He Held Up a Cup and Called It a New Covenant

He counted once and got to about forty. Forty times sitting there while it went round.

He knows the shape of it. Everyone gets quiet, somebody reads something, a tray comes past, you take one or you do not, and then the room goes back to normal after a minute or two.

He has taken it and he has passed it, depending on the year and who he was sitting next to.

What he has never had is anybody explain what is actually happening. Not once. He has heard the same three sentences read out about forty times, and the sentences are not an explanation, they are a quotation, and he has never been given the thing they are quoting from.

So he has assembled a private version out of guesses, and the private version is roughly that it is a remembering exercise, and that the point of it is to feel appropriately serious for two minutes.

Read what He actually said while holding it

There is a sentence in Luke, said at a table, and the word in the middle of it is a legal word.

Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. (Luke 22:20, King James Version)

This cup is the new testament in my blood.

Testament in older English is the word for covenant. He is not saying this is a nice picture of something. He is naming a legal instrument and saying what it is cut in.

And He says it while holding an ordinary cup at an ordinary table, in the middle of a meal His friends had eaten every year of their lives.

He is not starting something unfamiliar. He is telling them what the familiar thing had been about.

You are looking at a legal instrument rather than an exercise in remembering. Luke 22 has Him naming it as a covenant while holding the cup, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old word do something to forty occasions somebody sat through.

Agreements in that world had a meal in them

The reason there is a table involved at all goes back a long way, and there is a scene in Exodus that shows it.

A covenant has just been made. Blood has been applied. And then this happens, and it is one of the strangest verses in the book.

And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand: also they saw God, and did eat and drink. (Exodus 24:11)

They saw God, and did eat and drink.

Somebody ate a meal on a mountain in front of God as part of an agreement being finalized. The meal is not a celebration afterwards. It is part of the instrument.

That is why there is a table in the upper room, and it is why there is one at the front of a building on a Sunday, and almost nobody in the room is ever told.

You are at a table that has been part of the arrangement since the beginning. Exodus 24 has the eating and drinking inside the covenant scene, and it is His Spirit who makes an ancient mountain meal explain a tray going past.

Paul says what the taking is doing

There is a sentence in Corinthians about what the act itself amounts to, and the verb is not remembering.

For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come. (1 Corinthians 11:26)

Ye do shew.

That is a proclaiming word. It means to announce, to declare publicly.

So the act is not primarily an interior exercise in feeling appropriately serious. It is a public statement made with a body, which is why it happens with other people and not alone in a chair.

You are making a statement rather than producing a feeling. 1 Corinthians 11 uses a proclaiming verb and puts it in the plural, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old definition take the pressure off two minutes of quiet.

Hebrews says what the instrument actually settles

There is a sentence in Hebrews that says what the new one accomplishes, and it uses the language of inheritance.

And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance. (Hebrews 9:15)

Mediator of the new testament.

And the mechanism is stated: by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first one.

That is not sentimental. It is an account of what got settled and how, and it explains why the cup gets named the way it does.

You are named as an heir rather than a spectator at a ceremony. Hebrews 9 puts the inheritance at the end of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named elsewhere as the deposit on that inheritance.

And God built the explaining into it

There is a detail in Exodus about the meal that says what a table is for.

And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto you, What mean ye by this service? That ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the LORD's passover. (Exodus 12:26-27)

What mean ye by this service.

God builds the question into the instructions. He assumes somebody will ask what is going on, and He supplies the answer in advance, and He puts the whole exchange in the law.

Which means a room where nobody explains it is not how the thing was designed. The asking is meant to happen, and so is the answering.

You are asking the question the instructions expected. Exodus 12 writes the child's question into the law itself, and it is His Spirit who makes an old provision feel like permission to say out loud that nobody ever told you.