DeeJay said:
To add to that. I have made the case useing scripture that the Lords Supper/Communion is a continuation of the Passover Feast.
Close, but not quite. The Lord's Supper, in conjunction with the one time Sacrifice of Christ who is the true Paschal Lamb, is the
fulfillment of the Passover feast.
Christ is
the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world (John 1:29) by His death on the Cross, and our eating the bread and drinking the wine is our literal
participation in ("communion of") the Body and Blood of Christ (1 Cor 10:16). (Notice the comparison in 1 Cor 10 of the Lord's Table/Supper not only with the altar/sacrifices with the Jews but also with that of the pagans)
Similarly, Christ, and our participation in Him in the Eucharist, is also the fulfilment of another OT type--manna (the bread from heaven). However, in contrast to eating the manna (in which the eaters thereof still died), those who eat the bread Christ gives will live forever (John 6:50, 54, 58). Christ specifically identifies
this bread with His
flesh (not with his "words", as another poster alleges), declaring that the
bread HE gives
is His flesh which He gives for the "life of the world" (John 6:51)--which He did on the cross--and that His
flesh is
food indeed and His
blood is
drink indeed (John 6:55), and that we must
eat His flesh and
drink His blood to abide in Him and have eternal life (John 6:53, 56). No wonder the early church fathers such as Ignatius (who was martyred at the beginning of the 2nd century) called the Eucharist "the medicine of immortality", because when we partake of the Lord's Supper we partake of Christ
Himself. In fact, the consensus of the early Christians was that Christ's Body and Blood were truly present in the forms of the bread and wine of the Eucharist. The idea that the bread and wine were
merely figures (in the modern sense) or metaphors without any real connection to Christ's Body and Blood is only found very late in church history.
The Passover Feast is clearly a memorial.
The Passover Feast was indeed type and shadow of the reality that was to come--that is, the Sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, and our partaking of His Body and Blood--which He gave for us on the Cross--in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. That the Eucharist is indeed a remembrance of Christ's passion does not mean that is merely a mental recollection of past events, as the word for remembrance ("anamnesis") carries with it the stronger idea of "making present" what is being "remembered". (Even the Jews in celebrating the Passover feast spoke in terms conveying a more present tense, ie "
This night...). Paul clearly states that our partaking of the bread and wine
is our partaking in the Body and Blood of Christ.
The New Testament writers consistently use realistic language when describing the Holy Communion--the bread and wine
are Christ's Body and Blood, He declares; his flesh and blood
are food indeed and drink indeed; and we must eat and drink His flesh and blood if we want His life in us; the bread
is the communion of (participation in) the body of Christ, and the cup
is the communion of (participation in) the blood of Christ. The common rejoinder, of course, is that since Christ calls Himself "the vine" and "the door", and that He is speaking so metaphorically, we can simply dismiss the realistic language ascribed to the Eucharist as likewise being merely metaphorical. However, there are some problems with this, especially when one analyzes the difference between the "vine" and "door" language, and that used of Communion:
(1)Although Jesus says "I am the vine" and "I am the door", he never later points to a literal growing vine or a literal wooden door and says, "See that's Me.". With the Eucharist, Christ who earlier said that, not only was HE the bread of Life, but that (more specifically) His
flesh was food indeed and His
blood is drink indeed (and that we must eat and drink His flesh and blood to have life), later at the Last Supper specifically identifies His body and blood with the bread and the wine which we are to literally eat and drink.
(2)Although Paul specifically identified the bread and wine as
the communion of the Body and Blood of Christ respectively, he never described or alluded to a similar ritual involving affixing oneself to vegetation or walking through a wooden door as somehow a "communion of (participation in)" Christ "the Vine", or Christ "the Door" respectively.
(3)Nowhere in Church history do we see any evidence of early Christians observing any ritual or ordinance involving the physical joining of themselves to literal vines or the physical walking through literal wooden doors, let alone that they interpreted Christ's words in these passages as anything other than metaphor. However, the same cannot be said of Holy Communion as the consensus taught that Christ's Body and Blood were truly present somehow in the literal bread and wine which they physically ate and drank. These early Christians, in other words, could distinguish between the metaphors of "the vine" and "the door" from the realism of the Eucharist.
What would be the purpose of eating God's human flesh? People in the OT were saved without eating God.
Yet the OT priests
ate of the sacrifices of the altar--sacrifices which were types of the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ. Whereas, the OT animal sacrifices could never take away sins (they were only types and shadows of the reality to come), Christ's sacrifice was efficacious for that purpose. At the Last Supper Christ declared the Cup was the NEW Covenant of HIS blood, blood which earlier He had said was "drink indeed" and that we must drink to have life in us. Incidentally, this is why in the OT they were forbidden to drink blood, since the "life is in the blood"--and the only One whose life avails to conquer sin and defeat death is CHRIST. (Also, lest one miss the priestly implications of bread and wine, check out what the priest Melchizedek--another OT type of Christ--brought out in Genesis 14:18)
Hope this helps.
