Last week I talked about how communion is our “daily bread,” and how “daily bread”—a phrase Jesus gives us in the Lord’s Prayer—is in fact a callback to the manna God provided in the Old Testament. If you haven’t read that one yet, you can find it here.

But of course, if we’re going to be talking about Jesus’s sacrifice and the institution of the Last Supper and truly understand all it means, we have to look at the Feast during which He gave us this meal: Passover.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve read the story of the original Passover enough times that you could recite the gist of it without any trouble. Even so, there are things that I’d never paused to consider, and many of those things were expounded upon and then referenced by the Jews and Jesus. So having a good grasp of them is crucial to understanding the context in which Jesus acted and spoke.

First, something that really stood out to me when I was studying it this time was that when God instituted the Passover, He didn’t do it even then as a one-time thing. He created it as a tradition. Isn’t that just remarkable? How often in life do we really know when something is going to be such a big deal, so earth-shattering, so amazing that it will become an annual holiday we observe?

I didn’t know when I woke up on October 23, 2005, that I was going to have my first baby that day. I didn’t know when I woke up on September 26, 2020 that my son was about to be diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. My husband certainly didn’t realize on that warm January afternoon last year that he was going to slip, sprain his ankle, and it would impact his health for the next fifteen months.

But God obviously knew what He was doing (yeah, go ahead and laugh at the absurdity of that statement. I did.). And He did it on purpose. Which is to say, He did it with purpose, and He made it clear from the first word to Moses that this purpose was not just for NOW but for FOREVER. He didn’t just give him instructions to carry out, he gave him instructions for how to turn what was about to happen into a memorial to be remembered for all time.

Few things in history have such gravity. Few things were handed down with such direct orders. Not just do this but you will always do this. On this day of this month. Obey these traditions. Why?

Because it matters. Because it was so, so important that God’s people never forget what He was about to do.

Because it was the foreshadow, the foundation of what He would do later.

So God instituted the Passover tradition, and it was to be planned out well. On the tenth day of the month, each family was to select a lamb. (I wrote about that part already, here.) On the fourteenth day of the month, they were to slaughter the lamb. Some of its blood was to be smeared on the doorposts and lintels of their houses. They were to roast it whole, innards still in there. They were to eat it with unleavened bread, sandals on, travel clothes in place. Ready to leave.

Let’s pause for  just a moment and talk about the unleavened bread. Why? Because I love to bake, and this fascinates me, LOL.

So—yes, this is a total side note—I just learned about einkorn flour. Einkorn is the original wheat, what they would have eaten in the days of the Old Testament. It’s a kinda finicky grain, and it doesn’t have a high yield, so it didn’t take long for mankind to start breeding better-yielding varieties like spelt. Einkorn has been preserved only as an heirloom, hobbyist strain. Because of that, it has never been altered, neither by natural cross-breeding of strains nor by genetic alteration.

Today when we make a nice sandwich loaf, we use yeast. But yeast, as something you can buy on its own, is relatively new. It’s always been there, but not as a separate product. Back before you could just purchase a packet of jar of the stuff, you were relegated to the yeast that occurs naturally in your grain, and in order to have a fluffy loaf, you had to give those natural, “wild” yeasts time to do their work. And that could take a while.

We’re not talking an hour or two. We’re talking overnight. We’re talking a starter of fermented dough and water that is continually added to, sourdough style, used until it’s nearly gone, then fed again. That leaven, that yeast can go for years or decades or even centuries if you pay attention to it, add more, and use a little bit—it only takes a couple spoonfuls!—to start your new bread to rising. (“A little leaven leavens a whole loaf,” you know.)

This ancient grain, though, doesn’t have the same gluten that newer grains possess, and the rising process took way longer than our all-purpose flour does today. Rising times are typically double. (Flavor is, too. Just sayin’.) So the fact that the Israelites weren’t to give their bread time to rise meant a whole lot more. I admit that I’ve read that part before and thought, “Sheesh, it doesn’t take that long. What was the big deal?” But it was. Because it didn’t take a couple hours, it took half a day or more. My first sourdough loaves with this ancient grain took fifteen hours. Fifteen!! And these weren’t all inactive hours, either. It requires a lot of tending, turning, kneading, rising, moving, dusting…not a simple, hands-off experience.

It all started to make sense, then, LOL. That was the bread-baking God was telling them to forego. He said to simply mix the flour and water and bake the bread like that, then and there. What you ended up with was a flat cake of bread, usually baked in a circle. Make a note of that—it’s going to come up again in a couple weeks. 😉

Anyway, back to Passover. The meal was to be eaten in haste, together as a family. Note that this is part of the instructions, as clearly as killing the lamb and smearing its blood. The sacrifice alone was not enough. The blood being shed was not enough. They had to eat the lamb.

Why?

This goes back to the very nature of a covenant, which is something that moderns don’t really do much anymore. But in the ancient world, covenants were the things by which families were made. They weren’t a legal contract that said “you do this, I do that.” They were an oath that said, “I am yours and you are mine.” Marriage was not a contract, it was a covenant. When God made Abraham His child, it was a covenant. When He took Israel as His people—something He likens over and over again to marriage—it was a covenant.

Covenants are always, always sealed with a meal. I’ve looked before at the meaning of the word companion, which literally means “one you break bread with.” Why do we have a reception after a wedding? After a baptism? After pretty much all our big-deal life events? Because sharing a meal with someone means, “We’re opening our family to you.” It means, “We are no longer strangers, we are bound together.” Which is also why it feels weird to have a meal with a stranger, in a way it doesn’t feel weird to sit beside them on a bus or in a classroom. Meals invite conversation. Opening of hearts. Who do you eat most with in life? Your spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings. Meals, in a very important way, give us life. Sharing that has historically been one of the most sacred things two humans can do, and it’s why hospitality has such deep roots in ancient cultures.

The Passover meal is the part that God told Moses was to be repeated every year, forever. Obviously the Angel of Death was not going to make an appearance again, year after year. Firstborn sons were not going to be killed on that night, forever. But He instituted a tradition with that meal, and through it, He gave a way for His people not only to remember the history, but to remember the covenant.

The people demonstrated their acceptance of this covenant by participating in the meal. Again, not just obeying the command to kill a lamb and use its blood, but to eat it.

Later, after the Law was given by Moses, each tribe appointed elders to represent them. And Moses took those elders up onto the mountain to basically make this new covenant official, and have you ever noticed what they did? There, up on the mountain? They beheld God, and they ate and drank. (Exodus 24:9-11)

I had never noticed that before! Had you?

Those elders saw God. Not, presumably, His face, but Him in a key sense. And the natural response to this was to eat and drink. Because this created that covenant with Him. This sealed them in relationship with Him.

We see, then, why it came as no surprise to His disciples when Jesus instituted a new covenant through…a meal. That same meal, in a way. He did it during the Passover celebration. And yet, in some key ways, He made BIG changes. We’ll talk more about those later.

For now, just dwell on that. The old covenant—both the original given to Abraham and the one made between God and all of Israel—was sealed with a meal. With the eating and drinking of flesh and wine. With a slain lamb and its blood.

A lamb that not only had to be killed, sacrificed, but consumed. And that meal was remembered every year through the Passover tradition. It was being relived that night in the Upper Room. The Twelve were thinking, then, about how God had delivered them out of Egypt.

And that was the stage on which Jesus made it clear a new deliverance was coming.

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Have I ever done a blog series? I don’t know that I have. But I’ve recently finished reading an amazing book called Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist* by Brant Pitre, and it has forever changed the way I view communion. Far more, it gave me such a deep understanding of what Christ was really doing when He came to earth to save us. The expectations He was meeting and fulfilling. The way He’d written history to perfectly foreshadow what He knew He was going to do for us.

It’s beautiful. So, so beautiful. And so, naturally, I want to share it with you. As I always do, I’m going to take the lessons I learned not just from the book above, but also from everything else I was reading and doing during the 8-week study I did of the book, which means some of it will be Pitre’s research, some of it will be my own, and all of it, I hope, will make you go “Wow!” just as it did me.

So for the next several weeks, I’m going to look at the different ideas that all work together to give us this beautiful, complex, deep picture. And I’m going to start with the idea of our “daily bread.” (For the record, this isn’t where the book begins. But it’s the thing that has stuck with me the most and where I want to start, LOL.)

Have you ever pondered the repetition of that line of the Lord’s Prayer? Give us this day our daily bread.

Um…this day, our daily…yeah. I’d never really stopped to consider how that was saying the same thing twice. Why doesn’t it just say “give us this day the bread we need”?

Because to the Jews Jesus was talking to, daily bread didn’t just mean “what we need today.” It covered that meaning, sure. But it isn’t all it meant. And in fact, the word used there in the Greek doesn’t have anything to do with the word for day. The Greek word is epiousia, and it actually means “above the natural” or perhaps “super-substantial.” This prayer is inviting us to pray for supernatural bread. And in Jewish history, what was their supernatural, God-delivered, daily bread?

Manna.

So why is Jesus inviting us to beseech God daily for His provision of manna? Why does Jesus talk about the manna in His “bread of life” discourse in John 6?

Because the people of Jesus’s day who were looking for a Messiah had something very specific in mind. They weren’t waiting for just any Messiah. They were waiting for a new Moses. Someone to deliver them not just from oppression, but to true freedom, of spirit as well as politics or physical things. Moses himself prophesied that another would be raised up in his same spirit, and that was exactly what the people of God had been waiting for in the thousands of years between Moses and Jesus.

Why?

Because though they entered the earthly Promised Land, they never fully possessed it. They’d forfeited so much of what the covenant between God and Abraham was supposed to include through their disobedience and sin. They were supposed to be a nation of priests, with each father being the direct line between their families and God Himself.

But they’d instead worshipped the Golden Calf. They’d turned their hearts back to Egypt. Despite the miraculous escape from Egypt and the ways God had met them in the wilderness already, despite the words He had spoken aloud to them as a people, they’d forgotten. They’d sinned. They’d broken the terms of the covenant, and so they were given a new, abbreviated version–one with a lot of rules to follow. No longer would each man be able to go directly to God—only the Levites, who had remained true to the Promise, could do that. The priesthood was gifted only to them.

In another amazing book called A Father Who Keeps His Promises by Scott Hahn, the author goes into fascinating detail about all aspects of the covenant between God and man, and he pays especial attention to the giving of the Law to Moses. Did you know that every single animal God deemed “clean” had been reviled in Egypt? And that every animal that Egyptians included in their rituals of worship or used to represent the gods, God marked as “unclean”? I had never realized that! But it was a total and complete reversal of the ways of Egypt. We today tend to look at His prohibitions from a purely scientific point of view—you know the ones. “Pigs are filthy animals. Lobsters are bottom-feeders. They carry disease and make you unhealthy.” And all that may be true. But it misses a very vital part of the equation.

God wanted His people to completely forget the ways and worship of the Egyptians. He wanted them to be set apart. He didn’t want them to be constantly looking over their shoulders toward Egypt, like Lot’s wife at Sodom. He wanted them to embrace being a people set apart. A people belonging to the One True God and none other. He didn’t want to be a god in a pantheon. He wanted to be the sole ruler of His people’s hearts.

Part of this was taking care of His people during the journey from oppression to freedom, even when that journey took forty years instead of a few weeks thanks to their unfaithfulness and stubbornness and doubt.

Boy, that’s reassuring, isn’t it? Because let’s face it, friends. All of us have short memories. When it’s sweltering in the summer, we don’t remember how cold we were in the winter. When our land is parched and dying, we don’t really care that it was flooded last year. When we’re thirsty, it doesn’t matter if we had water enough to drink two days ago.

We are a people of now. A people of “what have you done for me lately?” A people so quick to forget God’s promises. And even when we remember them, knowing it doesn’t necessitate feeling it.

Yet still God meets us there, in our deserts. He meets us in our doubt. When we cry out, no matter how whiny we may sound, He provides.

When His people cried out for food, He sent them food every day. Bread from heaven in the morning. Quail in the evenings.

Pause for a moment to consider that—the daily miracle. The miracle that was so weird at the start that they named it “what is it?” and yet which they quickly grew so bored of that their complaints brought on a plague.

What daily miracles are we treating with such disdain? What daily bread are we turning our noses up at? What miracles are we not only refusing to believe anymore to be miracles, but do we come to despise?

It’s no coincidence that Jesus both begins and ends His “offensive” speech about the Bread of Life—a clear lesson on what we now call the Lord’s Supper, the Last Supper, Communion, or the Eucharist, depending on our faith background—with talk of manna.

Manna, the “daily bread” given to the people of Israel. Manna, which was “food for the journey.” Manna, which ceased when they entered the Promised Land. Manna, which was given every single morning (except for Sabbath, of course) for forty years. Manna, which tasted like wafers in honey—a foretaste of that Promised Land flowing with milk and honey.

Why did Christ draw the parallel between that daily bread and the bread that is His flesh? Why did He instruct us to pray for it to be given to us “each day”?

Because His flesh—that communion bread—is our sustenance for our journey in this life. Our journey before we reach our Promised Land, which is when we’ll dwell in His courts for eternity. Jesus is our manna. He is our daily bread. He is our supernatural bread. His flesh is food indeed and His blood is drink indeed, that’s what He tells us in John 6. And only those who partake of it—and who believe it—will have eternity with Him.

But there’s a whole lot more to how Jesus brought a new dimension to the Passover, and next week, we’re going to look at that Passover more fully.

In the meantime, I would love to know–what does Holy Communion mean to you? What role does it play in your church or your faith? I will admit that I had a very limited understanding of it for many years…and that it was studying it out that led me to change churches. Because I do believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the wafer and wine. I believe it is a miracle performed daily for us. And I needed a Church that teaches the same.

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