Transcript
Narrator: Throughout history, people and cultures have attached great significance to different actions and objects. A yellow umbrella might not mean anything to you, but it’s a symbol of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. Prior to 1968, raising a fist may not have seemed like much, but during the Olympics that year, athletes changed the meaning of this action when they used it sign at the medal ceremonies as a sign of protest against racial discrimination.
Likewise, if you aren’t familiar with the culture and beliefs of Jewish tradition, there is a lot of context missed when reading the Bible. There is a lot we miss as modern readers, especially the context and connections between Passover, Jesus’ crucifixion, the Last supper, and the Jewish temple.
Dr. Brant Pitre, in his book “Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist” looks at the Eucharist through the Old Testament and various sources of Jewish tradition and writings. These include the Targums, Babylonian Talmud, and Mishna as well as various collections of ancient commentary and oral traditions from Jewish rabbis.
In the Jewish tradition of Passover a male lamb, unblemished, in the prime of his life, is sacrificed. Ancient texts reveal the lambs would be sacrificed in the temple and placed on skewers, and then paraded back out of town.
Sacrifices of thousands of lambs produced gallons of blood, sometimes up to the priest’s ankles. The blood was then washed out the side of the temple with water. Jewish people were familiar with the image of the temple being purged of water and blood. On the cross, Jesus, who referred to himself as the new temple, has his side pierced and water and blood flow out. The image of lambs up on skewers, temple being purged of blood, would be in the mind of every Jewish person when seeing or reading about Jesus’ crucifixion.
In the The book of Leviticus, which chronicles all the worship rituals and practices of the Jewish people in great detail, we encounter the Bread of the Presence. A literal translation of this is actually the “Bread of the Face” and this was kept in the tabernacle the Jews carried in the wilderness during the exodus.
The Bread of the Face was kept on a golden table, or altar, and veiled when brought out of the tabernacle. It was kept with large containers of wine and the bread and wine were eaten by the Levitical priests on every Sabbath day.
According to Rabbinic tradition, the bread changed once it was brought into the tabernacle, as Dr. Pitre explains: “…certain rabbis believed something special happened to the Bread of the Presence when it was offered by the priests as a sacrifice to God. Before the bread was brought into the Holy Place to be offered in sacrifice, it could be laid on a marble table. But after the bread had been consecrated to God by the priests, it had to be laid on a golden table…”
Also, when the Temple in Jerusalem was built and pilgrims would travel for miles to celebrate Passover, during Pentecost, or the feast known as Tabernacles, the Bread of the Face would be removed from the Temple so pilgrims could see it: “The priests used to lift up the Golden Table and exhibit the Bread of the Presence on it to those who came up for the festivals, saying to them, ‘Behold, God’s love for you!’
At the passover meal, there is a lamb, bread, and four blessing cups of wine. At the Last Supper, in the Gospel of John, Jesus does not bless the fourth cup. The fourth cup then becomes what he drinks on the cross, completing what has become his passover sacrifice.
Also during the Last Supper, Jesus took bread and wine and blessed and broke it saying: “Take this, all of you and eat of it, this is my body, given for you.” The bread during the Passover meal has taken on a larger significance. Jesus tells the disciples this bread is his body, given for them.
Bread, wine, and the temple all have deep context to the Jews of Jesus’ time. The Mass, a continuation and celebration of the Last Supper with Jesus, has a fullness we
might miss without all this context. In the Passover, in his sacrifice on the Cross, in His Last supper, Jesus unites the fullness of the Old Testament and the Temple and the practices of the Jewish people into a divine participation in the worship of God. In Jesus, all these things find their fulfillment. So we can see how it’s fair to say the Mass is the fullest participation in the divine life that we can have on earth.
