 All right, so we're here this afternoon and talking about the Eucharist. So on Tuesday, we built a big background on the Old Testament and so now we can comfortably move ahead and we're gonna talk about what we call late Second Temple Judaism. Gonna look at the S scenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls and so on, the light that they shed because the Jews were reading those texts that we talked about on Tuesday. They weren't ignorant of those texts. They were meditating on those prophecies and the typology of the meal with God in the end time. And some of them were already celebrating sacred meals as an anticipation, a kind of a mystical anticipation of the eschatological banquet that the Messiah would bring which indeed he did bring, he did show up and he brought the meal. And we're gonna talk about that but let's go to the Lord in prayer in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Heavenly Father, we give you thanks this afternoon for the beauty of your word and for the beauty of the most blessed sacrament which you've given us to remain with us in your real presence until the end of time until you come back before our eyes for the final judgment. Lord, in this talk, we pray that you enlighten our minds and inflame our hearts with love for you in the sacrament that our passion may overflow and lead many to discover you as well. We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. So when Deacon Ralph was speaking this morning just what a beautiful talk and I kept thinking about how he went back and forth between head and heart between what we know and what we love and we know we need both. We need both the head and the heart and sometimes we do better at one and sometimes we do better at the other but God has to transform both. So to enlighten the mind and to inflame the heart and Deacon talked about that time when he was asked to assist at mass and how reticent he was to hold up the Eucharist and say the body of Christ because he wasn't sure if he fully believed that and so he studied and he read and got into the scriptures and theologians and so on and so it's kind of the head but it came back to the heart and making that act of faith which is made in the heart. And so we're gonna do a lot ahead for the next hour but we're also gonna come back to heart and one of the things that grieves my heart is what I hear about Catholics who have left the church and go to some Protestant mega church and say well you know I wasn't getting fed in the Catholic church or I found Jesus in this other church, et cetera and that pains me to my heart and in one sense I know what they mean and in another sense I feel tremendous frustration because what they were looking for was literally right in front of them. So I'm wearing a shirt that I wore at my high school graduation. I have a lot of Catholic friends or I had a lot of Catholic friends in my graduating class. All but one have left the church, okay? And I've talked with them over email about the different reasons. Some aren't practicing anything. Some are going to Protestant churches. One friend of mine ironically became a Calvinist. I became a Catholic. She became a Calvinist. I was just passing like ships in the night, you know? And I asked her, you know why did you become a Calvinist? Well, you know I didn't have a personal relationship with Jesus while I was in the Catholic church. And I wrote to her and I asked her, well you say you didn't have a personal relationship but what did you think was actually going on when you came forward and received communion? You know, no answer. Okay, that was the end of that conversation. I had a quarter for every conversation that has ended. I don't know what is about me. Do I smell? I don't know what is about me. So many people don't want to talk to me. All right, whatever. So, but let me again, talk about my own experience. So I grew up very devout Christian household. My father was a U.S. Navy chaplain. That's why I spent half my life in Hawaii. Got kept getting sent back to Navy and Marine Corps units on Oahu. But at one time we were stationed at the dual sub bases up in New London, Groton, Connecticut. Anybody from that area? Anybody know what I'm talking about? Okay, a couple of you. All right, New York, you know, New England area right on the coast of Connecticut there about, you know, just a few minutes from the border with Rhode Island, you've got New London, Groton and these sub bases. And you also got the Coast Guard Academy there. And my dad was the chaplain for the Coast Guard Academy. And he was also overseeing comm sub groups two and 10, either side of the Thames River there. And over in Groton, we went to a conservative Baptist church for our personal worship. My dad was, you know, the chaplain for the base. But, you know, it's hard to always be worshiping in that environment where, you know, you're in the military system and just kind of to relieve stress and have some quiet time with the Lord went to a civilian church off base and we worship with these Baptists. And I was about 12 at the time. And I got myself a job as a volunteer junior librarian in the church library. And that meant I could open up the library after the Sunday evening service and allow the church goers to browse for a half hour, 45 minutes after the Sunday evening service and chit chat with each other and maybe pick up a book to read. And that gave me access to the whole church library. And I love that because I was a bookish little boy, as you might imagine. And I read voraciously in the collection that they had there. And this is one of the books that they had, The Gospel Blimp and Other Stories by Joseph Bailey. Now, Joseph Bailey is a popular evangelical, Protestant writer, kind of aging now, but his heyday was back in the 80s and he would write these humorous parables about contemporary church life, really Protestant church life in the US. And so I read this little book of poking fun at the foibles of American Christians and kind of gently prodding us toward greater fidelity to the word of God. But most of the stories I don't remember too well, but I'll never forget the last one in this collection. The last chapter was a little story called How Shall We Remember John? And this little story, only about three pages long, had a profound impact on my understanding of the Christian faith and not so much for the good either. Okay, but let me explain. So this is how the story goes. There once was this family that had a beloved oldest son named John and everybody loves John, but one day in the wintertime, John falls through the ice on the family pond and goes on to be with the Lord. And so after the funeral, the families gather together, siblings, parents, and they're talking to each other, trying to work through their grief and one of them pipes up and says, well, how shall we remember John? How can we keep his memory alive? And one of the siblings raised their hand and says, well, you know, John loved to eat oatmeal for breakfast. So maybe every morning we can eat oatmeal together and we'll talk about John and we'll remember John. So he said, oh, that sounds like a great idea. So they have oatmeal for breakfast every morning and they try to keep John's legacy alive. Well, as you can imagine, every morning having oatmeal, it kind of starts to get old after a while. So after a while, the mother of the family says, we're doing this too often and it's becoming too routine. Maybe let's just do it once a month. So they did it once a month and even that got a little routine. So finally, mother said, well, maybe just, let's do it once a year and do it big. So the mother of the family says that and then she says, and when we do it, let's do it special. So she got little silver bowls for the oatmeal, a little silver spoon to eat the oatmeal out. And they found John's diary and they had to have some readings from John's diary and eat oatmeal at a little silver bowl and do this ceremony once a year. And at the end of the story, the narrator who is presumably one of John's younger siblings says, I'm about to go off to college and everybody's leaving the house and it's gotten to the point where we're just, eating this breakfast once a year and boy, I wish we could just go back to eating breakfast, oatmeal, and remembering John. Okay, so you know what he's saying. You guys know what he's saying, don't you? This is Bailey's understanding of how Eucharistic practice developed in the church, right? And the mother of the family is Holy Mother Church. She's the Catholic church, right? And mom is like, you know, restraining access and adding smells and bells and restricting access to this and so on so that it gets ritualized to the point that everybody forgets what the original meaning was and the original meaning was just to have a meal and to think about Jesus. Okay, really? Is that all it was? Okay, well, okay, Bailey's not a theologian. He's not a Bible scholar, not a church historian, but his little parable strongly shaped my understanding of Eucharistic theology for the next 20 or more years of my life until I was about 30 years old and on the cusp of joining the Catholic church. And I had about as low a view of the Eucharist as you could possibly have, okay? I had like a zwingly in view, is technically what they call it. It's just a symbolic ceremony. That's it, okay? And my view was lower than that of Calvin himself who has a little bit of mysticism in it, but most Calvinists are de facto zwingly and just like, it's just a symbolic thing, you know? It's an outward profession of your faith. No, nothing miraculous is taking place. Nothing's really happening to you. Nothing's changing its nature. You know, you just chop up the wonder bed into little squares and you put it on a plate and you got these little cups of grape juice and you pass them through the aisle and everybody eats together and thinks about Jesus, right? Okay, so just a meal to remember John. And that's the whole point of Bailey's parable and that kind of expresses how to this day many evangelical Protestants continue to have that view. That's a dominant view of the Eucharist in the US among baptized Christians in the US. That's kind of a dominant view. It's just this snack to think about Jesus, okay? And many of our parishioners as well, the people that we're spiritually responsible for are de facto thinking this, okay? And think that the church has just gotten kind of superstitious about it. And so we have to, but we have to ask a question and sometimes we might have a sneaking suspicion. Maybe we have a nagging voice in the back of our mind that says, well, I profess this with my lips, but could it be that really the church has gotten off track and put too much emphasis on this ritual, et cetera? And so we got to go back to the sources and we got to remind ourselves what the scriptures really say, especially in light of the Jewish context of the writing of the New Testament, okay? So just a couple of points here. For modern Americans, many details of the Last Supper go unnoticed and unremarked and it ends up just reading like a meal to remember Jesus. But for Jews of the first century, every detail of the Last Supper accounts would have been significant. And by paying attention to these details, in light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are the only contemporary Jewish documents we have, but which I mean, we actually have the documents that were written pen on paper at that time, okay? Enable us to reconstruct the last days of Jesus more vividly. And so what about the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Dead Sea Scrolls are the remains of a monastic library, a Jewish monastery that was sponsored by a sect of the Jews, similar in size to the Sadducees and the Pharisees. This sect was called the Essenes. And they considered themselves to be the true Israelites, the faithful remnant of God's people. They did not call themselves Essenes, they called themselves Israelites. And that's why you don't see them mentioned in the gospel as Essenes. But John chapter one, remember Nathaniel comes to Jesus, remember what Jesus says? Here is a true Israelite, okay? That's characteristic Essen jargon, okay? Nathaniel very well might have been an Essenes. In fact, personally I'm convinced he was, but anyway. The Essenes practiced strict observance of God's laws, they lived lives of poverty, prayer, and works of charity. We would have admired them, our Lord admired them. When our Lord speaks of those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, he's primarily talking about the Essenes who practiced celibacy like these monks along the shores of the Dead Sea. But they didn't just live in monasteries, they also lived in, Josephus tells us in every city of Judea and wherever the Jews lived, you had an Essen community. There was always an Essen quarter or an Essen neighborhood in every major Jewish population center. And so they were all over. And they ran, what we would think of as like halfway houses or charitable houses for unwed mothers and orphans and things like this and did a lot of works of charity. As I said, they alone of all the groups of Jews practiced monasticism. Modern Jews, modern rabbinic Judaism, they really bristle about celibacy. They've really got a chip on their shoulder about celibacy and they say some really unkind things about the Catholic practice of celibacy. But that was not always the case. Modern rabbinic Judaism comes from the Pharisees. Okay, it's the natural descendants, the genealogical and intellectual descendants of the Phariseic movement. And they're quite open about that. But the other groups of Jews, the Sadducees and the Essenes, they were wiped out in the Jewish war that ended in the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70. Only the Pharisees survived and they became modern Judaism. And so our understanding of Judaism is distorted by the Pharisee movement. But the Pharisee movement was only one expression of ancient Judaism. And we have to recover a sense of other forms of ancient Judaism like Essenism. And so the Essenes had a monastery by the shores of the Dead Sea and the remains of their library are the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. So geographically, we're talking about the north end of the Dead Sea. Many of you have been there on pilgrimage and you know what I'm talking about? Directly east of Jerusalem, but down several thousand feet to the lowest place on the face of the planet. This is a relief map showing a little bit of the terrain in the area. You can see that Jerusalem's up on the ridge line. That's the watershed between Western Israel and Eastern Israel. Rain that falls on the east of Jerusalem goes down to the Mediterranean. Rain that falls, I'm sorry, to the west of Jerusalem goes down to the Mediterranean. Rain that falls to the east goes down to the Dead Sea and eventually evaporates. So straight east from Jerusalem on the shore of the sea, you have this location that we call Qumran. And these are two of the Arab cousins. There were three Arab cousins who originally discovered the scrolls. One of them tossed a rock into a cave mouth. They heard the shattering of pottery and came back days later to investigate and pulled out the first three of what eventually became over a thousand scrolls that were discovered in these different caves. So this is an image of the limestone bluffs that ring the shore of the Dead Sea and down below these bluffs, you had a plateau. You still have a plateau and on the flat surface of that plateau, you can see all the foundations of an ancient dwelling that was the monastery. One of the interesting features about this ancient dwelling was the large number of ritual baths. Jews call these mikvot in the plural, a singular is a mikveh and there were at least 10 mikvot in an area just a couple acres large. That's the largest concentration of Jewish ritual baths in any one spot from this time period. So whoever lived here was very serious about staying ritually clean. You can see how large these were and how they had multiple staircases going down in. One staircase was when you were clean and going down into the water and another was when you were, I'm sorry, when you're unclean and coming down into the water in a different staircase when you are cleansed and heading back up out of the pool because of course you don't wanna bump into your dirty brother who's coming down the staircase when you're coming up cleansed. Oh, you touched me. Now I gotta go back and wash again. So separate staircases for traffic flow and there are enough of these that 100 to 200 men could wash in a relatively short period of time immerse themselves and get out again in a relatively quick time manner. Let's talk about some of the scrolls that were found there. The nicest find, the most beautiful find is the Great Isaiah Scroll. This is one of the first scrolls discovered. It was a complete, was and is, a complete copy of the book of Isaiah dating back by carbon dating to about 250 BC. A little younger, if you go by the paleography, the science of handwriting, so a little bit of a debate, but no doubt it's very old. It's our oldest complete book of the Bible really and in the original language in Hebrew and when it was discovered it was just in a pristine condition. A lot of these scrolls were found in jars buried up to six feet of bat guano in the bottom of these caves and they had to dig out all that bat stuff to get at these, but that was providential because all that bat dung kept these things in an oxygen-free environment for thousands of years and in the absence of oxygen things just don't age. So when they dug them out and pulled them out, like the Great Isaiah Scroll, this is a color photograph taken in 1948. You can see how beautiful the color of the leather is and how clear the writing is. It's just amazing. And I think that's the first big theological takeaway that we can have from the scrolls. If you feel like life is burying you under a heap of stuff, okay? It might just be because God has a providential purpose for your life, okay? So that is a profound theological datum from the Dead Sea Scrolls and this scroll is a less good condition, kind of fragmentary condition. These are some fragments of what we call the community rule. It was kind of like equivalent to the rule of St. Benedict or the rule of St. Francis. It was the religious rule that regulated their common life. So it's the oldest example of the genre of a religious rule in Western civilization. How ironic. Who knew that the oldest form of monasticism in Western civilization was actually Jewish? But it was and this was their rule and we found 12 copies of it. They were all kind of partially broken and somewhat fragmentary, but between the 12 different copies that we discovered were able to piece together the entire text of the document. And in my opinion and the opinion of many scholars, it's actually the community rule that's the most theologically important document in the entire collection because it gives a very good synopsis of their religious worldview, their sacramental practice, their common life and their eschatology. So get a really good view of how they thought and worshiped from the community rule. And it's this document that has, for example, the most phrases in common with the Johannine literature and the Pauline literature of the New Testament. There's several phrases in the community rule that are only elsewhere found in, for example, the Gospel of John or the Epistles of John and sometimes a few of St. Paul's epistles as well. So what do the Essings have to do with the Last Supper? Well, these Essing monks hid their library when they saw that they were gonna be wiped out by the Roman soldiers in the year 70 and we discovered it in 1947. And but what does this have to do with the Eucharist? Well, this is interesting. Did these Essings have anything like the Eucharist? Well, the Jewish historian Josephus describes their religious practice and he says they labor till the fifth hour. That's 11 a.m. by our clocks. So just an hour before noon. And afterwards they assemble and when they have clothed themselves in white veils, they then bathe in cold water. This is all those, oh, that we saw, all those big, we would call them baptismal pools at their monastery. After this purification, they meet together in a private room into which no other sect may enter. So only those who are initiated may go into this room, this dining room. Well, they go after pure matter into the dining room as into a holy temple. So they do this with religious reverence. This is not just some snack. They're not going to get refreshments. They're going into this room and this is a sacred meal. This is a sacred occasion and they treat it with the dignity of entering the temple in Jerusalem. And they quietly set themselves down upon which the baker lays them loaves in order. And here Josephus uses some phrases when he describes the baker of the community laying down the loaves. He uses some Greek words that are used in the Old Testament for laying the loaves of the bread of the presence on the golden table in the tabernacle. So Josephus is intentionally evoking the sacred bread of the tabernacle, the bread of the presence. And Josephus goes on and he says, but a priest says grace before the meal. In other words, praise. And it is unlawful for anyone to taste of the food before grace be said. So no eating before the blessing of the food. The same priest, when he has dined, says grace again after the meal. And when they begin and when they end, they praise God, which means they sing or chant Psalms of praise. And we're going to look at this in a minute because we have found their hymn book. Their hymn book is preserved. After which they lay aside their white garments and they labor again until evening. So like monks at other times, you know, it's aura at laborer, right? So they labor until noon, then they have the sacred washing, they have the sacred meal, they pray, they chant hymns, and then they go back to their labor until sundown and then they come back for evening prayer, as it were, right? Okay, so that was Josephus, who is part of the Pharisee movement and he's writing as an outsider and he's describing what he knows. And he spent some time, he was like an aspirant to the Essenes for a while. And so he lived with them and knew them a little bit, but again, an outsider's perspective. Now, let's look at an insider's perspective. Let's read some of the scrolls themselves. This is the community rule. Remember how I told you, describe their sacramental practice. And it says, they shall eat, pray, and deliberate communally. Wherever 10 men belonging to the party of the community are gathered, a priest must always be present. That's a, this is a quorum, okay? It's a quorum of 10 and you need a priest. And the men shall sit before the priest by rank when the table has been set for eating or the new wine and the new wine ready for drinking. It is the priest who shall stretch out his hand first, bless the first portion of the bread or the new wine. Okay, so this is how they have their sacramental meal and they can celebrate the meal as long as they have a quorum of 10 and a priest, but the priest must celebrate, he must officiate. And they also had excommunication. So these are the rules by which cases are to be decided at a community inquiry. If there be found among them a man who has lied about money and done so knowingly, they shall bar him from the pure meals of the many for one year. Look at that phrase. This is what they called their proto Eucharist. They called it the pure food or the pure meal of the many. And the many or the multitude rabim in Hebrew, that was one of the names that they had for their movement. They referred to themselves as the multitude, the multitude of Israel, for example. Okay, so look at that language. It's such interesting language. And lied about money knowingly and getting barred from the community. Ring any bells, anybody? Acts, right? This is the first offense against the church that we read about in Acts is Ananias and Sapphira. It's the first offense listed in the Dead Sea Scrolls that you can commit against the community is lying about money knowingly. And it's the first reported violation of the communal life of the church in the book of Acts. I don't know exactly what the, but I don't think that can be a coincidence. Something's going on there, but it's just so striking that, yeah, again, first sin against the community is knowingly lying about money. Now, interestingly, okay, there is an appendix to the community rule in one of its copies that has kind of adjustments for their communal life for when the Messiah arrives because they believed that the Messiah was coming anytime and they wanted to be ready and they wanted to know how to celebrate this sacred meal with the Messiah when he showed up. And so they describe how to perform the right when the Messiah arrives. And he says, then the Messiah of Israel may enter. The Messiah of Israel is the royal Messiah. They, in some of their documents, they reflect the view that there's going to be a priest of Messiah and a royal Messiah. But anyway, the Messiah of Israel may enter and the heads of the thousands of Israel are to sit before him by rank. Notice that, everybody has to sit by rank. When they gather at the communal table, none may reach for the first portion of the bread or wine before the priest. The priest here is the priestly Messiah. So interesting, look how the royal Messiah is subject to the priestly Messiah, at least when it comes to the liturgy. The priestly Messiah has to bless. For he shall bless the first portion of the bread and the wine, reaching for the bread first. Now notice how emphatic they are about that. Afterward, the Messiah of Israel shall reach for the bread. Then the royal Messiah, finally each member of the whole congregation by rank. Okay, that's how you do it when the Messiah has come. All right, so. Josephus says, when they begin and when they end, they praise God as he that bestows their food upon them. Now I told you, we found their hymn book. And scholars call it One Cue Horeyot. Okay, Kim's from the first kumran cave. Horeyot means praises or thanksgivings in Hebrew. So it's the book of thanksgivings. It's a book of hymns. And all of their hymns are really what they are is Psalms. They're new Psalms that the leader of the community wrote, probably written by this mysterious re-founder of their community called the Teacher of Righteousness. But all of these hymns or Psalms begin in the same stylized way. They all begin with the phrase, I give thanks to you, oh Lord, all of them. So one of them begins, I give thanks to you, oh Lord, for you have redeemed my soul from the pit. Sorry. Ah, thank you. All right, let's, ah, ah, sorry. We'll see what happens here. Okay, thanks to Lord for you have redeemed. Thank you, you've redeemed my soul from the pit from Sheol and Abaddon. Another begins, I give thanks to you, Lord, for you have become a wall of strength for me. Another one, I give thanks to you, Lord, for you have made my face shine by your covenant. So this is how they all begin, right? They're written in Hebrew. But you know, if you translate that into Greek, you know how that comes out? Eucharisto curiae. That's how I thank you, oh Lord. Eucharisto curiae, that's how that comes out. And Josephus says they chanted one of those at the beginning and one at the end, okay? So beginning and ending by giving thanks to God. So look at this, did they have a Eucharist? Well, they had a communal meal that anticipated the meal with the Messiah in the final age, a priest officiated at that meal. The meal was bread and wine. One had to be a member of their new covenant community to take the meal. I didn't even talk about that, but they call themselves the community of the new covenant, Barith Kharash, okay? It's the same phrase that the Chaldeans used when the Chaldean right uses to this day when the Chaldeans celebrate the Eucharistic liturgy, Barith Kharash. I heard it when I was in Escondido at John Paul, the great university, which has a large Chaldean contingent in the student body and among the faculty. Went to a Chaldean mass or Chaldean liturgy when I was down there some years ago. Just got chills up and down my spine because they celebrate in Aramaic, which is a spoken language of Jesus, which is sometimes indistinguishable from Hebrew. And so Jeremiah promises the Barith Kharash, the new covenant in Jeremiah 31, 31, and the Chaldeans lift up the host to say this is the Barith Kharash. Woo! Amen? So I, whoa, no going through Greek, no going through Latin, no going through English, just all in the same language of bam, it's got so much more impact when you don't have to do all the mental jumping between the different languages that we do. Holy cow. This is the new covenant. So yeah, they call themselves the community of the new covenant. And the sign that you were fully initiated into the new covenant was that you were able to partake of both the bread and the wine, okay? After a one year probation, you were admitted to the bread and after a further year's probation, you were added to the wine. So actually it was a three year process. It was like a, like an aspirancy, apostolency and a novitiate. You know, after your aspirancy, you could wash and then another year as apostolent, then you could take the bread and then another year as a novice and then you could take the wine and then you were fully part of the Barith Kharash, the Yachad Barith Kharash, the community of the new covenant. And sitting against the community meant loss of access to this meal. And the meal began and ended with the Thanksgiving Psalms starting with or beginning with I thank you, oh Lord. Okay, well, all right. So this is a photograph that we recovered from among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It had to be colorized. Anyway, it's, yeah, reenactors, you know, kind of imagining how this might have looked. They wore white garments of linen because they consider themselves a priestly movement. Okay, and so like, where are they getting these ideas? Well, we looked at those texts on Tuesday. You know, the meal of fine wine from Isaiah 23 and the free meal for the poor of the earth in Isaiah 55, one through three and others as well. And so they're meditating on those texts and they're trying to, you know, get ready for the coming of the Messiah. And they anticipate that there's going to be this eschatological banquet. And so they start celebrating it already to kind of be prepared. And now in light of that, in light of the Old Testament texts that we looked at on Tuesday and now this Jewish practice that we looked at today, let's go back to especially Luke who gives us the longest account of the institution of the Eucharist. And there we read in Luke 22 19, he took bread and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them saying, this is my body, which is given for you. Okay, well, American Christians just read that. Like, all right, I was taking bread and he gives it to them. But notice, who takes the bread first and who blesses it? Jesus. And what kind of action is that in this kind of religious culture? That's what the priest, only the priest can do. Okay, how many times didn't we see that? Only the priest was reached his hand out first. Okay, so this is, you know, some of the connotation or the social religious significance of what Jesus is doing is just lost because we're modern Americans. But this is a priestly act. The point I'm making fathers and brothers is that modern Christians miss the cultic priestly and liturgical significance of what's taking place in the upper room and they just read it flat. This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. We'll come back to that phrase. This is the line that gives so many people the wrong idea that this is just a meal to remember Jesus by. Broke my heart about six years ago as giving a parish mission in Texas. And after I got done with the talk, an older gentleman came up to me and he said, my son has left the church and now he's a Baptist pastor. And could you talk to him about the Eucharist in the church? Like, sure, I'd be fine to talk to me. He said, well, he's here tonight. So I'll go get him. So he goes, it brings back his son, who's 30 something and fine young man and very respectful. And so we have this dialogue and so we agree to email back and forth. And so he sends me stuff and I sense him stuff. And I try to talk to him about the Eucharist is just what I found persuasive. You know, when I found Ignatius of Antioch 10 years after St. John, the Apostles death saying, stay away from anybody who claims to be a Christian but refuses to confess the Eucharist to be the flesh of Jesus Christ, which suffered and which was raised. So powerful for me. So I'm sharing this stuff with him. And all he comes back with is, well, all I, you know, it's just this meal to remember Jesus. It's just this meal to remember Jesus like, but you don't. Well, we'll come back to that phrase. All right, likewise the cup after supper saying, this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. Holy cow, what did you say? All right, well, first of all, this is the long awaited meal with the Messiah. Okay, so, you know, so I figure about four of the Apostles had a background in Essenism, right? Just like other of the Apostles had a background in Phariseism, St. Matthew and St. James the less. I'm convinced that they were Pharisees before they followed Jesus. I would say John and Andrew and Nathaniel and maybe one other were previously from the Essen movement and there may have been a former Sadducee among the Apostles and you know, we know that Simon used to be a zealot, right? So they come from different religious political parties, but especially for the Apostles that came out of Essenism, when they see Jesus doing this, they're getting chills up and down their spine because they recognize this is what they expected the priestly Messiah to do at the end of time. So Jesus giving thanks and blessing the bread and the wine at this sacred meal. This is a priestly act. He's acting like the priestly Messiah of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And now let's look at that line. Do this in remembrance of me. That is literally, that can literally be translated do this as my memorial offering because this word that's used for remembrance is anomnesis. You may have heard that before. Remember that from seminary or from reading Dr. Hahn's books or something like that. But this word for memorial or remembrance is anomnesin. And the Greek here is literally do this, ice-tane emain anomnesin. Do this as or unto my memorial. And that word memorial was often used as shorthand for the memorial offering. So you see that the heading of Psalms 38 and 70, which in the Septuagint are Psalms 37 and 69, they both have a heading that says for the memorial offering. And that comes out in Greek as ice-anomnesin for the memorial, okay? So again, do this as my memorial offering. What was the memorial offering? The memorial offering was an offering of grain or flour in the temple on regular occasions which was meant to remind God of the covenant. Now, does it literally mean remind him as if like God, oh, I forgot the covenant. Damn, you're right, okay. Yeah. I was like, who are my people? Oh yeah, you're my people, okay. No, God doesn't literally need reminding, but this was, they were searching for what we would call renew, okay? They didn't have a word for renew. They used this idea of remind, which is like, call up or recollect, okay? So again, the memorial offering was a grain offering offered periodically in the temple to renew the covenant. Does it make any sense at all to think of the Eucharist as a grain offering that renews the covenant? Works for me, okay. Is that all I'd wanna say? No, okay, that's only like, that's 1% of what I would wanna say about the Eucharist, but it's at least that, amen, okay? So much more, body, blood, soul, and divinity, all that, okay? But it's certainly at least that, okay? So do this as my memorial offering. And likewise, the cup after supper saying this cup which is poured out is the new covenant in my blood. That is huge. Let's look at that again, verse 20, okay? Likewise, the cup after supper saying this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant. Wow, they had been waiting 600 years for the new covenant. Okay, about 600 years previously, around the year 587, Jeremiah in Jeremiah chapter 31, verse 31 said, the days are coming says the Lord God when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with them when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, my covenant which they broke and I had to show myself to be their master. But this is the covenant that I will make with them in those days, I will write my law upon their hearts. And then he goes on to describe the, what we know as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. That is the only place in the entire Old Testament where the phrase new covenant is used. And here Jesus uses that key phrase drawing a direct line back to Jeremiah 31, 31 and saying this reality that you've been waiting for for 600 years, I'm doing it now. And I'm sure James leaned over to Andrew and said, did he just say what I thought he said? So like this is going down now, right here. And again, chills up and down the spine because the new covenant is gonna replace the one when God took Israel by the hand and led them out of Egypt, my covenant which they broke and he had to show himself to be their master. Do you remember what that covenant was? We call that the, well, yes, that's connected. Yeah, Mosaic covenant, right? The covenant of Moses or the Sinai covenant, right? With the 12 tribes at the foot of Mount Sinai. We looked at Exodus 24 on Tuesday. So the new comes gonna replace that. So what Jesus is saying is what I'm doing with you 12 here in the upper room on Mount Zion is as significant as what Moses did with the 12 tribes at the foot of Sinai. Dang. You know what happened at Sinai? Earthquake, fire, wind, lightning, storm, shaking the ground, the trumpet voice of God that struck fear into the hearts of the people, okay? But what I'm doing with you in the upper room is as epic as what took place at the foot of Sinai in Exodus 24. This is huge, okay? So this is the new covenant in his blood. Now let's talk about that phrase in my blood. That means consisting of my blood. So let's look at this again. This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant. That's epic. In my blood, which means consisting of my blood because that's what the cup is referring to, right? You know that people say here, drink this cup, but you think about it, you never drink a cup. It would stick in your throat, right? You can't swallow a cup, right? You only, when we talk about that, it's an expression for the contents of the cup, right? So when he says this cup, he's talking about the contents of the cup, which that's why he clarifies in my blood. Now the blood of Jesus in the cup, is that his physical blood or his sacramental blood? Amen. You guys all went to a great seminary, okay? Sacramental blood, right? Because he didn't open a vein and fill it with his blood because then it would taste like blood, right? But what he did in this case was he took wine and transformed it into the substance of his blood without losing the accidents. So it tasted like wine, but it was actually his blood. So blood in that form, it's the same as his physical blood, to specify, since it doesn't have the accidents, we call it the sacramental blood of the Lord. So, and the sacramental blood of our Lord, that is one of the species of the Eucharist, right? So let's simplify this even further. So the new covenant is the Eucharist, absolutely. The new covenant is the Eucharistic blood of Christ we know the properties intercommunicate. So it's not like, oh, it's the blood, but not the body, you know, something crazy like that. No, the new covenant is the Eucharistic body and blood of our Lord. Well, that is crazy, you know? Because the whole Bible is a sequence of covenants and it's not just Catholics that think of it, think of it that way. I mean, I grew up as a Calvinist and we were all into covenant. We knew that the Bible was a sequence of covenants. My home church was called Covenant Christian Reform Church in the South End of Grand Rapids, Michigan, okay? And later I would write a book about the covenants, this one here, and actually the first like five or six chapters of this I could have written as a Calvinist because it's like, yeah, this is all, we knew about, you know, a dammit covenant, Abrahamic covenant, Mosaic covenant, Davidic. We all knew that this is a sequence, right? Up to the new covenant. But we didn't pay attention to this verse. What actually is the new covenant? It's the Eucharist. What did we think the new covenant was? Well, you know, Christ sacrificed on the cross. So that's not wrong, but you're losing this too vague, okay? More specific, okay? It's the Eucharistic body and blood of our Lord. And then further confusion is introduced because then we go into Latin, right? And in Latin, new covenant is Novum Testamentum. And that gives us a phrase in English, right? New Testament, yeah? But then you go on the streets of Steubenville or you go on the streets of, you know, Houston or down in the Bible Belt or wherever and you ask people, what is the New Testament? And if they know it all, what are they gonna tell you? It's the Bible, it's the second half of the Bible. It's, you know, it's the books Matthew through Revelation. If they're really zealous, you know, then they've got one on them, okay? And they pull one out. Now, this is a Catholic New Testament. This is a confraternity pocket edition from Scepter Publishers. You know how I learned to carry one of these? From a Catholic. A Bible totend Catholic at the University of Notre Dame converted me and eventually became my sponsor into the Catholic Church. That's a whole other story. But I learned to carry a pocket New Testament from a Catholic. I got a bunch out there. If you don't have one, I urge you to get one and carry it with you so that you're always armed, you know? And so, you know, around here in Ohio, you see this motion? You know, you know we call this in Ohio? Conceal, carry. It's legal in Ohio. And you're ever in a situation of spiritual warfare, you can draw, you know? And so, pick one of those up, gentlemen, and carry those with you. It's a good witness and a good example for your people. Amen. Amen. And, but okay, so back to this. So, you know, so maybe it's gonna be, oh, this is the new Covener. This is the New Testament. What's the New Testament? This is a New Testament. Is this the New Testament? No. This is the 27 books about the New Testament. Okay? But the New Testament, the New Covenant is the Eucharist. Okay? And so, some of you have heard me say this before, but I'm gonna say it again. You know, if you're calling yourself a Christian, if you're calling yourself a New Testament Christian, but all your religious practice only consists of reading and meditating on the Bible, which is what it's like for many evangelical Protestants, okay? But you're calling yourself a New Testament Christian, all you're doing is reading your Bible. Then you are like the person who goes to the Chinese restaurant, reads the whole menu, and never orders General Tso's chicken. I mean, what's the point, okay? And don't get me wrong, all right? It's not that I've got anything against the menu, okay? I've got a doctorate in menu studies, okay? From the University of Notre Dame. I love the menu. I love the languages of the menu. I love the literary structure of the menu, you know? But it's a menu pointing to a meal and much more than a meal, because it's a meal where you personally encounter the host who is also the food, who gives himself to you. But that's what I mean when I started off my talk on Tuesday saying the whole Bible points to the Eucharist, okay? It's a story of a sequence of covenants. Covenants are family relationships formed by an oath one after another through the Old Testament, all leading up to the ministry of Christ. And Christ brings the new one, the new and eternal one that's never gonna be taken away. And it's the Eucharist. It's his presence in the sacrament, amen? And so we gotta get people to realize that this is the menu. You wanna read it, but then you wanna do what it points to and you wanna go partake of the meal. And you know, when I used to do evangelism, I used to do door-to-door evangelism as a Protestant pastor. And you know what our closing verse always was before we led people in the sinner's prayer? Closing verse that we would quote to people? Nope. Revelation 3.20, absolutely. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will go in and eat with him and he with me. And then we'd say, do you hear Jesus knocking on the door of your heart? And if they said yes, then we'd say, would you like to pray to let him in? Say yes, then we lead him in the sinner's prayer. And you know the irony of that? What's actually being talked about, right? It's Eucharistic imagery. What that meal that Jesus is gonna share with you, that's the Eucharist. That's what John's talking about through the Mysterium Arcana. You know, the disguised way of talking about the sacraments that was practiced in the early church. And so we non-Eucharistic Christians, we're using a Eucharistic verse to close the deal on the gospel when we would present it. Okay, so this is earth shaking. Okay, so this, the blood of Jesus in this cup is the new covenant that we've been waiting as Jews for 600 years for. And this is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. You know, pro multis, right? And like, you know, I've had priests tell me, oh, it shouldn't say for many. It should say for all. I'm like, well, first of all, it's in scripture so we're not like free to just like revise what scripture says. You know, secondly, you gotta understand the Jewish context for that term. The term many was used for the religious community that was gathered together in prayer to await for the Messiah. Look at how it's used in the Dead Sea Scrolls. If the novice does proceed in joining the party of the Yachad, that means community in Hebrew, he must not touch the pure food of the many. That's their proto-Eucharist before they have examined him as to his spiritual fitness and works and not before a full year is passed. Okay, so you have to go through the postulancy before you are admitted to the pure food of the many. The many is the term for the community. So look at that Matthew 26, 28, poured out for many. This is authentic Jewish religious jargon from the first century. This is not a later language made up by the second third generation of the Christian church and retrojected into the mouth of the historical Jesus which probably a lot of you were taught in seminary and I was taught that too. Probably, yeah, how many of you heard stuff like that? You know, this is second, third generation, whatever Christian stuff, written back into the New Testament? No, okay. The Dead Sea Scrolls show this kind of language just rings authentically with how devout Jews spoke in the first century. And let's go on. And likewise, the cup after the cup saying, okay, we looked at that. Okay, I got the wrong PowerPoint up here. All right. This is not the one that I fixed up for you guys. All right. Then he says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you. That language of poured out for you is from the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. He poured out his soul to death and the soul is in the blood. Leviticus 17, 14 says, the soul of every creature is its blood. Okay, using nephesh, the Hebrew word for soul. Same word used in Isaiah 53, 12. And so my blood poured out for you, that is my soul or my life poured out for you. Jesus is the suffering servant who's both priest and victim. And a dispute arose amongst them who was to be regarded as the greatest. Why are they having an argument about who's greatest in the context of the Last Supper? It's because at these sacred meals, you had to sit by rank. That's right. And so it makes sense. That's why in particular, this argument comes up in that context. And then Jesus says to them after he settles that argument, you are those who have continued with me in my trials. And I covenant to you, as my father covenant to me a kingdom, you've probably never seen it translated like this before. So I checked all the contemporary English translations earlier today looking at the NABRE and the RSVCE2 and the NIV and so on. They say a point or a sign or confer. But nobody translates it literally. This is actually the Greek word for covenant making. And everywhere else in the New Testament that this term is used, it's talking about making a covenant. But in this one instance, all the English versions say just a point or confer or whatever. And if you get into it, you find out that they don't think that covenant making makes sense in context. Like why would that make sense in the context in which he's just made the new covenants, right? Don't stop this. That's ridiculous. That doesn't make any sense at all, right? I covenant to you, but what gets them is he covenants a kingdom and you're supposed to covenant a covenant. You see, you're supposed to deotithe me a deotheke. And that makes the covenant a covenant in Greek. And here he's covenanting a kingdom. And they're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. Except when we think about it, there is one kingdom in the Old Testament that was established by a covenant. And that was the kingdom of David, right? 2 Samuel 5 and 2 Samuel 7, two covenants actually, a covenant between David and the people and a covenant between David and God. It was this dual covenant that established the Davidic kingdom. And Jesus is the son of Moses? No, actually, he's come to me. Son of, oh, David, yes, yes, it did. So if Jesus is the king and he's the son of David, then Jesus' kingdom is the kingdom of? David, that's right, which coincidentally established by a covenant. So I covenant to you, as my father covenants to me a kingdom that you may eat and drink at my table and my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel. So we have echoes here of David the king and the kingdom of my covenant and the apostles are being given a princely status, which is seen in our bishops. That's why our bishops wear miters, but that's shared with you. You are collaborators of your bishop, kind of extension to your, his officials on his behalf, you represent his princely rule over the local tribe of Israel. Here it's the tribe of Steubenville, but there's the tribe of Fort Wayne South Bend, there's the tribe of LA, the tribe of Galveston, Houston. And each of them has a prince with his royal officials gathered around him, extending his kingdom. So summing up here, the Last Supper is no mere memorial meal as many Christians mistakenly think. The disciples would have understood the priestly and messianic significance of Jesus' actions because they had the concept of a bread and wine meal with the Messiah in the end times. And the Eucharist is a covenant meal making us God's family and establishing us as God's kingdom. And the Eucharist also of course goes beyond anything that the Essenes imagined. But let's go back to Bailey's story and let's look at his story about that oatmeal breakfast to remember the beloved oldest son, John versus what the Eucharist actually is. Is the Eucharist nothing but a meal to remember John? Well, first of all, let's think about it. John's family wasn't building on a long tradition of sacred meals in their culture, were they? No, but Jesus was. Furthermore, John's parents weren't claiming to establish a new covenant between God, the Creator and all the human race through this meal. But Jesus was, amen. I mean, isn't that just a little bit of difference? Okay? The Creator God and the human race and this is the family bond between us, okay? And none of the meal actions of John's family were intended or understood to be priestly or liturgical. Okay? But Jesus' were, as we saw, Jesus' family, I'd say John's family, wasn't culturally formed to expect to celebrate a breakfast-to-vote meal with the Messiah in the end of time, right? But the apostles were formed to expect bread and wine with the Messiah at the end of time. And it's almost as important about the new covenant. John's parents didn't claim to be fulfilling ancient prophecies, 600-year-old prophecies by the great prophets of Israel by celebrating this meal, but Jesus was. Let's go to him in prayer. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of the Eucharist and the ministry of our Lord, Jesus Christ. And we thank you also for the providential discovery of the scrolls which kind of highlight and bring to greater color and greater clarity this Old Testament and Jewish background so we can understand the full significance of what our Lord was doing. Heavenly Father, please help us as we try to explain to our people and to anyone who will listen the true meaning of what our Lord was doing in the upper room and how that has perpetuated in the Catholic Church until the end of time so that so many may come and feed on Jesus in the most blessed sacrament and come to know him not only by reading about him in the book, but by consuming him in the meal where he is priest and sacrifice. We ask this through Christ our Lord, amen. Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.