All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible 1995 Ed. (NASB95) published by The Lockman Foundation

In light of the fact that it’s the week determined by the western Christian tradition to commemorate the last week of Jesus’s earthly life, I want to point out to you the astonishingly undervalued importance of the so-called Last Supper. I term it “so-called,” because I want to hint at the reality that this wasn’t the last Passover feast of God’s true people, but the first official supper celebrating the birth of God’s kingdom on earth. There are several reasons that the Last Supper is significant, but I want to show you that it isn’t merely a historical event that finds its chief importance in being the last meal that Jesus ate with His disciples before He died. Rather, the Scriptures teach that the Last Supper is a model for the type of living that all believers in the Lord should be leading. In celebrating this feast, the Lord was giving us a picture of the manner of living that we should be engaged in as citizens of His kingdom, and members of His family.

To begin, here are several of the ways that the Last Supper is important to remember for believers:

  1. It reveals to us the way that Jesus viewed His suffering and death, since He explicitly teaches the main significance of that death in His words during the supper.
  2. It shows us the depth of love that Jesus had for His friends, since all the while He’s telling them He’s going to die, they’re denying it, and even questioning His identity.
  3. It’s a foreshadowing of the type of activity that God’s people will do when Jesus returns. It’s a picture of life in God’s kingdom.
  4. It’s the model for the ceremony of the Lord’s Supper that believers should ideally be conducting on a regular basis.

From this supper that Jesus intended as a model for us to follow today in form and in its principles we can be reminded that serving Him is a joyful work of celebration, that He provides us with all we need, and that we should be treating our brethren in Christ in the same way that He treated His first disciples. Most importantly, it’s a reminder of what Jesus did on the cross, and what He’s promised to do when He returns to create the new heavens and new earth. Hence, in this lesson, we’ll look at several passages of Scripture that describe the supper, and the significance of feasting for God’s people in the past, the present, and the future. Most pertinently, I want to show you that the life of the body of Christ is a life of joy, love, community, and abundance, and that we should be living in this way every day.

A Breakdown of the Last Supper

Here is the most detailed account of the Last Supper from the apostolic historian Luke:

“When the hour had come, He reclined at the table, and the apostles with Him. And He said to them, ‘I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I say to you, I shall never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’ And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, he said, ‘Take this and share it among yourselves; for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes.’ And when He had taken some bread and 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 in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.’” – Lk. 22:14-20

The New Covenant Meal

Let’s notice a few things from this passage. The first key to understanding the Last Supper is that it was a covenantal meal. Jesus was eating this meal with His disciples to tell them that He was determined, and happy, to go through with His promise to die as their ransom. The first evidence of this is that the Last Supper was the first direct fulfillment of the Passover feast. Jesus specifically calls the meal they were eating “this Passover” (v. 15). However, it’s the last Passover meal of God’s chosen people, and the first feast of God’s newly established kingdom. How was this kingdom promised? In the form of “the new covenant”. That’s why Jesus says that the last cup of wine represents “the new covenant in My blood” (v. 20). In saying so, He was declaring that this meal was a celebration of God’s new covenant made with His people in the Old Testament. This covenant is mentioned in several places, but most explicitly in Jeremiah 31:31-34.

In God’s covenant recited in Jeremiah, God promises all the essential aspects of the salvation He had promised to provide for people since the victorious seed of the woman in Genesis 3. Essentially, God promised three main blessings in Jeremiah 31. First, He promises to internalize His standards in His people’s hearts, so that they delight to obey Him. Second, He promises to cause them to know and love Him personally. And finally, He promises to fully and finally forgive their sins, so He no longer holds them against them. Obviously, all these blessings are the essential ones we enjoy as believers in the Lord Jesus.

The question is, why did Jesus commemorate the beginning of this covenant with the Last Supper? The main answer is that in ancient Eastern culture, having a meal together was supposed to signify that you were treating the participants in the meal as your friends. In fact, the Passover meal itself was informally a covenantal meal through which God reminded the Israelites that He promised to save them from the bondage of Egypt, and take care of them as His special, favored, people.

Now, I should remind you of what a covenant is, since it’s an essential aspect of our understanding of the Last Supper, and of God’s salvation for us. Basically, a covenant is a formal agreement between two or more parties, in which at least one of those parties agrees to act toward the other in a certain way. Thus, the new covenant is God’s promise to us that He’ll change our hearts, reveal Himself to us, and forgive all our sins, simply on the basis of His own sovereign good pleasure. And this series of promises was pictured, confirmed, and secured through Jesus’s death on the cross. That’s why He calls the cup of the Last Supper “the new covenant in My blood”.

And in order to show His disciples that He was letting Himself be executed because He loved them, and was sacrificing Himself for them, He preceded it with this special meal. He, as the maker of the covenant, was promising with this meal that He would carry out the requirements for the covenant to be fulfilled. We see a prefiguring of this in the giving of the old covenant in the Book of Exodus. After Moses delivers the terms of that covenant to the Israelites, and they verbally agree to obey its terms, as summarized in the Ten Commandments, we read this:

“Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel . . . Yet He did not stretch out His hand against the nobles of the sons of Israel; and they saw God, and they ate and drank.” – Exodus 24:9-11

Here we see that God literally meets with the leaders of Israel after He’s given His covenant to them, and they enjoy a meal in His presence. Jesus was doing the same thing with His disciples at the Last Supper. He was celebrating the soon ratification of the new covenant.

The Meal of God’s Kingdom

The second thing we should understand about the Last Supper is that it’s a picture of life in God’s kingdom. Big feasts, as the Last Supper was, are always events of celebration, thanksgiving, joy, and prosperity in Scripture. And by preceding His death with a feast, Jesus was showing His disciples that He was about to inaugurate His kingdom through His death and resurrection. That’s why He says,
“. . . for I say to you, I shall never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” (v. 16)

With these words, the Lord was implying that in God’s completed and fulfilled kingdom, His disciples would again eat a meal with Him. However, that meal will be the fulfillment of the promise that this meal foreshadowed. He shortly goes on to tell them,

“. . . and just as My Father has granted Me a kingdom, I grant you that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom . . .” – Lk. 22:29-30a

Clearly, there will be feasting on the new earth, when Jesus comes again. And yet, by giving the apostles this model of the Last Supper to repeat afterward, He was teaching them that the Christian life is one of enjoying the beginnings of God’s kingdom now. We know this because Jesus goes on to instruct the disciples to eat the bread of His body “in remembrance of Me”. And Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11, quotes Jesus’s words to teach that believers were still to observe the meal that Jesus instituted at the Last Supper.

In fact, from the beginning of the Spirit-indwelt Assembly of Jesus, we see the disciples enjoying this meal. Luke himself records this in Acts 2:46-47:

“Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people.”

Since Luke uses the language of “breaking” bread in his Last Supper passage, and then says in Acts 2:42 that the first Christians were “devoting themselves to . . . the breaking of bread,” it’s commonly understood that these believers were including the Lord’s Supper in these meals. This is further confirmed by Paul’s description of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11 as a literal meal, and then extra-biblical evidence that the early Christians celebrated a regular “love feast” when they met together as localized bodies.

Hence, it’s important to realize that by giving His apostles the model of the Last Supper as the type of activity that will characterize the perfected kingdom of God, He was teaching them and us that we ought to live joyful, communal, and thankful lives together with our brethren. And the reason for this is that we are even now manifesting God’s kingdom on earth, which will be fulfilled when Jesus returns to judge and make all things new.

The Meal of Our Remembrance

As I just noted, the Last Supper wasn’t a one-time deal. Instead, Jesus was teaching His apostles how to perform a specific ceremony that they were to then teach their disciples. Again, that’s why Luke writes,

“And when He had taken some bread and 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.’” (v. 19)

Clearly, He wouldn’t have told them to eat the bread in that way to remember Him if He didn’t intend for them to do it after He left them through His ascension into heaven. And thus, this is the institution of the Lord’s Supper.

But how exactly did Jesus want His apostles to practice the ceremony after He left them? As I already pointed out, Paul clearly describes the Lord’s Supper as a meal in 1 Corinthians 11:20-21 and 11:26:

“Therefore when you meet together [as an assembly], it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper, for in your eating each one takes his own supper first, and one is hungry and another is drunk . . . For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

The very fact that it was possible for the Corinthians to get drunk by partaking in this ritual shows us that this supper was more than a snack and a sip. As Paul explicitly calls it, it was a supper. And it was a supper because that’s the activity that the Lord engaged in with the apostles at the Last Supper, when He told them to eat the bread to remember Him, and to drink the cup to remember His covenant with them.

I realize that this is contrary to the practice of most Bible-believing assemblies, but it must be dealt with. Why is there no example in the New Testament of a local body celebrating the Lord’s Supper with only a small portion of bread and grape juice? And why are the only examples in the New Testament descriptions of joyful meals that include the breaking of bread, and the drinking of wine? It’s because the only idea the early Christians had of the Lord’s Supper celebration was that of a literal supper. And so we’re missing something very important and helpful, if we celebrate the Lord’s Supper as something other than a part of a real meal.

One of the most important things we miss out on if we try to observe the Lord’s Supper without a meal is the communal aspect of this ceremony. The reason for this is that Jesus intended this ritual to remind His disciples of the meals He shared with them at the Last Supper, and after His resurrection. If we simply have a crumb of bread, and a sip of juice, isolated from the rest of our congregation, then we lose a sense of the nearness and sharing that Jesus has with us in our life together. In addition, we miss the experience of an activity that we hope to enjoy in the completed kingdom. As we’ve already seen, the Lord’s Supper isn’t only meant to help us remember Jesus’s death, but to also anticipate His coming again to fulfill God’s kingdom, and share a perfect meal with us on a perfect earth, with perfect joy and love.

Therefore, I call you to seriously consider whether there are any ways you can encourage the brethren you meet with to incorporate a meal with the Lord’s Supper, so it’s an actual supper, and not a pretend one.

A Summary of How We Ought to Respond to the Lord’s Supper

To sum up how we ought to apply the model of joyful community living that the Lord’s Supper provides us, here’s a short list to think about:

  1. It teaches us that serving the Lord is a joyful act of celebrating Him and all He’s given us.
  2. It shows us that living with the Lord means having an abundance of all we need.
  3. It gives us a way to reenact the Last Supper, and to rehearse for the eternal marriage supper of the Lamb promised in Revelation 19:9 (“Blessed are those who are in invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb”).
  4. It’s meant to display the body’s unity, love and peace between each other.
  5. It’s a corporate model for what we should be practicing among our individual families and friends.
  6. It’s a picture of what the Lord promises to sinners who repent.

On that last point, let me leave you with our Lord’s picture of what He calls us to do as His representatives in this evil age:

“When one of those who were reclining at the table with Him heard this, he said to Him, “Blessed is everyone who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!”

But He said to him, “A man was giving a big dinner, and he invited many; and at the dinner hour he sent his slave to say to those who had been invited, ‘Come; for everything is ready now.’ But they all alike began to make excuses. The first one said to him, ‘I have bought a piece of land and I need to go out and look at it; please consider me excused.’ Another one said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am going to try them out; please consider me excused.’ Another one said, ‘I have married a wife, and for that reason I cannot come.’ And the slave came back and reported this to his master. Then the head of the household became angry and said to his slave, ‘Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the city and bring in here the poor and crippled and blind and lame.’ And the slave said, ‘Master, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the highways and along the hedges, and compel them to come in, so that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner.’”” – Lk. 14:15-24