The Lord's Supper

The Parallel Gospel Accounts of the Institution of the Lord’s Supper

We did. And continue on in looking at the scriptural section, which is section 311 in the book on the floor over there in the corner, which is very useful to everybody, which is Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22 are the parallel texts.

Those other books have been sitting there for probably five years, I would say.

I don't know why they just sit there, but those on in the inner circle. Now, section 311, page 284.

Luke 22 seems to be a fairly lengthy version. And he said to them, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you I shall not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves, for I tell you that from now on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, this is my body which is given for you, do this in remembrance of me. And likewise the cup after supper, saying, this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

We have pretty much the same information in Matthew without the preceding portion. That is, now as they were eating, Jesus took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to the disciples and said, take, eat, this is my body.

And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.

Or, as Mark puts it, when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. And then you'll notice, I think inappropriately, the parallel. They take John 6 and put it here, which I don't think is relevant, but they are kind enough to put 1 Corinthians 11, 23 through 25, where I see from the Lord what I also deliver to you.

The Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread. When he had given it, when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body which is for you, do this in remembrance of me. The same way also the cup, after supper, saying, this cup is a new covenant in my blood, do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

Now, just in passing, you'll notice a few differences in phraseology that may or may not be represented in the translation you're using. The reason for this being, there are a number of the, well, if you look down at the bottom of the page, you can see a number of alternate readings.

There was a, whenever you have very important parallel passages, sometimes when you have parallel passages that aren't talking about something that is a big issue in the Christian faith, there won't be as much of this.

But especially when you do have parallel passages like this in a number of different places, scribes will want to harmonize and sometimes purposely, sometimes not purposely. I mean, I think if I were to have everybody close their Bibles right now and write out the words of the institution as best you can remember it.

If you're a Christian, like if you've been a member of this church for 10 years and you're pretty regular in attendance, okay? Let's say you only miss twice a year. You've been here for 10 years. How many times have you partaken of the Lord's Supper then?

That would be, no, no, because you're thinking weekly. Yeah, you're thinking weekly. You've heard it a bunch of times, many, many times. But if you were to write it out right now, and it's not that long.

I mean, what is it? Three sentences, four sentences maybe? It would be interesting to see, for example, take, eat, this is my body, which is given for you. Well, it's which is given for you in Luke, and it's in 1 Corinthians, but it's not in Matthew and Mark.

So if you're used to the phraseology given for you, and you happen to be transcribing the book of Mark, and you're not paying close attention, what's going to be the easy thing for you to do unintentionally is to expand that phrase so it matches what you have in Luke and 1 Corinthians.

And again, we've talked about these differences many times in the past, the difference between an MP3 recording and anything that would have existed prior to MP3 recorders, I guess. And so a lot of the things down at the bottom of the page just represent that sometimes purposeful, sometimes not purposeful harmonization that takes place when you have parallel accounts of the same thing, so it all is supposed to have the same words, so on and so forth.

For example, in Luke, you have this cup, which is poured out for you as the new covenant of my blood, versus this cup is the new covenant of my blood in 1 Corinthians 11. So just word order differences, things like that.

In general, once again, we noted before the context here. I think I want to emphasize this. The context is, as Luke gives it to us, and as we see from the other Gospels as well, the Passover meal. Now, this isn't the Passover meal itself.

There's a lot of discussion about this. This is an addition. It is an expansion.

It is beyond.

It has a special meaning that's not to be found specifically in the Passover meal itself. Unfortunately, as interesting as it might be and as fruitful as it might be, there is a tendency today for people to talk about the Passover, and I know even churches here locally that have had Passover seders done and things like that, and looking for Christological types and shadows and things like that.

Okay.

But the one thing that is often overlooked is we are somewhat guessing as to exactly what the Passover would have looked like in the days of Jesus. We can pretty well know what it looked like 250 years later, and so would it be very similar?

Yeah, but would everything be exactly the same? Well, would everything even have been exactly the same in that day in, say, Jerusalem versus in the Diaspora, down in Alexandria, in Babylon? Would there be local differences that existed back then?

And I think most people would say probably there would have been. But we do know that no matter what the specifics were, that what you had on the table, the bitter herbs and the matzah bread, no yeast, et cetera, et cetera, all these things were very rich in meaning, and part of the discussion and explanation of the seder amongst the Jews themselves was, you know, this represents the suffering that we experienced under Pharaoh, and this represented this, and that represented that, and it was just very, very, very deep in symbolic meaning, and nobody was sitting there saying, ah, these bitter herbs are actually being changed into something else.

And no, the context was easily understood, and I think that's very often missed in regards especially to the abuse of John chapter 6 and turning it into a discussion of the Last Supper and hence into some kind of literalistic, this is my body, it's been changed and transformed and transubstantiated and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

The original writers of these words would never have come to those conclusions, given the context in which it was taking place. The fact that Matthew, Mark, and Luke give us this institution and Paul does as well, and I don't think John does, is just another indication of the fact that John is not attempting to write something that is functioning in the same way that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are meant to function.

Yes, sir?

An absolutely necessary distinction to be drawn between what's called the real presence and transubstantiation. Transubstantiation is a term that first appears in the 11th century, in the 1000s, after Aristotle becomes well-known again in the West, because the only way to understand the term transubstantiation is to have Aristotelian categories of accidents and substance.

That is, something has an external appearance to us, but then it also has its substance is what makes it what it is, and there can be a distinction between the two. We can be deceived by our senses, and that's how you can say that in substance the bread and the wine are changed in the body and blood of Christ, but the accidents remain the same.

So it tastes like bread, looks like bread, tastes like wine, looks like wine, but its substance has been changed, because there's a distinction between substance and accidents. Well, that was a philosophical mindset that is Aristotelian and really would not have been something that the apostles living in first century Judea would have had any real concept of.

And so, in the early church writings, what you have is the concept of the real presence of Christ, that is, that Christ is spiritually present with his people. This is especially true in periods of persecution and things like that, that there would be that kind of emphasis upon the spiritual presence with Christ, and it was considered to be more precious and real than a physical presence would be.

But when you look at someone like Augustine in writing in the late fourth century, early fifth century, he strongly emphasizes that,. A, Christ's body has physically left us. It is in heaven. It stays in heaven and will stay in heaven until the second coming of Christ.

That is very, very clear. And he also teaches that the body of Christ is available to us only by faith in the Lord's Supper, not in any type of alteration of substance or anything like that. So, this is also seeing the fact that in the early church, when the Lord's Supper was celebrated, they would take the elements to those who were sick, who could not come to the service.

They would want them to be able to participate, and so they would take the elements to individuals. But they were not carried in any procession or anything like that, as you would see. Anybody been down in Mexico and seen any of the processions they have down in Mexico, seen some of those things?

That didn't happen, and any of the bread and wine that was not used was simply disposed of. There was no concept of a transubstantiation, no concept of an alteration, sanctification, anything like that at all.

It's just not even a question that the way that they treated the elements clearly indicated that the presence of the Lord was a spiritual presence related to the gathering of the body, not to some kind of sacerdotal power in rendering Christ present upon an altar, etc., etc., etc.

So, you know, Rome has done much to try to turn the early church into modern Roman Catholicism, but the documents are just too extensive for them to be able to do that. There is a much higher view of the Supper than many of us have, in the sense that, well, in contrast to what we saw whenever I was here a couple of weeks ago, and we looked at what the London Baptist Confession says, certainly, as I mentioned then, there's a problem when we live in a day where if someone was cut off from the celebration of the Supper, today, almost nobody would care, because you can always just go someplace else.

You know, you can just run down the street if you really want to, but for most people, you're like, who cares? That was never a view in the early church. There was a recognition that this was a very, very, very serious thing to be cut off from something so important and so vital and so much a part of what a Christian would want to be involved in, and I suppose this is a good time to remind everybody that the Lord's Supper is this evening.

So, you know, but, yeah, so the term itself first appears 10th century or 10th, 11th century, around that time period, and the concept begins to develop a little bit before that. That's why Red Burdus and Rattramnus have their big debate over the nature.

That's really where the concept starts to come into play, and immediately, there are people who go, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what we've ever understood to be, and it doesn't become dogma until 1215.

That's, well, yeah, that was one of the things that got Wycliffe into trouble is as he studied, you know, and he's only 1370s, he studies the documents as difficult as that would have been at that time.

It's not like you'd go to Wikipedia and comes and realizes, hey, wait a minute, this whole transubstantiation thing is pretty new. This has only been, you know, something that was demanded that we believe for a relatively short period of time, but you've got to always remember that during the medieval period, you have the concept of anachronism.

In the West, this is primarily just in the West, the Chinese never really had this problem, and even the Muslims, you know, 11th, 12th century, the Muslims have a more advanced society than the West does.

Before they then succumbed to the form of Islam that produces vices. But in the West, you had the concept of anachronism reflected in the paintings that you will see from that time period, and that is people at that time in the feudal system would rarely move more than seven miles from where they were born, so three and a half miles any direction.

That's it.

That was the world to them. And so the vast majority of people thought that things had always been the way they are now, would always be that way. So when they would paint pictures of David, David lives in a feudal castle, and he rides a horse, and he has armor, and because this is always the way it's been.

And so it was pretty easy if the priest tells me now, X, no one's ever said anything other than that. And it was really dangerous when you actually started studying things and found out that's not always the way it's been.

That would get you into a lot of trouble. That's yet another reason why Rome was so successful in utilization of fraudulent documents, such as the Donation of Constantine, the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, that builds up the entire power of the papacy.

I mean, the papacy developed on the back of utterly fraudulent quotes from the early church fathers that Rome today recognizes are all fraudulent, but the papacy still exists anyway. I mean, it literally is a huge edifice built now on nothing.

It's just hanging there in midair. Historically, when you look at how its power developed, the key point in time was when these fraudulent documents were considered to be absolutely reliable, and yet 98 of the quotes in them were completely made up.

And we know that now. They know that now. Doesn't change anything. It's still there. It's pretty fascinating when you think about it, how that happened. Anyhow, you have to differentiate between real presence, which is easy to prove from early church writings.

The church felt that Christ was truly present with them, but the nature of that presence was actually pretty much the opposite of what Rome has now dogmatically defined it to be, as if this priest has the sacerdotal power to render Christ present upon the altar, body, soul, blood, and divinity.

I'm just quoting their stuff there. And that the mass becomes a perpetuatory sacrifice. Yeah, that's one of the absolute key issues. Absolute key issue. And remember, they're not saying Christ is re-sacrificed.

They are saying, in fact, it's an unbloody sacrifice. But what they are saying is it is a re-presentation, not representation.

Same word.

Don't you love the language? It is a re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Christ. And buy my guns here. This is something I've argued since 1988 or so. Anybody in here that was not around in 1988?

Okay, thank you. Oh, yeah, right. I'm going to do the Klingon act of dishonor towards you now. Yeah, 1988. What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah.

I will stick my guns. I only think there is one theological tradition within the Protestant church that is able to really deal with the best formulation of that Roman concept. Most Protestants, who are just anti-Catholics because they don't like Catholicism and they think the Pope looks funny, just simply dismiss the mass because, ah, you're just re-sacrificing Jesus.

Well, their best argument is we're not re-sacrificing him at all. There is one sacrifice re-presented on the altar by the power of the priest. Well, how do you respond to that? Well, I would say that the strongest response to that is a demonstration that what happens in the mass is not what happens at the cross.

But the problem is what happens at the cross is the perfection of whom? A specific people. If you believe in universal atonement, if you reject the L, good luck with the best Rome has to offer because I don't think you can really argue it because you have a hypothetical atonement just like they do.

And most of my Arminian friends never seriously engage Rome anyways. They don't really, or when they do, they end up Roman Catholics. So that's an interesting thing. And don't get me wrong there. I know good Calvinists who have ended up as Roman Catholics, very unhappy ones, but that's a whole other story.

But, yeah, I think we are in the position, and I think it really helps us to see what the importance, one of the many important reasons why you should not hide your head in shame. I remember I was at a church in London, and I just had a debate with a Muslim.

So it's a completely different subject. And this woman comes up to me, and she has this really concerned look on her face, like she's about to discover that I actually support the football team that's absolutely anathema to support in that part of London.

It's like, are you a Man United fan? And how you answer that in certain stops along the tube, life or death issue, it really is, you just have to be really careful. But she comes up to me with this look on her face, and she says, somebody told me that you believe in limited atonement.

And the look on her face is sort of like, please don't tell me that's true because I like what you just did. And if you tell me that, then I'm going to have to hate you. I mean, that's not what she said, but that was the look on her face.

And how do you respond to something like that staying in a hallway? I responded to it, well, of course I believe in limited atonement, don't you? Well, don't you believe that Christ's death actually accomplishes what the Father, the Son, the Spirit intended it to accomplish and perfects those for whom it's made?

You go on the offensive, you just do it not in the mean, nasty, Calvinist way. You do it in a better way than that. Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way. But as I said, I think it's important. That's just one of the many reasons why it's important.

And it's also interesting to me that a lot of the people that reject that stuff,.

They never do apologetics.

They never go out there and take on the world's religions and things like that. They're just happy to sit back here and shoot their rubber bands our direction every once in a while. Well, congratulations, George.

You got me completely out of the, right off into non-island, which I frequently do. Are there any other, since we're in the neighborhood, anything, any follow-ups there?

Yes, sir.

The Meaning of the Cup of Blessing and the One Bread

Corinthians 11? Out of the parallel here so it doesn't have 1 Corinthians 10. I'll get there in a second.

Go to 1 Corinthians 10.

The cup of blessing which we bless, especially in light of what we looked at.

When we looked at the last couple sections of the confession last time we talked about this. But I would be careful seeing eulogias as the same thing as hagiadzo. The cup of blessing which we bless. My mother speaks Greek, so I'm not trying to lose everybody here.

I'll explain it. But eulogoumen, it's plural. So, it's not any one person. This is, the emphasis here is, look at verse 17. Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body for we all partake of the one bread.

So, it's the unity of the body being symbolized in the participation in the one recognition of Christ which demonstrates the oneness of the body of Christ. So, the blessing is being done by everybody.

It's a recognition of the blessing we receive. Ephesians chapter 1, we receive blessings, same root term, in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That's different than hagiadzo which would be the actual idea of sanctifying or making holy.

So, that's the first thing that I would point out to you. But that's in the context of oaths, if I recall correctly, in Matthew. Well, it's definitely the context. It's not bread and wine in and of itself that is relevant.

It is the fact that this is representing that which makes the body of Christ one. And so, yeah, when we go by and get the elements at the store, we're not looking for the particular stuff that glows or something.

It comes from one store and it could be drunk by a pagan or drunk by us this evening. It's the context in which it's placed. And notice, it is not, verse 16, is this not a sharing, a koinonia in the blood of Christ?

So, the point is, it wasn't just the apostles who got to have that incredibly special experience of that supper. We get to have that very same experience because he established the supper to be celebrated by all who follow after him.

The sad thing is that that incredible truth, especially that beautiful term koinonia, which also appears in the next line, and the bread which we break, it's not the bread which we break, a koinonia in the somatostupistu, the body of Christ.

So, the sad thing, sort of, when you think about church history, is that because of the introduction of a sacerdotal system, priests and things for which there's absolutely no New Testament evidence whatsoever that there was a priest class or anything like that, what was meant to be a tremendous evidence of the unity of the body of Christ and of the abiding presence of the spirit of Christ and of our participation in the death, burial and resurrection of Christ, our union with Christ, I think there's been a whiplash response on the part of a lot of Protestants against the magicalization of these things by Rome, so much so that it can become just a formal external nothing when it never should be.

It never should be because, as you point out here, Paul can speak to the Corinthians and in the context of the unity of the body of Christ, and he can speak to them on the basis of the fact that this is something that all Christians have experienced and all Christians should have thought about and should be contemplating and should be giving consideration to.

The fact of the matter is, not all Christians really do, and that's a problem.

Yes, sir.

The Cup of Demons and the Weak Brother

Well, yeah, you read the whole section and it's about, you know, just continue on. What do I mean then? Are the things sacrificed to idols anything or than idols anything? No, but I say that the things which Gentiles sacrifice is sacrifice to demons, not to God.

I do not want you to become sharers in demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord's jealousy?

We are not stronger than he, are we? So, it is in the context of the strong, the weak, the things offered in sacrifice to idols. That's the context in which he's speaking of. We don't have time to go into it all right now, but he also then, after speaking of the bread, since there is one bread, we who are many are one body, we all partake of the one bread.

Look at the nation Israel, are not those who eat the sacrifices sharers in the altar? So, he's using a number of different examples, all in the same general area of freedom. What is, you know, the weaker brother, the stronger brother, all of those things in regards to what was going on in Corinth.

So, yeah, there is that element of it as well. And the only reason he can bring it up is because it would be a common possession of all believers. This is something that they had all participated in and evidently would have been instructed in, in the process, which is another thing I like about how we do things around here, is that there is instruction prior to the participation in the Lord's Supper.

That's not always the case. There needs to be, because the assumption here is that the people have been instructed, and hence that could be used as an example that they should be able to understand. So, wow, did not expect to end up there.

Thank you very much, George. I appreciate that, but useful for this evening especially. So, I suppose that ended up working out pretty well. And if you wish to make a note, Section 312, we will pick up on that next time.

I will be here, well, I'm supposed to preach next week, so I don't know whether I'll be doing Sunday school or not. We'll discuss about that. Then, yes, two more weeks, one week in Kiev, one week in Berlin, and then I'm actually here for, I think, over a month.

Wow, and then I go to Norway in January.

Brilliant.

I may be stealing a few of Brother Callaghan's warmer jackets for that particular little jaunt into the frigid air. But anyways, that will be interesting. So, all right, our time is up. Let's close the Word of Prayer.

Once again, Father, we thank you for this time, this opportunity, this freedom that we have to possess your Word, to study your Word, to consider your Word. We ask that we would be good students of it and that you would be with us now as we go into worship.

We pray in Christ's name.