1 Corinthians 11:25

The first words reappear literally in Luke's account. The two narratives prove that a certain interval separated the two acts of institution. The bread was distributed while they were eating; ἐσθιόντων αὐτῶν, say Matthew and Mark, thus positively expressing what is implied by the accounts of Luke and Paul. The words: after they had supped, in Paul and Luke, complete the view of what was done. The feast was therefore closed when the Lord took the cup. The interval which separated the two acts no doubt explains the term: in like manner also, ὡσαύτως καί, in Paul and Luke. After the distribution of the bread, Jesus had for a few moments given up the solemn attitude which befitted the institution of a rite, and familiar conversation had resumed its course. Supper ended, at the time of distributing the cup, He resumed the same attitude as in the preceding action.

This cup which Jesus now passes round, certainly corresponds to that which in the Paschal ritual bore the name of Cos Haberakia (1 Corinthians 10:16), the cup of blessing, which the father of the family circulated to close the feast.

The article τό, the, designates the cup as the one which stood there before Him, but at the same time as becoming from that moment the type of those which shall afterwards figure in all the celebrations of the Supper.

The first words of the formula of institution are the same as in Luke; only he adds after the expression ἐν τῷ αἵματί μου, in My blood, the determining clause τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν ἐκχυνόμενον, which is shed for you, thus making his formula parallel to that of the other two synoptics: “This is My blood, that of the covenant shed for many.” The formula of Paul and Luke: This cup is the New Testament, has something more spiritual about it than that of the other two synoptics. In fact, what, according to this formula, corresponds to the cup, or the wine contained in the cup, is not the blood itself, but the covenant entered into over the blood. Hence it is easy to see what elasticity is demanded in the interpretation of the word est (is), and how thoroughly mistaken Luther was when he sought at Marburg to crush Zwingle with this one word.

The term new covenant alludes to the covenant made at Sinai over the blood of the victim which Moses offered for all the people. Indeed it is related, Exodus 24:8, that Moses took the blood and said: “Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you.” This old covenant was recalled every year by the Paschal feast; but Jeremiah had already contrasted it with another, a future and more excellent one, when he uttered the promise: “Behold, the days come that I will make a new covenant with you, not according to the covenant that I made with your fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt, which My covenant they brake; but this is the covenant that I will make after those days: I will put My law in their inward parts...for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sins will I remember no more” (Jer 31:31-34).

Matthew and Mark, at least according to the most probable reading, omit the word new. According to them, Jesus said: “This is My blood, the blood of the covenant shed...” Strange to say, Holsten alleges that Paul has here preserved the true formula adopted in the primitive apostolical Church; for, he says, in view of the Judaizing adversaries whom Paul had before him at Corinth, he would not have dared to modify the original formula. It was Matthew, according to him, who, seeking to efface every trace of opposition between the old and the new covenant in favour of a strict Jewish Christianity hostile to Paul, deliberately rejected the term new. But Mark? What of him, independent as he certainly is of Matthew in his whole account, and betraying not the slightest tendency hostile to Paul? What is more curious still, if possible, is the entirely opposite opinion of Meyer, who thinks that the designation of the covenant as new, can only be of Pauline origin. There is here a description added at a later time to the authentic words of Jesus. But what! Jeremiah, six centuries before, had already characterized the Messianic covenant by this epithet; and Jesus could not have used the same expression, either at His own hand, or in imitation of the prophet! The absence of the word in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew proves nothing. They both reproduce the formula in use in the Jewish Christian Churches, where the expressions relating to the bread and wine were gradually identified: “This is My body..., this is My blood. ” As to Luke, he depends on Paul, and Paul himself gives us the formula as he “received it of the Lord.” It is obvious why he had from the beginning rested his argument on that personal revelation which had been granted to him; otherwise, indeed, and this is the truth in Holsten's remark, he could not in opposition to his adversaries have enunciated a different formula from that which prevailed in the apostolic Churches.

The words: in My blood, depend, according to Meyer and Hofmann, on the verb is: “This cup is, in virtue of the blood which it contains, the new covenant.” But it would be far from natural to say that the blood is the means in virtue of which the cup establishes the covenant. It is simpler, as is admitted by Heinrici and Holsten, to refer the regimen in My blood to the notion of the substantive covenant itself: the covenant in My blood, for: the covenant concluded in My blood. The absence of the article ἡ is objected, which would be required, it is alleged, to connect the substantive with the regimen; but the omission of the article is easily explained by the verbal meaning of the word διαθήκη, contract; from this substantive there is easily taken the understood participle διατιθεμένη, contracted. As the blood of the Paschal lamb, and afterwards that of the offered victim (Exodus 24), were the foundation of the covenant agreement passed in Egypt and at Sinai between the Lord and His people, so the blood of Christ, represented by the wine contained in the cup, is the foundation on which the new covenant rests, which is concluded in Christ between God and mankind. For the old contract, which had for its object, on the one side, the promise of the Divine protection, on the other, the engagement to obey the law of Sinai, there is substituted the new covenant, which has for its contents, on the one side, the pardon of sins, on the other, free obedience to the Divine will through the Holy Spirit.

The last words: Do this in remembrance of Me, express once more the idea of the institution of a rite which is to continue to be celebrated in the Church. Here they do not occur even in Luke. But in Mark and Matthew there are found words which have some analogy to this command: “Drink ye all of it.”

In the injunction: Do this, the word this denotes what Christ is now doing when He holds out the cup to them, and what they themselves do when partaking of it; such is the act which is always to be repeated anew in the assembly of believers. When so? Jesus says: as often as ye drink. Evidently this cannot be understood: as every time ye drink, in general, or when ye take any meal whatever. The following verse is opposed to this; for there Paul says: “As often as ye drink this cup; ” comp. also 1 Corinthians 11:22, where the Lord's Supper has been positively distinguished from common meals. Meyer understands: Every time that at a love-feast you come to this final cup. Hofmann and Osiander almost the same: Every time you assemble for a love-feast. But these ellipses are very arbitrary. The thought of the Lord is better explained, as it seems to me, if it is qualified by connecting it with the words: in remembrance of Me, and by the evident allusion to the remembrance of the Paschal lamb: “Every time you celebrate, as members of the new covenant, the religious feast corresponding to the Paschal feast of the old, distribute the cup and drink of it in remembrance of Me.” The memory of Jesus is to be substituted in their heart for that of the lamb, every time they celebrate the new Paschal feast.

This very indefinite expression ὁσάκις ἄν, every time it shall happen that, shows that henceforth this ceremony will no longer be bound to a fixed day of the year, like the Paschal feast, but that it is put at the discretion of the Church. Again we see in this how important it was for St. Paul's apostleship that he should possess an independent and original acquaintance with the mode in which this ceremony was instituted. Langen, in his monograph on the narrative of the Passion, has sought to combine in one sentence the formulas of Paul and Luke on the one hand, and of Mark and Matthew on the other; but the proposition thus reached is very complicated and clumsy, far from suitable to the sharply cut form which should characterize the institution of a rite. Meyer gives the preference to the formula presented in the two first synoptics as more concise and striking. It seems to me, on the contrary, that Paul's form, independently even of his testimony, deserves the preference. Tradition and ecclesiastical usage must naturally have inclined to assimilate more and more to one another the two formulas relating to the bread and the wine, and consequently to simplify the second as much as possible, to bring it nearer the first, originally the more simple. Paul was put in a position to restore the original difference; and it is from him that Luke has taken his formula, so like Paul's own.

It is singular that Paul, who, agreeably to the historical order, here puts the bread before the cup, has done the opposite in chap. 10. No doubt it is because in the last passage, where the matter in question was not the narrative of the fact as such, he has followed the order which corresponds to the assimilation of faith. The believer first appropriates the pardon which is connected with the shedding of the blood, then he receives the life and strength which are represented by the eating of the body. Here he simply reproduces the fact. His sole aim is to contrast the seriousness of the action with the manner in which it is treated by the Corinthians.

He now draws the practical consequences of the description which he has just given (1 Corinthians 11:26-32).