Luke 22:19-20

2 d. Luke 22:19-20. The time when the Holy Supper was instituted seems to us to correspond to the second and third steps of the Paschal feast taken together. With the explanation which the head of the house gave of the meaning of the ceremony, Jesus connected that which He had to give regarding the substitution of His person for the Paschal lamb as the means of salvation, and regarding the difference between the two deliverances. And when the time came at which the father took the unleavened cakes and consecrated them by thanksgiving, to make them, along with the lamb, the memorial of the deliverance from Egypt, Jesus also took the bread, and by a similar consecration, made it the memorial of that salvation which He was about to procure for us. In the expression, This is my body, the supposed relation between the body and the bread should not be sought in their substance. The appendix: given for you, in Luke; broken for you, in Paul (1 Corinthians 11:24), indicates the true point of correspondence. No doubt, in Paul, this participle might be a gloss. But an interpolation would have been taken from Luke; they would not have invented this Hapax-legomenon κλώμενον. Are we not accustomed to the arbitrary or purely negligent omissions of the Alex. text? I think, therefore, that this participle of Paul, as well as the given of Luke, are in the Greek text the necessary paraphrase of the literal Aramaic form, This is my body for you, a form which the Greek ear could as little bear as ours. The idea of this κλώμενον is, in any case, taken from the preceding ἔκλασε, and determines the meaning of the formula, This is my body. As to the word is, which has been so much insisted on, it was not uttered by Jesus, who must have said in Aramaic, Haggouschmi, “ This here [behold] my body! ” The exact meaning of the notion of being, which logically connects this subject with this attribute, can only be determined by the context. Is the point in question an identity of substance, physical or spiritual, or a relation purely symbolical? From the exegetical point of view, if what we have said above about the real point of comparison is well founded, it would be difficult to avoid the latter conclusion. It is confirmed by the meaning of the τοῦτο which follows: “Do this in remembrance of me.” This pron. can denote nothing but the act of breaking, and thus precisely the point which appeared to us the natural link of connection between the bread and the body.

The last words, which contain the institution properly so called of a permanent rite, are wanting in Matthew and Mark. But the certified fact of the regular celebration of the Holy Supper as a feast commemorating the death of Jesus from the most primitive times of the Church, supposes a command of Jesus to this effect, and fully confirms the formula of Paul and Luke. Jesus meant to preserve the Passover, but by renewing its meaning. Matthew and Mark preserved of the words of institution only that which referred to the new meaning given to the ceremony. As to the command of Jesus, it had not been preserved in the liturgical formula, because it was implied in the very act of celebrating the rite.

A certain interval must have separated the second act of the institution from the first; for Luke says: After they had supped (Luke 22:20), exactly as Paul. Jesus, according to custom, let conversation take free course for some time. After this free interval, He resumed the solemn attitude which He had taken in breaking the bread. So we explain the ὡσαύτως, likewise.

The word τὸ ποτήριον, the cup, is the object of the two verbs λαβών... ἔδωκεν at the beginning of Luke 22:19. The art. τό is here added, because the cup is already known (Luke 22:17). This cup certainly corresponded to the third of the Paschal Feast, which bore the name of cup of blessing. So St. Paul calls it (1 Corinthians 10:16): the cup of blessing (εὐλογίας) which we bless. In this expression of the apostle the word bless is repeated, because it is taken in two different senses. In the first instance, it refers to God, whom the Church, like the Israelitish family of old, blesses and adores; in the second, to the cup which the Church consecrates, and which by this religious act becomes to the conscience of believers the memorial of the blood of Jesus Christ. What this cup represents, according to the terms of Paul and Luke, is the new covenant between God and man, founded on the shedding of Jesus' blood. In Matthew and Mark, it is the blood itself. Jesus can hardly have placed the two forms in juxtaposition, as Langen supposes, who thinks that He said: “Drink ye all of this cup; for it is the cup which contains my blood, the blood of the new covenant.” Such a periphrasis is incompatible with the style proper to the institution of a rite, which has always something concise and monumental. There is thus room to choose between the form of Matthew and Mark and that of Paul and Luke. Now, is it not probable that oral tradition and ecclesiastical custom would tend to make the second formula, relative to the wine, uniform with the first, which refers to the bread, rather than to diversify them? Hence it follows, that the greatest historical probability is in favour of the form in which the two sayings of Jesus least resemble one another, that is to say, in favour of that of Paul and Luke.

Every covenant among the ancients was sealed by some symbolic act. The new covenant, which on God's side rests on the free gift of salvation, and on man's side on its acceptance by faith, has henceforth, as its permanent symbol in the Church, this cup which Jesus holds out to His own, and which each of them freely takes and brings to his lips. The O. T. had also been founded on blood (Gen 15:8 et seq.). It had been renewed in Egypt by the same means (Exodus 12:22-23; Exo 24:8). The participle understood between διαθήκη and ἐν τῷ αἵματι is the verbal idea taken from the subst. διαθήκη (διατιθεμένη): the covenant [covenanted] in my blood. Baur, Volkmar, and Keim think that it is Paul who has here introduced the idea of the new covenant. For it would never have entered into the thought of Judeo-Christianity thus to repudiate the old covenant, and proclaim a new one. Mark, even while copying Paul, designedly weakened this expression, they say, by rejecting the too offensive epithet new. Luke, a bolder Paulinist, restored it, thus reproducing Paul's complete formula. And how, we must ask, did Jesus express Himself? Was He incapable, He also, of rising to the idea of a new covenant thenceforth substituted for the old? He, incapable of doing what had already been done so grandly six centuries before by a simple prophet (Jer 31:31 et seq.)! And when we think of it, is not Mark's formula (which is probably also the text in Matthew) far from being weaker than that of Paul is it not even more forcible? If the expression of Mark is translated: “ This is my blood, that of the covenant,” is not the very name covenant thereby refused to the old? And if it is translated: “ This is the blood of my covenant,” does not this saying contrast the two covenants with one another as profoundly as is done by the epithet new in Paul and Luke?

The nom. abs. τὸ ἐκχυνόμενον, by rendering the idea of the shedding of the blood grammatically independent, serves to bring it more strongly into relief. This appendix, which is wanting in Paul, connects Luke's formula with that of the other two evangelists. Instead of for you, the latter say, for many. It is the בּים × רַ, ִ many, of Isaiah 53:12, the ים רְִַבּים § גּוֹ o ִ f Isaiah 52:15, those many nations which are to be sprinkled with the blood of the slain Messiah. Jesus contemplates them in spirit, those myriads of Jewish and Gentile believers who in future ages shall press to the banquet which He is instituting.

Paul here repeats the command: Do this..., on which rests the permanent celebration of the rite. In this point, too, Luke's formula corresponds more nearly to that of the Syn. than to his.

If there is a passage in respect to which it is morally impossible to assert that the narrators if they be regarded ever so little as seriously believing arbitrarily modified the tenor of the sayings of Jesus, it is this. How, then, are we to account for the differences which exist between the four forms? There must have existed from the beginning, in the Judeo-Christian Churches, a generally received liturgical formula for the celebration of the Holy Supper. This is certainly what has been preserved to us by Matthew and Mark. Only, the differences which exist between them prove that they have not used a written document, and that as little has the one copied the other; thus the command of Jesus: “ Drink ye all of it ” (Matthew), which appears in Mark in the form of a positive fact: “ And they all drank of it; ” thus, again, in Mark, the omission of the appendix: “ for the remission of sins ” (Matthew). We therefore find in them what is substantially one and the same tradition, but slightly modified by oral transmission.

The very different form of Paul and Luke obliges us to seek another original. This source is indicated by Paul himself: “ I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you ” (1 Corinthians 11:23). The expression: I have received, admits of no view but that of a communication which is personal to him; and the words: of the Lord, only of an immediate revelation from Jesus Himself (a true philologist will not object to the use of ἀπό instead of παρά). If Paul had had no other authority to allege than oral tradition emanating from the apostles, and known universally in the Church, the form used by him: “ I have received (ἐγὼ γάρ) of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you...,” could not be exonerated from the charge of deception. This circumstance, as well as the difference between the two formulae, decides in favour of the form of Paul and Luke. In the slight differences which exist between them, we can, besides, trace the influence exercised on Luke by the traditional-liturgical form as it has been preserved to us by Matthew and Mark.

As to St. John, the deliberate omission which is imputed to him would have been useless at the time when he wrote; still more in the second century, for the ceremony of the Holy Supper was then celebrated in all the churches of the world. A forger would have taken care not to overthrow the authority of his narrative in the minds of his readers by such an omission.

About the meaning of the Holy Supper, we shall say only a few words. This ceremony seems to us to represent the totality of salvation; the bread, the communication of the life of Christ; the wine, the gift of pardon; in other words, according to Paul's language, sanctification and justification. In instituting the rite, Jesus naturally began with the bread; for the shedding of the blood supposes the breaking of the vessel which contains it, the body. But as in the believer's obtaining of salvation it is by justification that we come into possession of the life of Christ, St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:16 et seq., follows the opposite order, and begins with the cup, which represents the first grace which faith lays hold of, that of pardon.

In the act itself there are represented the two aspects of the work the divine offer, and human acceptance. The side of human acceptance is clear to the consciousness of the partaker. His business is simply, as Paul says, “ to show the Lord's death,” 1 Corinthians 11:26. It is not so with the divine side; it is unfathomable and mysterious: “ The communion of the blood, and of the body of Christ! ” 1 Corinthians 10:16. Here, therefore, we are called to apply the saying: “ The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law,” Deuteronomy 29:29. We know already what we have to do to celebrate a true communion. We may leave to God the secret of what He gives us in a right communion. Is it necessary to go further in search of the formula of union?