Something occurred to me yesterday while I was thinking about my play and I wanted to run this past my very smart readers for comment.
Its perhaps not a coincidence that the Last Supper was at the time of a passover meal. Passover, after all, was to be comemmorated annually by the Jews as a remembrance of the fact that God directly intervened to free them from bondage and to begin their journey to the Promised Land. Jews were required to kill a young lamb without defect and spread his blood on the lintel of the door or be killed. God did this to honor the covenant he had made with Abraham.
Jesus, of course, takes the opportunity of the passover feast to create a new covenant with his disciples - a covenant of wine and bread, symbolizing blood and body. Jesus then offers himself up as the young lamb without defect to be sacrificed so that whosoever believes in him shall have everlasting life. This being the final culmination of the law and the prophets.
Anyway, I hope you can get the gist of what I'm saying here. I'm curious to read what you all think about this.
3 comments:
I agree with your idea that Jesus reframed the passover meal for his disciples. In the synoptics, it does seem that the last supper is a Passover meal. In John, however, the last supper is just a meal. Jesus dies on Passover itself at the same time that the sacrificial animals are being slaughtered.
Only this time there don't have to be any more sacrifices (of the Christ) after this one.
A few years ago our Pastor did "Christ in the Passover" for our Palm Sunday service. Check it out here: http://jewsforjesus.org/programs/cip
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