The Last Supper: This Is My Body

It is the evening of the Passover. Jesus has arranged for a room in Jerusalem — sent two disciples ahead to find a man carrying a water jar, follow him, ask the owner of the house to show you the room prepared. They find it exactly as he described. They make the preparations.

When the hour comes, Jesus reclines at table with his apostles. He says: I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. He takes a cup, gives thanks, says: divide this among yourselves; I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. He takes bread, gives thanks, breaks it and gives it to them: This is my body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And the cup after supper: This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

Paul's account, written perhaps twenty years before Luke's Gospel, preserves the same tradition — and frames it as something he himself received: For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. This chain of transmission — received, passed on — shows that within a decade or two of the crucifixion, a formalized account of the last supper was already being transmitted as foundational community memory.

Around the table, in Luke's account, there is also a dispute about who among them is the greatest. Jesus reframes it: the greatest is the one who serves. In the world, kings lord it over their subjects and call themselves benefactors. It will not be so among you. He is among them as the one who serves.

The meal that Jesus gave his disciples that night — which they repeated immediately and have been repeating in some form ever since, in every Christian community from Rome to Corinth to Ethiopia to the far east — is simultaneously a Passover reframed and a new beginning: the new covenant in my blood. The liberation from Egypt becomes the liberation from death. The lamb of Passover becomes the Lamb who was slain. The meal becomes the memory and the hope.