the only good man, and God himself in a confusing but very real way, would bear God’s wrath, he would experience the consuming justice of God while harboring all of our petty jealosies, our wanton glances, our harbored grudges, our betrayed friendships. He stood in under the consuming justice of God against those things that WE did. And because of that. We can take the exchange.

But we can only be saved by faith in the provision of the substitute.[3] We can claim his blood. We can paint our hearts with it. And if we do, in that final day, we face the unbending, terrible good that is God’s unwavering justice, we will be passed over…we will be unjustly called ‘just’…we will invoke the Great Exchange…we will point to God’s annihilation of God on the cross and be able to say, ‘Yes, I have done horrible things. I could not stand under the scrutiny of God’s perfect justice. But the consuming effects of the collision of that Justice and my failure has already happened. God did it to Jesus, and offers us the blood escape. “

So the last supper is not just a sentimental final meal before death. Jesus uses the imagery and the intimacy of the Passover to explain why he was going to die. It was going to be for you. It was going to be an atoning death. He was going to bear what justice required on our behalf.

2. Jesus Prescribes a Sensual Experience of Worship

So he has explained his death in an eatable object lesson. It seems like a pretty clever way to teach an eclectic group of ordinary, mostly blue collar workers. But then, he tells them to do it again after he is gone. He says ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ And so they did, as did those after them, and those after them…and we do it today. Jesus wanted his disciples to frequently remember the free, substitutionary nature of his death again and again and it seems like there are a lot of ways he could have done that. He could have taught them a prayer, or a song, or preached a sermon, had them all memorize it, he could have made them stand on their heads and recite the Torah backwards…but instead he prescribes a frequent meal.

Why a meal? Why a ceremony? Many modern protestant churches have tried to do everything they can to rid their churches of anything that even sniffs of ceremony. So why?

The Lord’s Supper or communion or the Eucharist (which is Latin for ‘thanksgiving’), all ways to refer to the celbration of a meal of remembernce, is a deeply sensual form of worship. Now that phrase is intentionally shocking. By sensual, I mean that by calling us to a meal of remembrance he has giving us a means of worship that is fully tactile and engages all the senses. Its sensual. The fact that we have, culturally, come to see ‘sensual’ as synonymous with sexual is unfortunate, but kind of illustrates the point here. Sex also engages all the senses, and is in no way boring.

Likewise, communion engages all the senses and should be in no way boring. We see the elements, the bread and the wine. We hold and tear the bread, waft the wine and smell its complexity, taste the bitter sweetness of fermented grapes and the comforting softness of bread, and hear the story of God’s intimate celebration of his substitutionary death ‘for us’ told one more time…or at least that was Jesus’ intention. Sometimes I have somewhat jokingly called communion ‘taste worship’…but that actually short changes the power of the sacrament. And I know it is hard to get into with the thimble of Welches and the microscopic carb-pellet we use in evangelical churches…but Jesus thought that this explanation of his substitutionary attonement was so important, that it warented its own, particularly sensual, worship experience.

In this tactile, sensual experience of worship we remember…we remember, again and again and again and again, the truth of the gospel…because the more we internalize and appropriate the truth of the gospel, the more we will act like it matters. The more we remembered that we have been spared a looming confrontation with God’s pure justice that we would not have survived…the more we remember that God himself, in the person of Jesus, experienced the obliteration that confrontation…the more we remember that the only difference between us and our neighbor is that we have some blood painted on our door, the less we will behave like self righteous prudes and the more willing we will be to extend grace, patience, generosity and love.

So, as you can probably guess, I have far more to say about this ceremony than I have time for or, than is appropriate for this venue. If you are interested in more, I have put additional thoughts on my blog. But for now, I think it is valuable to recognize that the events of that night, the explanation of Jesus’ coming death on the cross as an atoning death ‘for us’…as an exchange, our wickedness for his goodness…is worth remembering again and again…and not just abstractly, but sensually and viscerally in a meal of worship and community.

3. Jesus Teaches a Brief Seminar on Leadership

Then in verses 24, there is an anti-climax. Jesus has eagerly desired to utilize the imagery and intimacy of this Passover to explain his death. You can sense the urgency and the desire and the passion. But the disciples…they’re still asking the wrong questions…there’re still asking power questions. They want to know who will have the authority, because in an authoritarian leadership model rank coerces action…it provides power.

I have actually taken courses on leadership for my job. At these classes we were taught that the era of leadership based on authority is over. In contemporary society, leadership is about influence rather than authority. In the influence model, respect coerces action…which give you power. It is still about power.

Tim Keller calls this mercenary leadership. It is fundamentally self interested. In Jesus’ community leadership is not about power, authority, or influence. It is not about the leader at all. It is about what she or he can find to do that would serve the other people in Jesus’ community in a fundamentally helpful way.

In the world, leadership is conferred on the best performers. In Jesus’ community it is conferred on the best repenters. It is an inverse-meritocracy. In the following passage, Jesus acknowledges that Peter will be the leader, but he is not because he is the greatest. But failure and repentance turned him into precisely the kind of servent leader Jesus is talking about. Repentence turns failure into compassion, humility, understanding.[4] In Jesus’ community, railure and repentance are the stuff leadership is made out of.

So that is a common application of this passage. Let me call it personal or ecclesiastical leadership. But I want to offer a brief post script. I simply want to pose the question about how this passage should shape our political action.

I have always found politics difficult in light of my faith. There are no examples in the scriptures of God’s people behaving well or poorly in a secular democracy…so sometimes I can feel adrift. Let me offer you this, as an aside. I think that the exile community (e.g. Daniel and friends who were captured and taken to Bablon) is a closer example of what our social action should look like than Theocratic Isreael.

But let me just ask, what does this passage say about our social action, including our political action. I think it suggests that we, as the Church, should be very wary of wielding power over people…that our social action and leadership should be typified by service rather than power.

Tim Keller has a really interesting observation about this. He says that most religions seem to do quite well when mixed with political power. Hinduism and Buddhism have done pretty well. Islam absolutely thrives when in political power. But Christianity doesn’t. Christianity has a very poor track record with surviving political power. The one place where Christianity has wielded political power, Europe…it is toothless. Keller suggests that wielding political power is so contrary to the way of Jesus Christ that it can destroy us.

So, there it is. In the last supper, Jesus uses the intimacy and imagery of the Passover to explain why he had to die. He died as a substitute for us. And we can appropriate that substitution by trusting and following him. This idea is so central to who he was and what he did, that he left a special, sensual ceremony so that we might frequently and meaningfully remember his substitutionary death and live in light of it. And one way that we live in light of it is to seek service rather than power…just like he did.

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[1] This analysis is from Tim Keller.
[2] As usual, I owe this insight to Tim Keller.
[3] This phrase was stolen verbatim from Keller.
[4] This is Keller’s too...One could argue from these footnotes that I do not read broadly enough. I would counter-argue that I do read pretty broadly for a guy with an engineering job, a ministry, 2 kids and working on a degree, Keller is just head and shoulders above other contemporary voices.