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Some Protestants claim that Catholics try to “put Jesus back on the Cross,” at Mass, citing Scripture like “Once For All” or “It is Finished.” Joe explains why the Eucharist is necessary to complete Christ’s once for all Sacrifice.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back, Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to wish you a happy holy Thursday as we commemorate the last supper of Jesus Christ in which he institutes the Eucharist and the priesthood. And I know many of you hearing that are already saying it’s not really what we believe in my tradition as an evangelical Protestant or whatever you may be, because unfortunately, while the Lord’s Supper should be a place of Christian unity, this is where we become one in Christ. It’s become between Catholics and Protestants, a place of real division, and not only between Catholics and Protestants, but between Protestants and Protestants that the understandings of the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper you might find in an Anglican or a Lutheran service are going to be radically different from what you might find in a Baptist or non-denominational one. And in particular, there’s a lot of controversy over a claim that we as Catholics make, not only that Christ is present in the Eucharist, not only that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, but that in a strange way we are actually participating in the one sacrifice of Christ that many Protestants who are fine saying Christ is somehow present and with under the bread and wine or in some other way in the Eucharist, are not okay with the idea that this is the one propitiatory sacrifice of Christ.
So I’m going to give you a very short presentation of the Catholic position and then three common objections that I hear to the Catholic claim and then show you why these objections don’t actually understand the biblical meaning of sacrifice. They don’t understand either what Catholics are saying or more importantly in some ways what the Bible is saying about sacrifice. So without any further ado, the catechism in paragraph 1367 says that the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice. Now how can that be because the victim is one and the same, the same meaning the same Jesus offers through the ministry of priests who then offered himself on the cross. Only the manner of offering is different. So it’s one and the same sacrifice. It’s not a second crucifixion that’s going to be very important. But this is somehow participation in Christ’s one sacrifice.
And since in the divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner upon the altar of the cross is contained in offered in an unbloody manner. This sacrifice is truly propitiatory, meaning it appeases God, the justice of God is met in some way in the offering of the Eucharist at the mass. Now that’s going to be confusing for a lot of reasons. Number one, this distinction between the bloody and the unbloody manner is already confusing. What’s meant by that, I’ll explain that at the outset just so we understand what’s going on because you might say, how could you say it’s unbloody when we’re offering the body and blood of Christ? Well, because bloody doesn’t just mean blood is present, but that the pouring of blood, I wouldn’t describe you as bloody right now unless you’ve got an open wound.
I don’t know about you have blood, but that blood is not being poured out. So we talk about the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the cross as opposed to the Unbloody way in which Christ is presented. Now we’re saying we’re not pouring out his blood again, we are not crucifying Christ. That’s very important. This is one of the most common ways that I see Protestants misunderstand what Catholics are claiming in the first place. So to make sense of this already, you have to have a sense that sacrifice is more than the pouring of blood. That’s going to be a common thread to how many evangelicals today misunderstand it. And understandably, when we think about the sacrifice of Christ, we’re imagining good Friday. But in fact biblically the sacrifice of Christ includes holy Thursday. It includes even the ascension into heaven. And we’re going to see all of that as we go biblically.
You don’t have to take my word for it, I can show you it in the Bible. So what are the objections people are going to have to this view that the mass is the represenation of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross? Well, one of them is going to be a pretty strong one frankly. Hebrews 7 27 says that Jesus has no need like those high priests, meaning the Old Testament ones to offer sacrifices daily first for his own sins and then for those of the people, he did this once for all when he offered himself or offered up himself. And so on the face of it here you’ve got the Catholic church every day offering the sacrifice of the mass for the remission of sins. And then you’ve got this text in Hebrews that sounds like, oh, we’re not going to need to do that as Christians.
And so if you don’t understand what Hebrew seven is actually saying, that looks like just a flat out contradiction. And you might be wondering why in the world were the early Christians convinced they were continuing every week and even every day to represent the sacrifice of Christ? Because please understand what I’m describing here isn’t some late modern, medieval, whatever Catholic view you can find the earliest Christians speaking in no uncertain terms about this very point. In fact, as far back as the first century indeed, we’re going to see even within the text of scripture itself, there is this understanding that this is the sacrifice of Christ. So why would we believe that when Hebrews 7 27 seems to say the opposite, that I want you to just hold that in mind because that’s going to be a lot of what we’re looking at making sense of what Hebrews is actually talking about.
But I want to give two other objections that you might hear along the way. The second one, this is literally from a week ago. A Protestant elder gave a, for some reason, a lot of evangelicals who don’t understand Catholicism at all think it’s important to give sermons during their own liturgical life, during their own church services where it’s a bunch of evangelicals gathered together and instead of presenting anything about Jesus’ death and resurrection, they gossip about Catholicism and give false teachings. And that’s unfortunate, but this is a thing that you’re going to find. And so this sermon was called How Rome Re Crucifies Christ, the Fatal Error behind Roman Catholic Eucharist. And now even from the title, you should be able to say, oh, that’s exactly the opposite of what the catechism just said. They just said it wasn’t re crucifying Christ, it’s representing his once for all death on the cross. But okay, here’s how that elder claims Catholic theology works. And I want to be fair, I don’t think he’s intentionally lying, although he couldn’t be much further from the truth. I think he just does not understand what the Bible or the church says about sacrifice.
CLIP:
So when you go to a Roman Catholic church, at the front is not a pulpit, it’s an altar. And on that altar, the priest conducts a service called the mass or the Eucharist whereby he calls down the physical body, the physical blood, the soul, and the divinity of Christ to come into the actual elements transubstantiation transforming the elements into Christ. And then once the priest does that, what does he do? He kills Christ, he re crucifies him, he transforms the elements and then he takes the wafer and he holds it up and he breaks the quote body of Jesus again.
Joe:
Now if you understand Catholic theology at all, you realize this is a really cringe-worthy misunderstanding of the Catholic claim. Remember in paragraph 1367 where it says the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and offered in an unbloody manner. Now with the Eucharist so very explicitly the church is saying, yeah, we don’t reskill Christ. We don’t think we’re doing good Friday every day in terms of sacrificing Christ over and over again as separate sacrificial actions where we are killing him time and time and time again, we’re not crucifying Christ yet this is a very common evangelical misunderstanding and I think what it points to is not just how badly evangelicals tend to misunderstand Catholicism, but how badly they misunderstand the Bible, namely this many of us, when we imagine what the Bible means by sacrifice, just have envisioned this idea of ritual killing.
But as we’re going to see the biblical meaning of sacrifice involves a lot more than that. I’m going to give you plenty of biblical examples as we go, but for now just realize what we have here isn’t just a misrepresentation of the Catholic view, but a misrepresentation of the biblical idea of sacrifice and a very common one. Now the third objection you’ll hear is, well, no, this cannot be of the sacrifice of Christ in any sense because Christ on the cross said it is finished. And you’ll hear this very popular story about what those words mean.
CLIP:
He said it is finished and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. The English phrase that’s translated it is finished it a single word in the original Greek text to tele. It means that something has been brought to its final conclusion fully accomplished and nothing more needs to be added.
Joe:
So you’ll notice all that’s saying is it is finished, means it is finished. This idea of nothing more needs to be added that’s not actually found in the Greek, that’s just theology being applied on top of the Greek. And we can get into whether that theology is right or wrong, but saying something is fulfilled or finished doesn’t actually by itself say that there’s not going to be anything else added when Christ fulfills scripture. That doesn’t mean that there are going to be no more scriptures and as we’re going to see that’s a very relevant example because the same language is going to be used for Christ’s fulfillment of scripture. In fact, on the cross when Jesus says it is finished, he’s talking about scripture, but that’s not what many evangelicals will tell you. They’ll tell you it is finished is this common expression that you find in a bunch of places, but allegedly particularly in one,
CLIP:
However, it was most commonly used in Greek business in association with the repayment of debts when the final balance was paid off, the creditor would write the word tetelestai across the certificate of debt, signifying that it was paid in full. It meant that the obligation was completely satisfied and the debtor was free.
Joe:
As you can imagine, people like to draw profound theological meanings from this. Look, we don’t have to do anything because Christ pays our debt in full, and that’s what toal us die means when he says it is finished. The problem is this is just literally not true, including all of the alleged claims about ancient documents that had esti written on debts that were owed, and then this was a way of saying that it was filled out. This is a 19th century error that we’ve known was false for more than 90 years. In fact, if you don’t have to take my word for it as a Catholic Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology, Dr. Gary Manning, who I believe is the head of the MDiv program there, but I may be mistaken about that. In any case, he’s done work on this exact area and he went to find out if this was true In his words, he says, since I’m writing a commentary on John, thought it’d be worthwhile to look at all the papyri on which this claim was based because this idea, this notion that this was a common thing used for the repayment of debt is coming from receipts, particularly 40 tariff import export receipts found in Egypt.
And what he finds is that none of them actually say Al isai. Instead they just say, Al, it’s an abbreviation. And the problem with that is that there are at least five different Greek words that begin with Al, and the one that this obviously refers to is not to telli, but instead the term taxed or paid as taxes. Why? Because these are tax documents. When you see tax documents with the beginning of the word for tax in Greek, the obvious word that you’re looking for there is the word for the taxes were paid, not the debt is paid in full. Well, this matters because, well, for one, we’ve known this since at least 1934, and the publishers of the papyri realized that they had misunderstood this as being short for to tellis die. And the official papyri databases now recognize the correct translation as the payment of taxes.
But more importantly, this means that in John 19, when Jesus cries out to tell us die, he’s not saying I’ve paid your taxes, nor is he saying, I paid your debt of sin because that’s not the way the term was used. And all of the papyri that allegedly support that don’t because they were looking at the wrong word, it was a shortened abbreviation and they guessed the wrong abbreviation. And it’s now very clear to anyone involved that on a tax document that the word is about taxes. It’s really tempting to view it as to telles die, but just doesn’t make sense in context. But fine, that just shows that those 40 documents, that wasn’t the case. But Dr. Manning then decided to look around to find any other place because you have actual documents where debts are paid off and not one of them muses to tell or to telles I to describe paid in full.
It just is literally not used in any ancient document, any of the ancient Greek sources, any of the ancient Greek papyri, any ancient Greek inscriptions to use this thing that it allegedly frequently most commonly met. It just literally did not mean that. And then he points out that contextually John 19, there’s a much more obvious explanation that what does Jesus mean by esti? Well look at the Greek of John 19. Jesus says, well, excuse me, John says that Jesus knowing that all was now finished again, ESI is used right there. So here’s an important bit. John 19 verse 28 uses to tell us die. And then verse 30 uses to tell us die and evangelicals take his meaning in verse 30 without acknowledging the meaning in verse 28, because in verse 28, what’s being fulfilled is not a dead of sin. What’s being fulfilled is the scripture that scripture is now being fulfilled. And then in case we missed that in case we had any ambiguity, John says, after having said all was now fulfilled, he then says to fulfill the scripture and uses a variant.
And so it’s very clear from John 20 19 28 to 30 what it is that’s being fulfilled here. Scripture is being fulfilled here. Now, how is scripture being fulfilled by Jesus saying, I thirst. Why does John say that? He says this to fulfill the scripture. I mean, surely Jesus was thirsty before this. Now there’s a whole sacrificial dimension and I really was tempted to explore that, but I didn’t both, number one for reasons of time and number two, because Scott Hahn has already done a better job of that in what’s called the fourth cup. So if you find his talk or I believe he has a book by that same title, it explains that in the liturgical context of the Passover, there were four cups. If you read the liturgy of the last supper in the New Testament, there’s only three. And so Christ bringing this ritual act to completion, bringing this liturgical action of the Passover to its fulfillment says, I thirst.
Obviously he’d been thirsting before that. So the thirst of Christ is to fulfill the scripture and it is the culmination of these things you have to understand to tell die in light of that. And so unfortunately, evangelicals aren’t reading John 19 verse 30 in the context of John 19 verse 28, they’re reading it in light of alleged papyri that turned out not to say what they thought they did. That’s bad biblical exegesis. So the idea that Christ says it is finished, so therefore the entire work of our redemption is finished or the entire work of justification is finished, that’s bad exegesis. What’s more St. Paul explicitly says Christ rose again for our justification. So that read of scripture is actually contradicted by the New Testament. No. If you understand what’s happening sacrificially, this is by all means a once for all portion of the sacrifice.
This is not the complete sacrifice that Jesus offers us. This is part of it and we’ll get into that. But going back to Dr. Manning, he says, this view that Jesus was proclaiming the fulfillment of scripture molest the view taken by everybody from Saint Leo, the great to Martin Luther. Jesus’s work is completed and scripture is fulfilled. Then he says the interpretation, oh, excuse me, paid in full. While an attractive and harmless suggestion, I’m not sure it is harmless, but he says, while it’s an attractive and harmless suggestive is based on a misreading of the evidence, doesn’t fit the context well and was never suggested before the 20th century. So there’s this very brief window in time in the early 20th century where scholars think they found these papyri that say to telli, and this becomes a popular kind of legend among Protestant pastors and it gets spread from pulpit to pulpit.
And so even those scholars actually pretty quickly correct that error. It lives on as kind of popular lore. So the peoples claiming this rarely, if ever bother even trying to point to papyri. They just tell you, oh yeah, they’re out there somewhere. If you look at them, you’ll find out they don’t actually say that. So okay, the paid in full meaning of it is finished. It’s clearly bad. I mean it’s just bad acts of Jesus. It may or may not be bad theology. We’ll get into that, but that still is going to leave these other questions. Why isn’t the cross a killing of Christ as some have erroneously claimed Catholics believe? And how do we make sense of the cross in the sense that Jesus’ death is once for all and yet Catholics claim to still be participating in it in some fascinating way. There’s a few things we’ve got to sort out here.
We’re going to look at the parts of a Jewish sacrifice. Then we’re going to look at a few particular Jewish sacrifices. First of all, the Passover because this is the number one motif through which the New Testament authors tell us to make sense of Christ’s death. Second, we’ll look at Yom Kippur, and then third, we’re going to look at this underappreciated part of Hebrews nine that talks about the creation of a covenant. So with that, let’s start with the parts of a Jewish sacrifice. As I said, a lot of us today when we hear the term sacrifice, just imagine that means ritual killing, but there’s more to it. So the mere fact that let’s say you’re a farmer and you kill a goat, you’re a goat farmer for purposes of our analogy, is that automatically a sacrifice? It’s not. There are a bunch of different sacrifices in the Old Testament, but broadly speaking, we can talk about a few different sort of steps or stages in a sacrificial action.
And significantly, these are not going to be four separate sacrifices. These are going to be four parts of one sacrifice. Now, I’m going to use the peace offering because I think you’re going to see this more clearly with that. Different sacrifices are going to vary somewhat, but this is just to give you the basic skeleton of what we mean biblically when we’re talking about sacrifice. So in Leviticus chapter three, it says, if a man’s offering is a sacrifice of peace offering, if he offers an animal from the herd, male or female, he shall offer it without blemish before the Lord. Okay, so there’s actually going to be step one there. You dedicate this animal before it’s even dead, you say, this is the one I’m going to be offering, that you don’t just wait till an animal’s dead and be like, oh yeah, the one that just got hit by a truck, that’s the one you get.
God doesn’t work like that. You have to give it to God first before it’s even killed. Then you lay your hand up on the head of the offering and you kill it at the door of the tent of meeting. And then Aaron sons the priest then throw the blood against the altar around it. So you have then the ritual killing and then the application of the blood. So we now have three steps, but that’s not actually it. In Leviticus seven, we’ve discovered that the flesh of the sacrifice of the peace offering shall be eaten on the day of his offering. Now, this is particularly the peace offerings for thanksgiving. Now remember the word Eucharist comes from the word for thanksgiving. So this gives us maybe a helpful way of understanding the eucharistic sacrifice as we’re going to get into that. But the peace offerings for Thanksgiving, you had to eat them on the day they were offered.
You couldn’t leave any of it until morning. In fact, it says if any of the flesh to the sacrifice of his peace offering is eaten on the third day, he who offers it shall not be accepted. Neither shall it be credited to him. It shall be an abomination, and he who eats of it shall bear his iniquity. So notice the eating wasn’t just a thing you did after the sacrifice. The eating was a necessary step for the sacrifice to be accepted. That’s going to be obviously pretty important because you’ll notice that means there’s at least four distinct stages to the sacrifice. You have the offering or someone’s called the consecration of the animal. You then have the ritual killing of the animal. You then have the application or the presentation of the blood of the animal that’s going to look different in different sacrifices. As we’re going to see with the Passover, the presentation of blood isn’t going to be around the altar, it’s going to be in the doorposts, and then you have the eating of the animal.
Those four stages aren’t four different sacrifices. Those are four parts of one sacrifice. And if you want to understand Jesus’s sacrifice, you need to break out of the idea. The sacrifice is just the death and be looking for where does Christ offer himself? Where does Christ lay down his life to die? Where is Christ’s blood applied and presented? That’s going to be actually two places, one on earth and one in heaven. And then where do we eat the flesh of Christ? Once you understand sacrifice having those dimensions, the Eucharist fits in perfectly and what’s more, you see the connection between the last Supper and good Friday. Here’s the thing, it’s not just that Evangelical Protestants broadly can’t understand how the Catholic sacrifice of the mass fits in with Good Friday. It’s that they can’t understand how holy Thursday is related to Good Friday. And so they think of Good Friday as a standalone sacrifice with just the killing, but there’s no offertory aspect.
That’s not even a sacrifice. The mere fact somebody or something dies doesn’t automatically make it a sacrificial death. There has to be a laying down of the life of the animal or in the case of Christ, his laying down of his own life, and where do we see him do that as we’re going to see at the last Supper. So with that, let’s turn from peace offerings and look particularly at the Passover sacrifice and why the Passover sacrifice, as I already alluded to this, is if you want to understand the sacrifice of Christ from start to finish throughout the New Testament, you are pointed towards the Passover. For instance, John the Baptist in John one says, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That is a Passover reference. Likewise, at the last Supper, right before it, I should say, Jesus says, my time is at hand.
I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples. That’s what he tells the disciples to go and tell the owner of the upper room. So he’s presenting the last Supper as his Passover, and that’s going to be very important when we realize what’s strange about the Passover of Christ. So let’s get into the way the Passover sacrifice looked very similar to the stages that I described, but this is actually a clearer in certain ways because there’s two separate days involved. First you have the 14th day of the month of Nassan. This is not like Nissan like the car. This is the Jewish month. This isn’t like a Honda Toyotathon, anything like that. So in Exus 12 it says in verse six that your lamb shall be without blemish a male, a year old. You shall take it from the sheep or from the goats, and you shall keep it until the 14th day of the month when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs in the evening.
Now, significantly has happened actually before sundown because sundown marks a new day on the Jewish calendar. Then they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the Lyle of the houses in which they eat them. So you’ll notice there’s a couple things you’re doing on the 14th of the month. You are having the ritual killing and the application of the blood of the lamb by smearing the blood on the doorposts. So you have chosen a spotless lamb, you’ve then killed that lamb. You’ve then had the, well, the previous has killed the lamb, and then you’ve had the blood smeared on the doorpost. That’s all on the 14th day, the month, what happens on the 15th day of the month. The next verse tells us they shall eat the flesh that night, roast it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.
They shall eat it. Now again, this is a new day on the calendar on a Jewish calendar. It’s kind of a weird place to start your day, but that’s where it is. And so Leviticus 23 says very specifically that the 15th day of the month is the feast of unleavened bread to the Lord. And this is beginning actually of a seven day long festival. Now, over time, the Passover sacrifice on the 14th day and the eating of the Passover meal, the first day of unleavened bread, the language is kind of blended because these are two aspects of the same sacrifice. These aren’t two separate sacrifices, even though they’re happening on two different calendar days, this is one in the same sacrifice. You kill the lamb and then to finish the sacrifice, you eat the lamb. In fact, if you read the Jewish encyclopedia on Passover sacrifice, it says the Pascal sacrifice belonged to the shela meme.
I think it’s actually wrong about that. It’s similar to the shela meme sacrifices. It’s not particularly important, but it puts it in the category of Shela meme. But in any case, it says, thus forming one of the sacrifices in which the meal is a principle part and indicates the community between God and man. So literally, I was talking to Steve Christie, who’s like a big James White devotee, and he said, oh, the meal wasn’t a sacrifice. I was like, no, no, it clearly was eating the Passover lamb was the chief part of the Passover sacrifice. The Jewish encyclopedia has read about this. Modern Protestants are wrong about that. Now, I think in fairness, most modern Protestants maybe wouldn’t go that far to literally deny the Passover meal was a sacrifice. But if your understanding of sacrifice is just killing, then yeah, it doesn’t make sense why the Passover meal would be a sacrifice.
And yet, if you read Jewish sources, you’ll find that not only was this part of the sacrifice, this was the main part of the sacrifice because this was what established community or communion between God and man. Now, once you understand the Old Testament saying that, then suddenly you can hopefully see how the last supper is so critical to Christianity, how this communion is established in eating the flesh of the sacrificial offering. That’s what we believe is happening at communion at every mass throughout the world. And significantly, this is part of the sacrifice. Now, think about it this way, on the 15th day of the month, if you gathered around with your family and you ate the Passover sacrifice, are you re killing the lamb? No. But are you participating in the Passover sacrifice? You are because look, remember originally it was every head of household like the dad would kill the lamb, but pretty soon this becomes the responsibility of the Jewish priests.
And so then the question becomes, well, how does my family participated in the sacrifice? If I’m living in the Old Testament, how does my family participate in the sacrifice? Well, for one, it’s my lamb that the priest is killing, but I’m not doing the actual killing. So if the sacrifice is just a killing, I’m not part of it. But two, and this is more important, the eating of the lamb because you didn’t actually have to have it be your own lamb. If you couldn’t afford a lamb, you could share with another family. And so it’s not necessary for you to even own the lamb, but it is necessary for you to eat the lamb. And the Jewish encyclopedia points this out that you had to eat upon pain of excommunication, but in order to eat, you had to be ritually clean. You had to be circumcised.
Does his prefigure the Eucharist? You bet it does. In one Corinthians 11, St. Paul talks about how you can’t receive the Eucharist, and yet it is still very clear from texts like John six that we must eat the flesh. I mean, we’re told that that if we don’t eat the flesh, we don’t have life within us. This idea that upon pain of excommunication, upon pain of the sacrifice being accepted, we have to participate is not just a deeply Christian idea. It is even before that a deeply Jewish idea. Now significantly, scripture itself speaks of both stages of this, the killing of the lamb and the eating of the lamb as one sacrifice. So for instance, you see in Deuteronomy 16, the reference both to the killing and the eating of the Passover sacrifice. Well, likewise in Exodus 12, you’re told, and when your children say to you as you’re eating, what do you mean by this service?
You shall say, it is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, right? When you are gathered around the table and you are eating the Passover, you announce that you’re participating in the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover that is about as clear as it could be, but just in case Exodus 34 also tells us that neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the Passover be left until morning. So in the Old Testament context, the Passover liturgy includes the killing of the lamb and the eating of the lamb. Now, it also includes the smearing of the blood. We’ve already talked about that. So what is this going to prefigure? Well, the killing of the lamb, how does that prefigure Christ is Lamb of God? That’s a no-brainer, right? Preparation day, the 14th day of the month, John makes this very clear that good Friday is preparation day.
He calls Good Friday preparation of the Passover. Now, he might mean that literally, or he might mean that just that this is the fulfillment. This is Christ’s preparation day. Well, likewise, what is the fulfillment of the first day of unleavened bread, the eating of the Passover meal? Well, mark 14 describes the last supper as the first day of unleavened bread. And then he says, when they sacrifice the Passover lamb, that’s actually pretty significant, right? Because eating the lamb, and he’s still talking about this in the context of a sacrificial offering. And then in Luke 22, as I said before, Jesus says, I’ve earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you. So here’s where we get something really significant. Remember, the thing you had to do in the Passover upon pain of excommunication was eat the lamb. And yet when you read Matthew, mark, Luke, and John’s account of the Last Supper, not one of them ever mentions them eating lamb.
That is a shocking omission unless they’re eating the flesh of Christ, the lamb of God. So where do we see the fulfillment of the killing of the passive lamb? Good Friday. Where do we see the fulfillment of the eating of the Passover lamb? Holy Thursday, it’s right there, but not just holy Thursday, also every mass after that. Now, I’d heard this claim for a long time that I wasn’t sure if it was true, so I’d hesitated making it until I actually found it in Jewish sources. And it’s this claim that when you ate the Passover, it wasn’t just a recollection of a past event that somehow the Jewish understanding is that the Passover became present, that there was a present, a presence, excuse me, of this past event, and this becomes really important because at Jesus’s Passover at the Last Supper, he says, this is my body which is given for you.
And then he says, do this in remembrance of me, and from the word anamnesis is the word used for remembrance there. Now, many Protestants hear this and they, oh, okay, I know what a remembrance is, just like recalling a past event that isn’t made present. That’s not a good understanding. In the Jewish context, for one anamnesis has a particularly sacrificial kind of overtone to it. The only other time we see anamnesis described, or excuse me, the word anamnesis used in the New Testament when it’s not talking about the Eucharist, he’s talking about the sacrificial sin offerings that would bring an anamnesis, a remembrance of sin that wasn’t just like, oh yeah, I did that. No, the sin is being made present in some way in the offering for the sin. There’s a much deeper theology that we kind of unpack there. But the point there is anamnesis doesn’t just mean like, oh yeah, I remember I went to school with that guy.
It’s not like that. And you might say, well, how do we know that? Well, we know that partly from scripture itself, particularly in the context of the Passover, because again, when you’re having the Passover meal, you shall tell your son on that day. It is because what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt, that’s right there. Exodus 13 verse eight. Now notice that you don’t say this is what happened for my forefathers. You a Jew in any century were to say, this is what had happened to you. You were to claim that the Passover applied to you personally. That’s not just some weird quirk in the language of Exodus 13, the rabbis seized upon this and they commented, you find this in the Talmud, in each and every generation, a person must view himself as though he personally left Egypt. And then it quotes Exodus 13.
In every generation, each person must say this, which the Lord did for me and not this which the Lord did for my forefathers. So understand that the Jewish understanding of Passover involved the Passover somehow mystically being made present every time it was celebrated in every generation. It was as if it was fresh and new. You were participating in the one Passover. You weren’t re Passover, you were participating in the once for all Passover from Egypt in every generation. This is a really important framework to make sense of how it is at every mass. We can say we are participating in this once for all first century event. You just have to understand it biblically in a way that many people have lost sight of because we don’t read the New Testament with an eye towards the Old Testament. So that’s the Passover, and obviously there’s much more that could be said, but I want to make sure I talk about a few other sacrificial dimensions, so to speak.
The second one is the sacrifice of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and this one is important because this is when we’re looking at the ones for all language in Hebrews. Part of what’s going on here is that Hebrews is comparing and contrasting Christ’s sacrifice with the Yom Kippur sacrifices. So by way of background, Leviticus 16 describes what’s going to happen on the day of atonement. Aaron shall present the bowls a sin offering for himself and shall make atonement for himself and for his house, and shall kill the bowl as a sin offering for himself. Okay? So step one, the priest had to offer a sin offering for himself because he is a sinner. Then a few verses later, there’s actually a whole purification ritual. I’m skipping that as we’re going to see it doesn’t apply with Christ’s sacrifice because he’s not a sinner. Verse 15, then he shall kill the God to the sin offering, which is for the people.
So that’s step two, the ritual killing of the goat. And then step three, he’s going to bring its blood within the veil of the temple or within the veil of the tabernacle, excuse me, and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bowl sprinkling in upon the mercy seat and before the mercy seat. Thus, he shall make atonement of the holy place. So there’s a ritual purification in some way even of the temple itself, and this is because of the transgressions, the people of Israel. And so there’s this whole, right? So there’s three steps. You got the sin offering for the priest, you’ve got the sin offering for the people, and then you have the offertory aspect that you’re bringing the blood into the holy place. Or if you want to describe it, you can describe it as the application of the blood.
I used that kind of language earlier because just as you were to smear the blood on the doorpost and other sacrifices, you pour the blood around the altar. Here you’re bringing the blood into the holy place. Now, how does this relate to the sacrifice of Christ? In Hebrews seven, we’re told that Jesus has no need like the high priest to offer sacrifice for his own sins, right? And obviously, so that dimension step one of the three steps Jesus doesn’t have to do because he’s sinless. But then when you go to Hebrews nine, it talks specifically about the am Kippur sacrifice. It talks about how within the temple there were two sets. There was the tabernacle or tent, the outer one, which there was the lamp stand and the table and the bread of the presence. It’s called the holy place, and that’s very eucharistic sounding.
I’m just going to throw that out there without really delving into it. But if you don’t get the context between the bread of the presence and Christ being made present, I think you’re missing something. But then the second temple, excuse the second curtain within the temple, the second tabernacle goes into the holy of Holies. And so the priest having made the preparations, normally we would only go into the outer tent once a year. Only the high priest would go in and he wouldn’t go in without first offering blood for himself as well as for the heirs of the people. Now, in contrast, Hebrews nine says, when Christ appears, he enters once for all into the holy place, not taking the blood of goats and calves, but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. Now, people will often point to Hebrews nine as if this is contradicting the mass and they’ll say, aha, this happened on Good Friday, but in fact, what’s being described here isn’t what happened on Good Friday.
That is not when Christ entered into the holy place. How do we know? Because Hebrews nine goes on to say what’s meant by Christ entering the holy place. Jumped on to verse 24, for Christ has entered not into his sanctuary, made with hands a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. So this is important. I debated James White on this and he tried to point to Hebrews nine. He saying, look, Christ, once for all offering happened on Good Friday, and I pointed out no very, the operatory aspect of the sacrifice happens when Christ goes into heaven itself, which doesn’t happen on Good Friday. It happens 42 days later when Jesus ascends into heaven. Now that’s going to be really important in understanding what’s happening because we’ll get into it. I’m going to continue reading from Hebrews nine though, nor was it to offer himself repeatedly as the high priest enters the holy place yearly with blood, not his own for then he would’ve had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world.
But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. So you have the killing first for the priest himself for his sin offering. There’s no need for that obviously, because Jesus is without sin. Then you have killing the sin offering for the people. Jesus fulfills that once for all on good for Friday, but then you have the offertory dimension, the bringing the blood into the holy place. This is also once for all, but it’s not on Good Friday. So anyone who tells you the once for all sacrifice is done on Good Friday doesn’t understand what Hebrews nine is saying and doesn’t understand the way a sacrifice works. Now you might say, hold on, where do we see anything about eating the flesh or anything that sounds eucharistic in this? And I’ll tell you it’s because we were looking at the beginning and the end of Hebrews nine and jumping right over the middle where there’s this really important passage where the author of Hebrews explains that when he talks about the blood of the covenant, he’s going to bring in a separate sacrificial dimension.
In this case the covenant creation which has some sacrificial offerings and explaining that step that we might miss if we are just thinking about Yom Kippur. So he says it like this. He says, even this is verse 18. Even the first covenant was not ratified without blood. Okay, so notice that means the old covenant and the new covenant are ratified with blood. It’s going to be very important to say even the first one. That also means the second one for when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people he took the blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet wool and hiss and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people saying, this is the blood of the covenant which God commanded you. Now if you’re a Christian, you hear those words, what does that remind you of?
Well, I hope it reminds you of Jesus’s words at the Last Supper and it’s hard to miss that dimension. We’re going to get into that, but the more direct reference here, when he talks about when Moses is creating the first covenant or God is creating the first covenant with Moses, this is in Exodus 24, and in Exodus 24, Moses sprinkles blood on the altar. He actually sprinkles the people with blood, which is pretty gross, but that’s part of what happens. They say, all the Lord has spoken, we will do and we’ll be obedient. And then Moses says, behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these, that’s Exodus 24 verse eight, but then read the next two verses. Then Moses and Aaron and Naab and Ahu, the sons of Aaron and the other priests and seven of the elders of Israel went up and they saw the God of Israel and there was under his feet as it were, a pavement of sapphire stone like the very heaven for clearland, for clearness, and he did not lay his hand on the chief man of the people of Israel.
They beheld God and ate and drink. So you have, this is the blood of the covenant and then the beholding of God and then eating and drinking in divine presence. Now, maybe you are missing how incredibly eucharistic that is in terms of what it’s prefiguring, but in case you are, it would actually turn your attention to a fantastic 2009 article by Brent Petri called Jesus the Messianic Banquet and the Kingdom of God. Commenting on this passage, he says, it’s hard to overestimate the significance of this biblical background for understanding Jesus’s words of the last Supper regarding the relationship between his banquet and the kingdom of God. It strongly suggests that for Jesus as for Exodus, although the sacrificial liturgy begins on earth, it climaxes with a heavenly banquet after going up the mountain, Moses and the alters enter into God’s own transcendent realm where they not only see the pavement of sapphire in the heavenly court, they also behold God and eat and drink.
Unless we start by assuming that Jesus is wrenching the expression from Exodus entirely out of context, then we have to conclude that he is deliberately drawing a parallel between the sacrificial liturgy of Moses and the elders of Israel and his own actions at the Last Supper. In other words, when Jesus says, this is the blood of my covenant, he expects Jewish readers and listeners like say the apostles to have in mind, oh yeah, that’s how the first covenant was created with Moses, and then what happened? They beheld God, inate and drank. Does that happen at the Last Supper? It does. Petri continues in the liturgy of Sinai, although the blood of the covenant was certainly poured out on the earth as well as on the altar and on the people, the covenant banquet was consummated in heaven where they beheld God and ate and drank.
So there’s a very strong connection that Hebrews nine is making between Exodus and the last Supper. That only makes sense if this is really the blood of Christ and if they’re actually beholding God and eating and drinking in the Eucharistic liturgy. I want to build upon what brat Petri is saying by turning to the work of Daniel Eleazar, a Jewish political scientist who did a multi-volume work on covenant and volume one was all about covenant and polity and biblical Israel. He then turns to other forms of covenant. Those don’t concern us, but his work on what covenant meant to the Israelites is very important in helping us understand both the old covenant but also the new covenant. And Azar realizes this in a way, many Christians actually don’t. And so Azar says, sealing a covenant involves some ritual act in the Bible. Sacrifice is the common ritual, but they’re also were the common meal and oath.
Thus Moses, Aaron, Aaron Sons and the 70 elders of Israel representing the entire people shared a common meal upon completion of the Sinai Covenant. So notice his point is that it’s not just that they form the covenant and then they happen to have a meal, that the meal is an integral part of the formation of the covenant. You need the actual blood. This is the blood of the covenant and you need the ritual meal. Does this prefigure the Eucharist? Of course it does. Azar continues other forms of sealing. A covenant involve drinking together, gift giving, exchange of name, sacrifices, kissing, and handshaking. Indeed, so much so that one way to forbid establishing a covenant relationship was to forbid eating together. The idea of the common meal becomes an important ritual in both Judaism and Christianity with the latter Christianity emphasizing the taking of food as the means of organically linking with the savior.
In other words, Azar understood something many evangelicals don’t. Eating the Eucharist has to be understood as a covenantal act. This is how you form a covenant in the Jewish context. You have the presentation of the blood and then you have the eating, the behold God, you eat and drink. That’s not just like a cool effect from this unrelated thing that happened before it. This is all part of one ritual action. Let’s turn back directly to the text of Exus 24, and I want you to consider this in Exus 24 verse eight. Moses says, behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words, the two questions that I asked James White in the debate, and then I would ask anyone watching this. Now number one, does Moses actually have blood or is it just a symbol? Well, he actually has blood.
Two is Moses actually establishing the covenant? White corrected me and said, God is establishing it fine, but a covenant is actually being established with these words. Contrast that with Jesus’s words at the last supper when he says drink of it, all of you for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for for the forgiveness of sins. Is that the blood of Christ? Well, as Catholics we would say yes, Protestants, at least Evangelicals would say no, it’s just a symbol. So it’s actually worse. Moses had real blood. He was actually doing something in formation of a covenant. You can’t form a covenant with Kool-Aid, with grape juice, with unconsecrated wine. So Moses is actually involved in the formation of a covenant when he says, this is the blood, Jesus when he says, this is my blood of the covenant allegedly is not involved in the formation of a covenant because he doesn’t have real blood.
That strikes me as glaringly bad to Jesus because what does that mean? That means what Moses was doing was superior to what Jesus is doing because Moses is actually involved in covenant formation and then they behold God and eaten drink. In the evangelical version, Jesus is just like, this is a symbol of my blood, and so it’s just wine or even grape juice worse, and then they don’t behold God an eat and drink. They remember God who’s not present there in that way, that is a downgrade and a pretty obvious downgrade. Now, that doesn’t work in light of Hebrews, Hebrews 10 goes on to say that the law is but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities. And that’s critical because the point that the author of Hebrews is making throughout Hebrews nine and then into Hebrews 10 is all of that stuff Moses was doing and all the stuff with Yom Kippur, all of that stuff is prefiguring new and better stuff that Jesus is doing.
And yet in the evangelical read of the Last Supper, it’s the other way around. Moses is doing something cooler than what Jesus is doing. Moses is doing something better. Moses’ words actually create covenant Jesus’ words. That is a red flag that something is grossly wrong in the evangelical understanding of the passage, and the only way around it is to say just as Moses actually had blood when he said that this was the blood of the covenant, Jesus, when he says it’s his blood of the covenant also actually has blood, and just as Moses and his followers eat and drink in divine presence, so in the Eucharist, we’re not just eating and drinking in divine presence. That was just a foreshadowing. We’re now eating and drinking God himself. The only way to go beyond eating and drinking in the presence of God is for your meal to be the direct communion with God.
You get rid of any mediator like a sacrificial offering because Christ himself is a sacrificial offering that you’re consuming. So if you understand Hebrews nine, then I think all of this makes sense. Now. Also, if you understand this middle part of Hebrews nine, then hopefully you can understand why all of this makes sense of Christ both presenting the blood in heaven and us continuing to have this heavenly meal even on earth. You understand the way Yam Kippur prefigures Jesus’s death and his ascension into heaven in light of the way Hebrews nine talks about Exodus prefiguring the last supper as well. If you separate the two, I think you’re not going to understand when Hebrews nine is saying, okay, so let’s wrap this up. Say, how does Christ fulfill the sacrificial system of the Old Testament? Now, I’m speaking very broadly here, right, but broadly we can talk about four steps, the offering or the consecration of the animal.
This is Prefiguring. When Christ says, this is my body, this is my blood. He gives himself, he lays down his life there at the last Supper, and this is repeated. He gives a do this instruction. That’s not once for all. He says, do this in remembrance of me, an anamnesis of me. Then step two is the ritual killing. That’s good Friday, that’s once for all. That’s an un. Then you have the application or the presentation of the blood that’s smearing the blood on the posts of the cross. This is also the presentation of the blood in heaven. There is a sense in which that’s fulfilled on ascension Thursday, particularly going into the holy place, Allah, yam Kippur, and that is also once for all, we point to the blood again, right? There’s a sense of application of the blood here on Earth, but certainly the heavenly application of the blood is done once for all when Christ enters into the holy place as Hebrews says.
But then the last step is the eating. We eat the flesh, we drink the blood. That happens on holy Thursday as well, and at every mass subsequent again with the do this kind of language. Now, I want to just wrap this up by tying in a couple other broad points about sacrifice. We see from the Old Testament that point to this, and one of those is the connection between the table of the Lord, which is clearly present at the last Supper and the altar of the Lord. Because for many modern Protestants, the table of the Lord just means like a kitchen table or a dinner table. We’re just gathering around and commemorating, but in fact, the table of the Lord is an altar. How do we know that? Well, one of the places we know that is Malachi chapter one, read verse six to seven, God is rebuking, the unholy priest of Israel says, you say, how have we despised thy name?
And he answers by offering polluted food upon my altar, and you say, how have we polluted it by thinking that the Lord’s table may be despised. Notice he uses the phrase, my altar and the Lord’s table interchangeably. The Lord’s table is an altar That becomes very irrelevant when we read about the table of the Lord in regards to the Eucharist in one Corinthians, remember that pastor at the beginning of the episode who is lamenting that at the heart of the church in a Catholic church, you’re not going to find a pulpit where somebody is preaching to you. You’re going to find the altar, the table of the Lord. That’s biblical. When Christ says, if you’ve got a problem with your brother, go and resolve it with your brother before you bring your gifts to the altar. He’s presupposing that in Christian worship. The center of that worship is an altar that doesn’t stop just because somebody wants to preach instead of focus on the table of the Lord.
One Corinthians 10, St. Paul’s talking about the Eucharist, and he puts it in Passover terms. The couple of blessing is the third of the four cups in the Passover liturgy. He says, the cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ. Okay, so he’s taking for granted. He’s asking this rhetorically that when we receive our Passover, we receiving the cup of blessing, and this is in some way a participation in the blood of Christ. Not really the recollection, but a participation in the blood of Christ. Now, how could that be? That’s the question you should be asking. He’s then going to give you a second rhetorical question. The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Okay, how could that be? Then he’s going to say a third provocative thing because there is, it actually says one loaf arton in Greek because there is one loaf we who many are one body for we all partake of the one loaf.
Now, I’ve seen Protestants point to this and say, aha, Paul must not think that this actually becomes the body and blood of Christ. He calls it the one bread. This is a very bad objection because he can’t literally mean that there’s one loaf of bread all of the Christians on earth are sharing. You can’t even imagine that all the Christians in Corinth are sharing the same loaf of bread with one another and St. Paul who’s not there in Corinth, clearly the one loaf as when Christ describes one loaf being on the boat, the one bread, the one loaf is Jesus Christ. So taking that to mean, oh, it must literally be a loaf of bread is a very bad misreading. So you’ve got three things he’s laying out here. Number one, when we drink from the Shalls, we’re participating in the blood of Christ. When we eat of the Eucharistic bread or the loaf or the host, whatever you want to say, we’re participating in the body of Christ.
And third, in some way, because we’re doing that, because we’re partaking, we are becoming the body of Christ, we are becoming united with Christ such that we’re not united just with Christ ahead, we’re also united one with another as the body of Christ. He’s going to expound on that theology more a couple of chapters later in one Corinthians 12, but I’m going to focus more on the first two of those three questions. The third one I think will become clear in answering the first two. He’s going to explain how this can be, and the first way he’s going to look is well look at the practice of Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar. What’s he mean? It’s what we’ve been talking about for the last better part of an hour that when you sacrifice, that is not how you become united with the sacrifice, just what the killing.
You then have to eat the sacrifice to become a partner in the altar. Somebody else might be at the altar doing the actual killing. You become a partner by eating. Let’s say you are a kid in the household. You’re not the primary breadwinner. You didn’t buy the lamb, you didn’t raise the lamb, you didn’t slaughter the lamb. How are you covered by the sacrifice of the lamb? Well, by eating the lamb. That’s how, and that’s St. Paul’s point that if you understand that, then you understand how it is. The Eucharist makes us partners in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross because we’re eating the flesh of Christ. But notice that analogy only makes sense if the Eucharist is a sacrifice like the Jewish sacrifices of all, because they’re not just remembering the Passover isn’t just a recollection of the Lamb got killed yesterday. No, they’re actually participating in the sacrifice of the lamb by eating it.
If that wasn’t provocative enough, he’s then going to contrast it with the practice of pagans as they do the same thing in sacrifices to demons. That what they sacrifice, they offered to demons and not to God. And so they become partners by making idolatry, sacrifices, and then critically eating those sacrifices. And Paul’s point, he says, is, I do not want you to be partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. What’s the table of demons? Well, it’s an altar. What’s the table of the Lord? Also an altar in a Eucharistic context. So in St. Paul’s understanding of Christian worship, the altar is front and center in many modern evangelicals. It’s not. The pulpit is, and I would suggest that is a pretty obvious violation of the biblical pattern of worship, that if you understand Jewish sacrifice and you can hopefully see why today on Holy Thursday, we celebrate that everything prefigured in the old covenant with all the sacrificial worship is being fulfilled now, first at the table of the Lord, the altar, the last supper, and then at the altar of the Lord the cross.
But that the cross and the table are both altars and they have to be understood in relation to one another because one is the alter at which the lamb is to be sacrificed tomorrow, and the other is the alter at which the lamb lays down his life and gives himself to be eaten so that we too can behold God and eat and drink. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you. Have a blessed holy Thursday. Good Friday and pretty soon Easter Sunday.