It is not resurrection per se that gives focus and direction to the Christian Church or the New Testament. It is rather the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth that is center stage. To understand, indeed to enter, this crucial Easter Moment, we must somehow enter the mind of this Jesus, or at the very least the mind of the early church about this Jesus.
Questions abound. Was it the mighty acts of his power that caused people to see God in Jesus of Nazareth, or was it because they saw God in Jesus of Nazareth that they attributed to him mighty acts of power? What was the content of the Moment when they knew that they could never again think of God without seeing him as included in all that the word God meant? To identify that Moment is to define Easter, To enter that Moment is to enter Easter.
In this chapter we will seek to isolate it, explore it, enter it; for the heart of the Gospel lies here. If Jesus did not rise, there is no resurrection, says Paul; and if there is no resurrection, then your faith is in vain, and we (Christians) of all people are most to be pitied.
Recall that no verse of the New Testament is written save as a post-Easter phenomenon. So every narrative about Jesus, every word, saying, and parable of Jesus, every healing episode involving Jesus is an account of an episode in the life of one acknowledged by the church and worshiped as the resurrected, ascended, glorified Lord. When we realize that every verse is a post-Easter verse, then new meanings flow from these ancient and familiar texts.
The Gospels portray Jesus as one who had an unbroken sense of oneness with God and an intensive awareness of this reality at every moment of his existence. Paul proclaimed this simply: “God was in Christ.”
The explanation of the meaning of this Jesus took the entire first century to work out canonically and almost six centuries to work out creedally. But explanations are always after the fact. How God was in Christ could be endlessly debated. That in Jesus they had met God in a unique, decisive way was clearly the first Christians’ undoubted experience. They saw Jesus as one who possessed the infinite freedom of wholeness. He was portrayed as possessing the intuitive power of an uncanny insight. He could read the lives of others as if they were an open book. He could communicate even with those who were thought to be mentally deranged or demon-possessed. He lived in a vivid receptivity and in a total communion with the holy. This sense of the holy he found not only in God but also at the very heart and in the very depth of human life.
True to his Hebrew heritage, God and life were not separated categories. God was always a verb. God andlove, God and being could not be surgically parted. Yahweh, the name given God in the burning bush story of the book of Exodus, is best translated, my Jewish friends tell me, by something like “I am that which causes all that is to be.” It was this sense of the holy God met in the center of life that enabled Jesus to see even the commonplace things of existence with an artist’s intensity of apprehension. He was totally available to every human being he confronted. Never is Jesus portrayed as looking over his shoulder at the next moment in time. He exhausted the wonder of every moment. The whole of his being, the full capacity of his power was lived out constantly. His ability to give life and to give love seemed infinite. Even when his life was being taken away, he is not pictured as grasping or clinging but giving willingly and freely.
All of this is portrayed in the New Testament as a pre-Easter description of Jesus. It is rather a post-Easter memory. I do not mean to suggest that it is an inaccurate memory, but there is no way the Easter Moment could not have shaped and informed this memory. Jesus’ identity as the risen Lord was far too dramatic a part of his being not to have colored even the most vivid recollections.
But the Gospels are equally clear in their assertion that during the course of Jesus’ earthly life no other human being perceived, recognized, or shared in the true meaning and nature of this Christ until the Moment of Easter. So on the lowest level of meaning and at the very least, Easter was the Moment when the disciples were able to see, to understand, to participate in his life, to share in his power. Easter was the Moment when the confines of their minds were broken open and they saw that in Jesus of Nazareth the full realityof God and the deepest truth about human life were not only revealed but were beckoning and inviting them to enter, to participate, and to live in the power of that meaning. I am convinced that Easter was infinitely more than this, but we must begin by looking at this moment subjectively.
What brought the disciples to see the truth of Jesus beyond the fact of the crucifixion? What enabled them to be certain that beyond the death of Jesus they had seen the living Christ? What forced open their eyes? What required, indeed demanded, of them that they identify the Jesus of history whom they had known in the flesh and loved as an earthly companion and teacher with the apocalyptic figure called the Son of Man who would usher in the dawn of a new creation? What brought these disciples to proclaim, “He is not here; he is risen!” and to proclaim it with such power and such conviction that their lives were never the same and that the history of their world was never the same? What removed their earthbound, time-limited blinders so that in an ecstatic moment of incredulous wonder they could see in Jesus both God and the fullness of human life and see all things anew in the splendor of transcendence and eternity? That is what the Easter Moment did!
I think the clue to this is so simple that its very simplicity baffled and embarrassed the members of the early church. Its lack of profundity all but cried out for an embellishment of the account and a heightening of the miraculous in the narrative. Yet at the same time this truth was so real and so etched upon their unforgettable memory that it echoed over and over throughout the New Testament record.
Think for a moment about the place of the sacramental meal in Christian history. Why did this become the major worship symbol for Christian people from the very beginning? Search the biblical narrative, and see what a powerful place the sacramental common meal has in the Gospel narrative. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include accounts of the last supper, and to it they assign a place of incredible significance. The Fourth Gospel omits the last supper narrative and substitutes the story of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet. But this is done, I am convinced, because in John’s mind Jesus on the cross became the bread of life broken for you. This is proved to my satisfaction by the Fourth Gospel’s having the Christ say, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger” (Jn. 6:35). The Fourth Gospel also attaches all of its highly developed sacramental teaching to the story of Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000. I think that it is not coincidental that the only miraculous event other than Easter that all four Gospels record is the account of a miraculous feeding of the multitude. Why did that story gather more attention about it than any other?
When these several versions of the miraculous feeding of the multitude are isolated and read, they are obviously full of symbols. The careful numbering of the crowd: 5,000 men (the Bible could not escape its cultural chauvinism), on another occasion 4,000. Five loaves once, seven loaves later. Twelve baskets of fragments were gathered in one account on the Jewish side of the lake. Later on the Gentile side seven baskets of fragments remained. The eucharistic verbs so obviously shaped by the liturgy are employed by the authors: Jesus took the bread, blessed it or gave thanksfor it, broke it, and gave it. Paul, giving us the earliest version of the last supper, employs the same four verbs in the exact order.
What is it that the evangelists are saying in the retelling of what appears to be a simple miracle story? Was this a literal historic episode, a miraculous feeding of a multitude by a first-century wonderworker? I doubt it, and I know of no contemporary New Testament scholar who would treat any version of the miraculous feeding stories as if they were descriptions of objective history. Was this a parable about the inexhaustible power of the risen Christ who was beyond all of the limitations of time and space read back as a narrative event in the life of the pre-Easter Jesus? I would bet my life on it, and here and in many other places, which I shall seek to document, I find the clue that for me unlocks the content of the Moment in which the disciples’ eyes were opened to see the risen Lord.
Time and time again the resurrection narratives of the New Testament combine the appearance of the risen Christ and the experience of eating together. I cannot agree with those who dismiss these accounts simply as an attempt to demonstrate or to heighten the physical reality of resurrection. In the later, and as we have seen contradictory, resurrection narrations that the Gospels include, that may well be a motive, even a primary motive, for portraying the risen Christ as eating; but the connection is too deep, too significant to be so categorically and cavalierly treated. Why did the earliest Christian tradition decide to use the eating of food as the means to heighten the physical reality of the resurrected one? Can people create a tradition out of nothing—a tradition so powerful that even today, 2,000 years later, Christians meet to worship inside theexperience of a common meal. This meal finds expression in highly stylized liturgical forms ranging from a fellowship-oriented Lord’s Supper in a country Baptist Church in the American South to a pontifical high mass at St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. Wherever the physical location is and no matter how simple or how complex the ritual, whenever the church has gathered to worship the Risen Christ, it has done so with the sharing of a meal that has a sacramental meaning. How did the idea of sacrament and meal become so closely linked?
We examine first the food references in the resurrection narratives of the New Testament. In the Emmaus Road story (Lk. 24:13ff) the risen Christ is at first not perceived. He is thought to be a stranger. As they walked the road to Emmaus, the account suggests that this stranger tried to show that suffering and dying did not preclude being the messiah, but Cleopas and his friend did not understand. Finally, they sat down to eat the evening meal. The stranger took bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it. Immediately, says Luke, “Their eyes were opened,” and they recognized him. He vanished out of their sight. These disciples returned to Jerusalem to inform the others. They did so, says Luke, with the words “he was made known to them in the breaking of bread” (Lk. 24:35). Almost immediately Luke has the risen Christ appear again even as they discussed these wondrous events. He asked, “Have you anything to eat?” (Lk. 24:41).
In the opening verses of the book of Acts (Acts 1:4), is recorded, “And as he (the risen Lord) was eating with them, he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the Father.” Later in Acts (10:41) in one of the sermons of Peter, Peter ismade to say that the risen Christ appeared “to those of us who ate and drank with Him.”
In the book of Revelation (3:20) the risen Christ is portrayed as standing at the doorway of our lives and knocking. The author in a very interesting verb usage says that if we open the door, he will come in and dine or sup or eat with us. To the mind of the early church, that was the appropriate verb to describe the presence of the Christ being experienced.
In the Fourth Gospel in a note referred to earlier in this volume, chapter 8, the resurrection appearance is set at the time of the evening meal. One week later when Thomas was present, the risen Christ appeared once more at the time of the evening meal. In the twenty-first chapter of John, Jesus is revealed to his disciples as they ate together on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Then he confronted Peter in a dialogue that turned on two verbs, love and feed. If you love, Peter, you will feed.
In these fragments of the resurrection narrative, I believe there is preserved the original context in which the meaning and the power of Easter were first experienced. If I had to reconstruct the Easter Moment as it dawned on the disciples, I would suggest that it looked something like this. For some time, perhaps as long as three years, the disciples had gathered around the man from Nazareth named Jesus. What he meant to each of them at that moment we can never be certain, but it is fair to assume that they were not trinitarians or dogmatic theologians and that they were not disposed to think of Jesus in any category save human. Yet over and over again the human capacities by which they sought to measure him had to be expanded. Why each of them wandered into the disciple relationship is forever lost, but we may safely assume a variety of reasons. Doubtless some of them, perhaps including Judas, saw in Jesus earthly messianic possibilities. Some of them were looking for success and saw Jesus as the star to which they should hitch their wagons. If the title zealot is historically accurate in its application to Simon, then surely he saw in Jesus a revolutionary movement to which he wanted to be attached. It is quite clear that the Jesus movement was basically a Galilean movement. The very clear Gospel tradition shows the Jesus movement to have its origins in Galilee.15
Jesus first achieved public notice, it appears, on two counts: his teaching and his acts of healing. His public ministry was undoubtedly inaugurated when he was baptized by John in the River Jordan. The difficulty the early Christians had interpreting that event was obvious. Surely they would not have invented a narrative that created that much of an apologetic problem. The baptism seems to have been a crucial moment for him. Each of the Gospels gives us a version of the impact of that moment on Jesus. But remember, we have the benefit of tradition; they did not. For them each day added to the tradition the meaning, the understanding they were to pass on to us.
What the disciples saw and experienced was that this Jesus possessed an uncanny power. I am quite certain that it was not, at least at first, what even they would call miraculous power. It was rather the power of a self-assured authority, the power of insight, the power of a secure, whole person, the power of one who possessed radical and existential freedom. They could not help being aware that his life stood in strange contrast to their own. They were anxious; he was at peace. They were grasping to become; he was content to be. They were jealous of their status; he was able to embrace children, lepers, and all sorts of others who were not capable of enhancing him. Somehow he had no need to be enhanced. They cited their credentials; Jesus said simply, “Verily I say unto you.” Constantly his scandalized critics shouted, “By what authority do you say or do these things?” The disciples were always concerned about the next day; Jesus was able to be totally present in the now. I suspect that this was the first reality they perceived, and interestingly enough these qualities—freedom, security, wholeness—are still both magnetically attractive and threateningly fearful.
Jesus had one other capacity that seemed to set him apart in the minds of the disciples, and that was his standard of judgment, a standard by which they benefited; for only one who operated on this standard would ever have chosen these particular men for discipleship. Jesus seems to have seen all persons not as they were, and certainly not as they ought to be, but rather as they could be, given the one ingredient that broken human life seems so desperately to require—healing, accepting, forgiving, affirming love. It is the kind of love that finally only God can give, and yet time and again the disciples seem to have experienced exactly this kind of love from Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus was also uniquely and intensely related to God, and this too must have been obvious. Jesus knew God in a disquietingly familiar way. We cannot get inside his prayer life, but we can see enormous power there. It was Irenaeus who observed in A.D. 175 that “the glory of God is man fully alive.”16 But Jesus seems to have lived out what Irenaeus articulated. It was unmistakable yet never analyzed or articulated by the disciples. They experienced it, they grew in it, they were mystified by it. His fully alive life had depth and power, and the more deeply they perceived it, the more of God’s glory they perceived in it.
How Jesus understood himself no one can ever say with authority. But it is fair to say that something happened in Jesus’ baptism that set in motion the course of his entire life. The wilderness experience we call the temptation was his own attempt to understand what the baptism seemed to have made clear to him, namely, that in some strange and mysterious way God was acting in human history through him. He recognized that he had a unique vocation: on God’s behalf to restore God’s creation to the wholeness that God intended. Jesus perceived God as restorative power. God was worshiped when the fullness of life emerged from the brokenness of humanity. The wholeness that Jesus knew himself to possess was what God intended for all his children. He was called, ordained, created, empowered to offer to the world the wholeness of God, the fullness of life, the power of love.17
How that power came to Jesus, when it became part of Jesus’ identity, only God knows. I would say, though, that no one finally can become something or someone that he never was, so that John’s prologue hymn of praise to the preexistent logos is for me the most satisfying Christological statement. However, as we attempt to retrace this drama, our purpose is not to prove Christology but to see how it dawned upon the consciousness of the people involved in the drama.
Jesus understood the messianic purpose to be to bring God—life, love, being, wholeness—to distorted, broken, insecure, grasping human life. He accepted that vocation self-consciously at his baptism. The Fourth Gospel accurately captures this when it has him say, “I have come that you might have life abundantly.” He tested this vocation in the wilderness and dismissed as temptation the popular understandings of where wholeness can be found. It is not found in the meeting of physical needs: “Man does not live by bread alone.” It is not found in meeting status needs: “Worship me and all the kingdoms of the world will be yours.” It is not found in meeting religious needs, acting as if you can manipulate God to show favoritism. “The family that prays together, stays together” is the modern version of the ancient temptation, “Cast yourself off the pinnacle of the temple, Jesus, for he will give his angels charge concerning you lest you dash your foot against a stone.” Wholeness, the fullness of life, results only when the infinite love of God embraces and restores the brokenness of human life.
Jesus seemed to understand and to see the infinite love of God to be his unique gift to bring, and his commitment to bring it was his call to be messiah. His vocation set him apart. In classical theological terms his ability to bring God totally was his claim to a divine nature, and his ability to live out the presence of God through his unbroken humanity was his claim to a perfect human nature. Like all theological terms, Jesus the God-man is a finite, frail, human attempt to make sense out of the reality of the experience that all that God meant was met, engaged, and worshiped in this Jesus who never ceased to be fully and completely human. When we get behind the words, we do not argue; we are rather drawn into mystery, awe, wonder, worship. That did not dawn suddenly on anyone. Yet every time they thought they understood, something happened that broke the barriers of their minds, and they sawhow inadequate their understandings had been. In the life of the disciples it was an ongoing process.
Perhaps it was in Jesus’ mind also. It is one thing to be aware of your purpose and quite another to know clearly how you will accomplish that purpose. The temptation story reveals a wrestling with alternatives that were rejected as inadequate. It is safe to assume that this inner wrestling continued not with the employment of the inadequate and rejected alternatives but with alternatives that were adequate but unsuccessful. The unsuccessful note lay in the inability of the disciples to discern their meaning, not in the inadequacy of the method.
Jesus was a teacher. His teaching was designed to illumine in his hearers the meaning of the purpose of his life. His teachings pointed to the results that are achieved when life is embraced in the recreating power of the love of God. That is what it means to be in the kingdom of God. When perfect love embraces life, those security-producing but mindless prejudices will disappear; so listen to the parable of the good Samaritan. When the infinite worth of human life is experienced, then the limited standards of human judgment are transcended. Prodigal sons are embraced, lost sheep are searched out and found, talents are multiplied. When the love of God touches human life, the capacity to give is enhanced, and it is the capacity to give, not the amount that is given, that becomes a mark of the kingdom. So watch for the widow and her mite.
On and on went the teaching ministry of this Jesus. Surely they would hear, see, and respond. But that is never the result. Men and women hear only out of the blindness of their needs. Some thought he was a rabble-rouser, fit only to be banished. Others thoughthe should be made king so that his wisdom could rule the nation. If Jesus ever entertained the hope that his teaching could enable men and women to see the meaning of his life and to be embraced by the power of his love, then surely the response he encountered must have dismayed and disappointed him. Teaching was not to be the means through which his messianic vocation could be accomplished.
There was another alternative. The power of the infinite love of God recreates wholeness when it touches the brokenness of human life. If Jesus possessed this power, then he would act it out. Twisted bodies would be made whole, distorted and deranged minds would be restored. There is no doubt in my mind that the New Testament portrait of Jesus as capable of doing wondrous acts of healing is accurate. Details may be heightened. The original diagnosis may not have been accurate. People who are convinced that epilepsy, schizophrenia, and deaf muteness are the result of demon-possession might well have no better understanding of how such afflictions are cured. But Jesus touched lives that were broken or distorted, and a wondrous wholeness resulted. “Devils are banished"; that is a sign that the kingdom of God is upon you.
Jesus did not do miracles to prove his divinity. But miracles, that is, marvelous acts that defied traditional limitations of explanation, did mark his life. Perhaps he hoped that people’s eyes would be opened by these signs and that they would see, experience, and believe the power with which he was endowed—the power to act out God’s healing love in human history.
But did they see? Of course not. Once again blinded by their own needs, some saw in him a wonderworker who perhaps could be manipulated to suit their purposes. Others saw a demon-possessed man who did these mighty acts by the power of Beelzebub, and they wanted to banish him. Jesus tried to speak to that (“A kingdom divided against itself will not stand”), but it was to no avail. The meaning of the life-giving, recreating love of God was being demonstrated in their very midst. But the people who had ears to hear his teaching did not hear, and those who had eyes to see his inner meaning acted out did not see. Mighty acts of healing were not to be the means through which his messianic vocation would be accomplished.
There was another alternative. Perhaps it was too much to expect the masses of people who constituted the ever-present crowd to comprehend. They did not really know this Jesus. His words, his actions were somewhat isolated in their minds from his person. They responded to his public image, which is always a distortion. So Jesus narrowed his scope and concentrated not on the crowds but on the intimate circle of his disciples. He would show them, teach them, and live with them in a community that was so deep, so intimate that they would hear his words and view his actions in the context of sharing completely in his life. Perhaps they would then understand.
In the Fourth Gospel between the Lazarus story and the events of Holy Week a long section is included that is called the farewell discourses. In Luke there is a section between the time Jesus set his face to Jerusalem and the time he arrived that consumed a significant part of Luke’s text, called the travel section. In both of these biblical narratives the primary action is between Jesus and his disciples. They differ vastly in content as well as style. Both, however, seem to me to be the place where the memory of Jesus’ intense relationship withthe disciples is recalled. At some point he appears to turn away from the crowds and toward his chosen ones. He shared his thoughts, he interpreted his actions, he tried to open their eyes to understand his power. I think we cannot overestimate the intensity of that shared time, and yet the result Jesus seemed to hope for did not occur. The disciples, blinded by their own inner needs, simply did not see, perhaps could not see. Instead of sharing in Jesus’ freedom, they debated as to which one of them would be greatest. They schemed even against each other.
Over and over again Jesus reached out to show them something more. Freedom, wholeness, and being do not have to be jealous, defensive, or status-conscious. The full and whole person can wash the feet of his inferiors, take the lowest seats at the banquet, or love one another as he has been loved. But the disciples never understood this, and when the last act of Jesus’ great drama unfolded, the disciples could not overcome their own security needs. Acting out of what they obviously conceived of as their best interests, one of them betrayed Jesus, one of them denied him, and all the others forsook him and fled. The intimate association of Jesus with his disciples did not prove to be the means through which his messianic vocation could be accomplished.
When Jesus gave up on the disciples’ response as the means through which he could impart his life-giving love to the world, no one can say. Some might suggest that when he took Peter, James, and John, his most trusted inner three, to the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest this was his last attempt to avoid the final alternative. If the disciples even at this moment could have understood, realized the source ofthe power of his life, allowed that power to be born in them, perhaps even then the cross might not have been necessary. Certainly the prayers of Jesus in the garden appear to be the moment when he knew there was no alternative. To accomplish his purpose of being the life through which God acts with his redeeming and recreating love in human history was to do the will of the Father. That purpose his words, his actions, his association with the twelve had not achieved. Only one other alternative lay before him.
I am convinced that Jesus entertained this possibility from the very beginning. Long before he launched his public career, he obviously steeped himself in his scriptures. Embedded in those scriptures were the servant songs of the book of Isaiah. Written in the sixth century B.C. to sketch a new vocation or to interpret the present vocation of the post-exilic people of God who possessed no power, no grandeur, no splendor, these songs portrayed a servant who was weak, defeated, abused, killed; and yet by being faithful, even as a victim he was vindicated and became a light to lighten the nations and the glory of Israel. Perhaps Jesus saw the role of the servant as another means of accomplishing his purpose. Perhaps what men and women could not hear in his words or see in his actions or experience in the intimacy of their life together they would be able to see and hear and experience if he lived out self-consciously the role of the servant. But for there to be any chance of accomplishing his purpose, the disciples would have to understand, to interpret correctly, and in the power of that action to experience the meaning, the love, the freedom of his life.
When any of these thoughts became Jesus’ purpose no one can say. I suspect that this was always an option,but never until the very end of his life was it his only option. I am also convinced it became his only option, not by his choice but rather by the fact that the disciples successively closed the doors on every other possibility.
The servant must act out the meaning of his life at the center of the stage. It must not occur in some remote region, so Jesus was careful not to be arrested in Galilee or to have his final showdown at some insignificant moment. Rather he set his face “like flint,” says St. Luke, for Jerusalem at the time of the crowded, nationalistically oriented festival of the Passover. Whatever else the Gospels say, it is quite clear that Jesus directed every detail of these final days of his life. The preparation for the challenge of Palm Sunday and the last supper was elaborate. Obviously some advance work had been accomplished. A sign had been given. A donkey for the procession was available. A large upper room, furnished, had been made ready. A retreat to safety in Bethany had been prepared. How else could one interpret this elaborate detail preserved in the earliest Christian records called the passion narrative? Then according to plan the drama unfolded.
The Palm Sunday procession from the Mount of Olives to Jerusalem achieved public attention. It was nothing less than a street demonstration. The cleansing of the temple of the moneychangers was the gauntlet thrown down at the feet of the religious hierarchy. The retreat to Bethany for the night guaranteed the proper time schedule. The public teaching to responsive crowds in the daylight hours heightened the tension and the anger. The attempt to pry loose one of his intimate circle was an appropriate response.
Finally, the night of the final meal came. Matthew, Mark, and Luke say it was the Passover. John says not so. It really does not matter. All Jewish meals have religious contexts, and this one, whether Passover or not, was caught up in the drama of that week. That is an inescapable fact. The disciples were on an emotional merry-go-round. All of their own nationalistic feelings and messianic hopes must have been fired by the events of Palm Sunday. There was no mistaking the messianic symbol of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem riding on an ass. Zechariah’s words were popular and well-known. The shouts of “Hosannah to the Son of David” and “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” both had significant messianic meanings. But before the flow of these moments could subside, there was Jesus in the temple, casting out the moneychangers. No one was blind to the authorities’ rage, and the disciples were fearful, wondering, confused. As the week wore on, the atmosphere became more and more taut. Judas’ defection was already a private but not yet a public fact. Finally, it all culminated in that upper room on that day we call Maundy Thursday.
The mood was melancholy. The room was, in a sense, a hideout. Fear was pervasive. Death seemed omnipresent. In this setting they prepared to eat. This may have been the first night since Palm Sunday that Jesus and his disciples had risked remaining in Jerusalem. The record is silent on the nightly abode, but the careful attention Jesus gave to the events of this week would cause one to suspect that a plan for nightly sanctuary outside Jerusalem was not overlooked. The disciples gathered on the reclining benches. The meal began.
Jesus, serving as host or head of the family, initiated the meal with the blessing of bread. It was in the tradition of Jewish meals that the head of the household could add the special meaning to each dinner beyond the significance the meal traditionally had. Hence, Jesus’ ad-libbing on the text was normal but nonetheless added its own ominous note. He took bread, raised his eyes heavenward, blessed God giving thanks for the bread, and then he broke it. As he broke it, he added words identifying that broken bread with his body, which would be broken for them. It was a strange note, a new note. They must have wondered what he meant. Remember that with pre-Good Friday understandings it was not at all obvious what it was he meant. The earliest version we have of this supper is in Paul (1 Cor. 11:23ff.) where Paul uses the formula reserved for the most ancient and authentic versions of the Christian tradition. Paul writes, “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, That the Lord Jesus, 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.’ “ And here Paul adds words, which I am convinced are both authentic and crucial, ”This do in remembrance of me” Luke alone of the Gospels includes this command in his narration of that unusual meal.
If the traditional pattern was followed, as Paul suggests it was, the meal followed that blessing. I suspect it was eaten in a somber mood. The gaity of Passover was certainly not the spirit of this evening. The meal having ended, Jesus again presiding took the cup of wine. Once more he blessed God, giving thanks for the fruit of the vine. Then offering the cup he identified its contents with his blood shed for them to inaugurate a new covenant with God. Once more, Paul says, he enjoined them, “As oft as you drink it, do thisin remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show forth the Lord’s death until he comes.”
Broken bread. This is my body. Poured-out wine. This is my blood. The synoptics suggest that after they sang a hymn the meal ended and the drama rolled on toward its crescendo. The Garden of Gethsemane, the betrayal, the arrest, the trial, the torture, the march to Calvary, the crucifixion all followed in rapid succession.
What was Jesus doing at that last supper? Was he trying to make them understand even then what his ministry among them for whatever its duration had failed to make them understand? Or did he by then know that for him to accomplish his messianic purpose he must suffer death? He wanted to give them this mighty interpretive clue through which they might understand his death and through that understanding come to experience the meaning of his life. He was going to live out the meaning of the love of God in the face of every human distortion of that love. The brokenness of human life would inevitably make this kind of love its victim. That was the fate of the servant about whom Isaiah wrote; the meaning of his life would never be born in them.
So at the last supper even though they did not understand, he gave them a clue, an interpretive clue that would unlock both the meaning and the power of his life. And to prevent them from misunderstanding or missing this clue altogether, his final word was do this whenever you gather to eat again; do this in remembrance of me. See my life under the symbols of broken bread, poured-out wine.
We watch Jesus walk through those final moments ofhis life. We observe his freedom, his life, his love, his unlimited capacity to give. We watch him absorb abuse and return love, absorb hate and return forgiveness, absorb misunderstanding and return acceptance. He was betrayed, and he loved the betrayer. He was denied, and he loved the denier. He was abused, and he responded by loving the abusers. Never did he grasp at the straws of life. Complete, whole, he laid his life down, a willing, loving victim. He was dying, and yet he ministered to the needs of those who were still alive. To the soldiers he spoke the word of forgiveness, to the thief the word of assurance, to his mother the word of caring. Here a dying form suspended from a cross lived out the freedom, the wholeness, the fullness of life that only one in touch with the meaning of God could possibly possess. He died. People watched. The disciples seemed to have scattered, but to where we do not know. Peter did linger to watch, to deny, to weep. The drama was over.
Most people felt the final curtain had rung down on this life. Perhaps they discussed him, perhaps they by and large ignored him. But those who watched him die could not help wondering. It was a haunting kind of wonder. But no matter what avenue of thought they followed, it all ended at the same point. Jesus was dead. Executed by the religious hierarchy, the official spokesmen for God, for the crime of blasphemy. All hopes ended with his death, for God did not spare him. They could not comprehend a messiah who would be killed. The sun sank, the bodies were hastily removed and hastily buried. The watchman blew the shofar. The Sabbath had begun. It would probably be the longest Sabbath, at least for some of the disciples and especially for Peter.