He Gives Himself: A reflection on Matthew 26:26–28 and the Lord's Supper

The Night He Changed the Sentence

There is a moment every year in the Jewish Passover seder when the presider lifts the unleavened bread and says, This is the bread of affliction which our fathers ate in the wilderness.¹ It is a moment of memory — a reaching back across centuries to the night Israel fled Egypt, when bread was baked without leaven because there was no time to wait, when a lamb died so that a nation might live.

Jesus was at that meal the night before his death. He knew the words. He had said them every year since childhood. But on this night, he did something no one expected. He took the bread, and he changed the sentence.

This is my body.²

Not the bread of Israel's affliction. The bread of his.

What he was doing — what Matthew wants us to see — is that Jesus was not merely observing a feast. He was reinterpreting it. The Passover had always pointed somewhere. The lamb, the blood on the doorpost, the angel of death passing over — all of it had been a shadow of something larger. On that Thursday night, Jesus announced that the thing it was pointing to had arrived. You think the Passover was significant, he was saying. What I am about to do will change the world.

Then he took the cup.

The One Who Walks Through Alone

In the ancient world, when two parties entered a covenant, they would take animals, cut them in half, and walk between the pieces together. It was a binding oath — you were saying: if I break this, may what happened to these animals happen to me. In Genesis 15, God made a covenant with Abraham exactly this way. He laid out the pieces. But then he put Abraham into a deep sleep, and God alone walked through them.³

Abraham didn't walk. God did.

The meaning is staggering: I will take the full weight of this. If this covenant is broken, it falls on me.

At the Passover table, Jesus took the cup and said, This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.⁴ Moses had once thrown blood on the people to seal the old covenant.⁵ But this is different. Jesus doesn't throw blood. He invites them to drink it. And he doesn't merely represent the covenant — he becomes the sacrifice that seals it. He is the one who walks through the pieces alone.

The bread tells you who he is. The cup tells you what it costs.

More Than a Symbol, More Than We Know

For centuries the church has wrestled with what happens when we hold that bread and cup in our own hands. The Catholic tradition says the elements become his literal body and blood. The Reformation pushed back. But then the question became unavoidable: if it isn't literal, is it only symbolic? Just a ritual, a memorial, a solemn act of remembrance for a man who died two thousand years ago?

The Reformed tradition says no — something real is happening. Something the word symbol is too small to hold.

When we eat the bread and drink the cup, we aren't eating and drinking Jesus with our mouths. But we are with our souls.

The sixteenth-century Scottish theologian Robert Bruce put it this way: in the Lord's Supper you receive what you receive in the Word — but better. We get Christ better.⁶ Not a new thing. The same thing, more fully. A communion with the living Christ that is not merely cognitive or memorial, but real. The living bread comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, and faith receives him — not only in the ear, but in the eating.⁷

This is why Jesus, in John 6, speaks of the bread he will give as his flesh, and why he says that unless we eat of it we have no life in us.⁸ The language is jarring on purpose. He is not describing a casual exercise. He is describing an act of intimate union — a receiving of Christ into the soul that is as real and as nourishing as food is to the body.

Between Two Tables

But there is one more thing happening at that table that we might miss if we stay only at the bread and cup.

Before the meal ended, Jesus said something remarkable. He said he would not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the day he drank it new with them in his Father's kingdom.⁹

He said it knowing Judas was about to leave to betray him. He said it knowing Peter would deny him before morning. He said it knowing the cross was hours away. And still — he was already looking past it. Already speaking of another meal, another table, a feast on the other side.

There is a table behind us and a table ahead.

The table behind: a Passover meal, a lamb, bread broken, a cup poured out, a covenant sealed in blood. The table ahead: a kingdom banquet, face to face, no more symbols, just him — the Lamb who died as the host.

Every time we come to the Lord's Supper, we are living between those two tables. We remember what it cost. We anticipate what is coming. We receive the living Christ into our souls and are reminded that this meal is not the last one — only the foretaste of a feast that will have no end.

Receive the King who gives himself for sinners.

That is what the table is. That is what we are invited to do.

Don't miss it.

This reflection is based on a Maundy Thursday sermon preached from Matthew 26:26–28 at Prosper Christian Reformed Church.

Notes

¹ From the traditional Passover Haggadah (Ha Lachma Anya), recited at the beginning of the Maggid section of the seder.

² Matthew 26:26, ESV.

³ Genesis 15:9–17, ESV. The image of God passing through the pieces as a smoking fire pot and flaming torch is a theophany — God himself binding the covenant oath unilaterally.

⁴ Matthew 26:28, ESV.

⁵ Exodus 24:8, ESV: "Behold the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words."

⁶ Robert Bruce, The Mystery of the Lord's Supper, trans. Thomas F. Torrance (London: James Clarke, 1958), 82–83. Originally preached in Edinburgh, 1589.

⁷ John 6:51, ESV: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."

⁸ John 6:53, ESV: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you."

⁹ Matthew 26:29, ESV.