A Jewish believer looks at the roots of the Last Supper

By Alan Gilman

It may be Holy Week, but for many Canadians the Stanley Cup playoffs garner far more attention. It is difficult, if not impossible, for non-Canadians to comprehend the passion so many have for hockey or how one of the most recognizable objects in Canada is a small, round, hard rubber disk—the puck. To us it’s a national symbol, stirring our collective memory from Paul Henderson’s goal against the Soviets, in 1972, to Sidney Crosby’s 2010 overtime Olympic winner. It brings hope to the followers of the sixteen teams that made the playoffs this year, but at the same time reminds Ottawa Senator fans that their beloved team didn’t qualify for the second year in a row. Hockey matters to Canadians; and the little black disk powerfully reminds us of the game and its history. Symbols work that way.

Still, it is Holy Week, when Christians throughout the world remember something more than a game—the sacrificial death of the Son of God and His victory over the grave through His resurrection. There are symbols at work here too and yet, tragically, their meaning is lost to many of us.

While Good Friday and Easter Sunday are annual commemorations of Jesus’s death and resurrection, Jesus Himself instructed His followers to remember Him via a symbolic meal.

The bread of affliction is the bread of deliverance. This is what had been driven deep into the psyche of the Messiah’s early Jewish followers who gathered that evening in the Upper Room.

“Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover,” He instructs His disciples in the Gospel narrative (see Luke 22:8). This would not be His first Seder (pronounced say’-der), meaning “set order”—the festive meal within which the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in Egypt, through Moses, was retold each spring.

The exact outline of the early First-Century Seder is unknown, though the Gospels hint at elements that continue to this day. The eating of matzah (the Hebrew word for unleavened bread) along with bitter herbs actually goes back all the way to Moses’ day (see Exodus 12:8), while the drinking of cups of wine, the singing of songs, and the dipping of the matzah were introduced sometime afterwards.

It was the matzah, more than anything, that spoke to the essence of this annual feast. Near the beginning of the evening, it is held up while proclaiming: “This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.” Whether the origin of this statement goes back to Jesus’s day or not, it graphically expresses the bridge between God’s workings among His people in the ancient past until now. The bread of affliction is the bread of deliverance.

When Jesus held up the matzah and applied it to Himself, He was proclaiming that the greater, long-expected liberation had finally arrived.

This is what had been driven deep into the psyche of the Messiah’s early Jewish followers who gathered that evening in the Upper Room. To see the matzah on the table at Passover required little explanation; they knew from childhood what it meant, as did previous generations. They also knew, as did those generations, that the Messiah would bring about a deliverance greater than the Exodus. Jesus was aware of that too, as He leveraged this most powerful symbol and took it to its fullest meaning by saying: “This is My body given for you; do this in remembrance of Me,” (Luke 22:19).

It was not to some everyday bread that the Messiah attached these profound words. He didn’t pick up a common dinner bun that happened to be part of His last, pre-execution meal. It was matzah, the bread of affliction, one of the most powerful symbols in the minds of His disciples—as it still is for Jewish people everywhere—that symbolized the great deliverance He was to accomplish for the world.

Jesus’s disciples, just like their fellow Jews of their day, celebrated their liberation from Egypt at Passover while being under the thumb of another oppressor, Rome; no longer slaves, but not truly free, yearning for the days of the Messiah. So when Jesus held up the matzah and applied it to Himself, He was proclaiming that the greater, long-expected liberation had finally arrived. It would be some time before these Jewish men fully understood the global implications of what He was about to do. Yet, they knew enough about the symbol of the matzah to catch the profound nature of what Jesus was saying: The bread of affliction is the bread of deliverance.

Alan Gilman and his wife, Robin, are Jewish believers in Jesus. Alan is part-time Pastor at All Saints Lutheran Church in Ottawa. He is also a writer and itinerant Bible teacher affiliated with ACCI.