Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I wanna 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, Ah, it's not really what we believe, you know, 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 gonna 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, in, with, and 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 gonna give you a very short presentation of the Catholic position, and then three common objections that I hear, uh, 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 gonna be very important.

Uh, 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 an, in a bloody manner upon the altar of the cross is contained and offered in an un-bloody manner.

This sacrifice is truly propitiatory, meaning it appeases God.

It- the justice of God is met in some way in the offering of the Eucharist at the mass.

Now, that's gonna be confusing for a lot of reasons.

Number one, this distinction between the bloody and the un-bloody manner is already confusing.

What was 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 un-bloody 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.

Like, I wouldn't describe you as bloody right now unless you've got, like, an open wound I don't know about.

You have blood, but that blood is not being poured out.

So when we talk about the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the cross, as opposed to the un-bloody way in which Christ is presented now, we're saying we're not pouring out his blood again.

We are not re-crucifying Christ.

That's very important, 'cause this is one of the most common ways, uh, 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 gonna be a common thread to how many Evangelicals today misunderstand it.

And, 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 gonna 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 gonna have to this view, that the mass is the representation 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, you know, on, 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 gonna need to do that as Christians.

And so if you don't understand what Hebrews 7 is actually saying, that looks like just a flat-out contradiction.

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, and indeed we're gonna 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?

And I want you to just hold that in mind, because that's going to be a lot of what we're, we're looking at, making sense of what Hebrews is actually talking about.

But I wanna 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, like during their own church services, where it's a bunch of evangelicals gathered together, and instead of, like, presenting anything about J- like, Jesus' death and resurrection, they gossip about Catholicism and give false teachings.

And that's unfortunate, but this is a thing you're gonna 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 wanna 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.

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 re-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-unquote, body of Jesus again.

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 re-kill Christ.

We don't think we're doing Good Friday every day, in terms of, like, sacrificing Christ over and over again in separate sacrificial actions, where we're killing him time and time and time again.

We're not re-crucifying Christ.

And 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 en- have envisioned this idea of ritual killing.

But as we're gonna see, the Biblical meaning of sacrifice involves a lot more than that.

I'm gonna give you plenty of Biblical examples as we go.

But for now, just realize what we have here isn't just a, 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 the 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.

He said, It is finished, and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

The English phrase that's translated it is finished is a single word in the original Greek text, tetelestai.

It means that something has been brought to its final conclusion, fully accomplished, and nothing more needs to be added.

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 gonna be anything else added.

Like, when Christ fulfills scripture, that doesn't mean that there are gonna be no more scriptures.

And, as we're gonna see, that's a very relevant example, because the same language is gonna 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.

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.

As you can imagine, people like to draw profound theological meanings from this.

So, look, we don't have to do anything, because Christ pays our debt in full, and that's what tetelestai 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 tetelestai written on, you know, debts that were owed, and then this was a way of saying that it was filled up.

This is a nineteenth-century error that we've known was false for more than 90 years.

In fact, if you , you don't have to take my word for it as a Catholic.

Biola University's Talbot School of Theology, uh, Dr. Gary Manning, who I believe is the head of the MDiv program there, but I may be mistaken about that.

He, in any case, he's done work on this exact area, and he went to find out if this was true.

He, in his words, he said, Since I'm writing a commentary on John, I thought it'd be worthwhile to look at all the papyri on which this claim was based.

Because this idea, this, this notion that this was a common thing used for, uh, 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 tetelestai.

Instead, they just say total, it's an abbreviation.

And the problem with that is that there are at least five different Greek words that begin with total .

and the one that this obviously refers to is not tetelestai, but instead the term taxed or paid as taxes.

Why?

Because these are tax documents, and so 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 tetelestai, and the official papyri databases now recognize the correct translation as, as the payment of taxes.

But more importantly, this means that in John 19 when Jesus cries out, Tetelestai, He's not saying, I 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.

The- it was, you know, a sh- 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, not a, you know The- it- it's really tempting to view it as tetelestai, but it 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 where you 'Cause you have actual documents where debts are paid off and not one of them uses to tell, or tetelestai, uh, 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 meant.

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 tetelestai?

Well, look at the Greek of John 19.

Jesus says Well, actually John says that Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, again tetelestai is used right there.

So here's an important bit.

John 19:28 uses tetelestai, and then verse 30 uses tetelestai.

And Evangelicals take his meaning in verse 30 without acknowledging the meaning in verse 28, 'cause in verse 28 what's being fulfilled is not a debt of sin.

What's being fulfilled is the scripture.

That scripture is now being fulfilled.

And then in case we miss 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, a variant.

The, uh, tetelestai, or tetelestai.

And, and so it's very clear from John 20- 19:28-30 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 it's 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 aims.

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 a culmination of these things that you- you have to understand tetelestai in light of that.

And so unfortunately, Evangelicals aren't reading John 19:30 in the context of John 19:28.

They're reading it in light of alleged papyri that turn 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, what's more, Saint 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, well, that's the view taken by everybody from Saint Leo the Great to Martin Luther.

Jesus' work is completed and scripture is fulfilled.

Then he says, The interpretation Oh, excuse me.

Uh, '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 suggestion, it's 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've found these papyri that say tetelestai.

And this becomes a popular kind of legend among Protestant pastors, and it gets spread from pulpit to pulpit.

And so even though scholars actually pretty quickly correct that error, it lives on as kind of popular lore.

So the people s- 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 is clearly bad.

I mean, it's just bad exegesis.

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 re-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 still claim to be participating in it in some fascinating way?

There's a few things we've got to sort out here.

We're gonna look at the parts of a Jewish sacrifice, then we're gonna 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, uh, we'll look at Yom Kippur.

And then third, we're gonna look at this underappreciated part of Hebrews 9 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- or stages in a sacrificial action.

And these, significantly, these are not gonna be four separate sacrifices.

These are gonna be four parts of one sacrifice.

Now, I'm gonna use the peace offering because I think you're gonna see this more clearly with that.

Different sacrifices m- are gonna vary somewhat, but this is just to give you the- the basic skeleton of what we mean biblically when we're talking about sacrifice.

So in Leviticus, uh, chapter 3, it says, If a man's offering is a sacrifice, 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 gonna be offering.

That you don't just wait til 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 upon the head of the offering and you kill it at the door of the tent of meeting, and then Aaron's sons, the priests 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 7, 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 this 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 gonna 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 something that'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, and it's gonna look different in different sacrifices, as we're gonna see with the Passover.

The, uh, presentation of blood isn't gonna be around the altar.

It's gonna be on 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' 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?

There's gonna 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, 'cause 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, uh, s- of his own life.

And where do we see him do that?

As we're gonna 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 wanna understand the sacrifice of Christ, from start to finish throughout the New Testament, you're pointed towards the Passover.

For instance, John the Baptist in John 1 says, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

That is a Passover reference, right?

Likewise, at the Last Supper, the- right, right before, I should say, Jesus says, My time is at hand.

I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.

Right?

Like, 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 gonna be very important when we realize what's strange about the Passover of Christ.

So let's get into the w- the way the Passover sacrifice looked.

Very similar to the stages that I described, but this is actually clearer in certain ways, because there's two separate days involved.

First, you have the 14th day of the month of Nisan.

This is not like Nissan like the car.

This is a Jewish month.

This isn't like a Honda Toyotathon, anything like that.So, in Exodus 12, it says in verse 6 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 fourteenth day of the month when the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs in the evening.

Now significantly, this 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 lintel of the houses in which they eat them.

So you'll notice, there's a couple things you're doing on the fourteenth day 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 then had the, well, the priest has killed the lamb, and then you've had the blood smeared on the doorpost.

That's all on the fourteenth day of the month.

What happens on the fifteenth 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 fifteenth day of the month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the Lord, and this is the beginning, actually, of a seven-day-long festival.

Now, over time, the Passover sacrifice on the fourteenth 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.

They, these aren't two separate sacrifices, even though they're happening on two different calendar days.

This is one and 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 Paschal sacrifice belonged to, to the Shelomim.

I think it's actually wrong about that.

It's similar to the Shelomim sacrifices, it's not particularly important, but it, it puts it in the category of Shelomim.

But in any case, it says, thus forming one of the sacrifices in which the meal is the principal part and indicates the community between God and man.

So, literally, I was talking to, uh, Steve Christy, who's like a, a big James White devotee, and he said, Oh, the Passover meal wasn't a sacrifice.

I was like, No, it clearly was.

Eating the Passover lamb was the chief part of the sa- uh, the Passover sacrifice.

The Jewish Encyclopedia is right 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, 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 is how 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 fifteenth 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.

'Cause look, remember, a v- 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, the question becomes, well, how does my family participate in this sacrifice?

If I'm living in the Old Testament, how does my family participate in this 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.

You could ch- 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 this prefigure the Eucharist?

You bet it does.

In First Corinthians 11, St. Paul talks about how you can't receive the Eucharist unworthily, and yet it is still very clear from text like John 6 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, uh, the reference both to the killing and the eating of the Passover sacrifice.

Well, likewise, in Exodus 12, y- you're told and when your children say to you w- as you're eating, What do you mean by this service?

You shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, right?

Like, when you are gathered around the table and you're 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 y- uh, the killing of the lamb and the eating of the lamb.

It also includes the, 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 as 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, like 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 sacrificed the Passover lamb.

That's actually pretty significant, right?

'Cause they're 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 have 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 Passover 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.

And I'd heard this claim for a long time that I wasn't sure if it was true, so I'd hesitated making it till 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' Passover, at the last supper, he s- he says, This is my body which is given for you.

And then he says, Do this in remembrance of me.

And anamnesen, 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, that, the word anamnesis used in the New Testament when it's not talking about the Eucharist, it's talking about the sacrificial, uh, sin offerings that would bring a, 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 much deeper theology that, that we kind of unpack there.

But the point there is anamnesis doesn't just mean like, Oh yeah, I remember, like, 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 in Exodus 13:8.

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 each and 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-Passovering , you were participating in, 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.

Okay, so that's the Passover.

And obviously there's much more that could be said, but I wanna make sure I talk about a few other, uh, sacrificial dimensions, so to speak.

The second one is the sacrifice of Yom Kippurah, the Day of Atonement.

And this one is important because this is, when we're looking at the once-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 Kippurah sacrifices.

So by way of background, Leviticus 16 describes what's gonna happen on the Day of Atonement.

Aaron shall present the bull as a sin offering for himself and shall make atonement for himself and for his house.

He shall kill the bull as a sin offering for himself.

Okay, so step one, the priest had to offer a sin offering for himself because he's a sinner.

Then a few verses later, he shall there's actually a whole, like, purification ritual, I'm skipping that 'cause as we're gonna see, it doesn't apply with Christ's sacrifice 'cause he's not a sinner.

Verse 15, Then he shall kill the goat of the sin offering, which is for the peoples.

That's step two, the ritual killing of the goat.

And then step three, he's gonna bring its blood within the veil of the temple and or within the veil of the, the tabernacle, excuse me.

And do with this blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it 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 of the people of Israel, and so there's this whole rite.

So there's three steps that they Sin offering for the priest, 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 wanna describe it, you can describe it as the application of the blood.

I used that kinda language earlier.

'Cause just as you, you were gonna smear the blood on the doorpost and, 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 7, 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 is sinless.

But then when you go to Hebrews 9, it talks specifically about the Yom Kippur sacrifice and talks about how within the temple, there were two sets.

There was, uh, uh, the tabernacle or tent, the outer one in which there was the lampstand and the table and the bread of the presence.

It's called the holy place and that's very Eucharistic-sounding.

I'm just gonna 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, or excuse me, the second curtain within the temple, the second tabernacle is, goes into the Holy of Holies.

And so the priest, having made the preparations, uh, normally 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 errors of the people.

Now in contrast, Hebrews 9 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 9 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 9 goes on to say what's meant by Christ entering the holy place.

Jump down to verse 24.

For Christ has entered not into a 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.

This, I debated James White on this and he tried to point to Hebrews 9 as saying, Look, Christ's once for all offering happened on Good Friday.

And I pointed out, No, very ******.

The offertory 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 gonna be really important in understanding what's happening because We'll get into it.

I'm gonna continue reading from Hebrews 9 though.

Nor is it to offer himself repeatedly as the high priest enters the high, the holy place yearly with blood not his own, for then he would have 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 or the sin offering.

There's no need for that obviously because Jesus was without sin.

Then you have killing the sin offering for the people.

Jesus cl- fulfills that once for all on Good 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 9 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 9 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 gonna 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're 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 gonna be very important to say even the first one, it 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 hyssop 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 and you hear those words, what does that remind you of?

Well, I hope it reminds you of Jesus' words at the Last Supper.

And it's hard to miss that dimension.

We're gonna get into that.

But the more direct reference here, when he talks about when Moses is creating the first covenant or that 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 will 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 8. But then read the next two verses.

Then Moses and Aaron and the other, uh, Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, the other priests, and 70 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 clearlin- for clearness.

And he did not lay his hand on the chief men of the people of Israel.

They beheld God and ate and drank.

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're missing how incredibly Eucharistic that is in terms of what it's prefiguring.

But in case you are, I would actually turn you to a fan- turn your attention to a fantastic 2009, uh, article by Brant Petrie 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' words at 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 elders 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 m- 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 and ate and drank.

Does that happen at the Last Supper?

It does.

Petrie 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 this very strong connection that Hebrews 9 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 wanna build upon what Brant Petrie is saying by turning to the work of Daniel Elazar, a Jewish political scientist who did a multi-volume work on covenant.

And volume one was all about covenant and polity in biblical Israel.

He then turns to other forms of covenant, m- 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 Elazar realizes this in a way many Christians actually don't.

And so Elazar says, Sealing a covenant involves some ritual act.

In the Bible, sacrifice is the common ritual, but there also were the common meal and oath.

Thus, Moses, Aaron, Aaron's 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 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, the, This is the blood of the covenant, and you need the ritual meal.

Does this prefigure the Eucharist?

Of course it does.

Elazar continues, Other forms of sealing a covenant involve drinking together, gift giving, exchange of names, 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 a means of organically linking with the Savior.

In other words, Elazar 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.

You 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 Exodus 24, and I want you to consider this.

In Exodus 24, verse 8, 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 that 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' 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 many for the forgiveness of sins.

Is that the blood of Christ?

Well, as Catholics we would say yes.

Protestants would, w- 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 the formation of a covenant.

You can't form a covenant with, like, Kool-Aid, with grape juice, with, like, 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 'cause he doesn't have real blood.

That strikes me as glaringly bad seditious 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 eat and 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 and 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 9 and then into Hebrews 10 is all of that stuff Moses was doing, and all the stuff with Yom Kippurah, 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 was doing.

Moses is doing something better.

Moses's words actually create covenant, Jesus's words don't.

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 ate and drank 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 the sacrificial offering that you, that you're consuming.

So, if you understand Hebrews 9, then I think all of this makes sense.

Now also, if you understand this middle part of Hebrews 9, 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.

So, you understand the way Yom Kippurah prefigures Jesus's death and his ascension into heaven in light of the way Hebrews 9 talks about Exodus prefiguring the Last Supper as well.

If you separate the two, I think you're not gonna understand what Hebrews 9 is saying.

Okay, so let's wrap this up and 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, in anamnesis of me.

Then you, step two, it's a ritual killing.

That's Good Friday.

That's once for all.

That's unrepeated.

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 with going into the holy place, à la Yom Kippurah.

And that is also once for all.

We point to the blood again, right?

Like, 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 wanna just wrap this up by, by telling you a couple other broad points about sacrifice we see from the Old Testament that, 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, 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 1. Read verse 6 to 7. God is rebuking the unholy priests of Israel.

He says, How have you despised 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 relevant when we read about the table of the Lord in regards to the Eucharist in First Corinthians.

Remember that pastor at the beginning of the episode who was lamenting that at the heart of the church, in a Catholic church, you're not gonna find a pulpit where somebody is preaching to you.

You're gonna find the altar, the table of the Lord.

That's biblical.

Like 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.

First Corinthians 10.

Saint Paul's talking about the Eucharist, and he puts it in Passover terms.

The cup of blessing is the third of the four cups, uh, 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, right?

That when we receive our Passover, we're receiving the cup of blessing, and this is in some way a participation in the blood of Christ, not merely 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 th- then gonna 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 gonna say a third provocative thing.

Because there is It actually says one loaf, arton in Greek.

Because there is one loaf, we who are 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, 'cause 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 Saint Paul, who's not there in Corinth .

clearly the one loaf, as when Christ describes one loaf being o- on the boat, the one bread, the one loaf is Jesus Christ.

So, taking that to mean like, Oh, it must literally be a loaf of bread, is, is a very bad misreading.

So, you got three things he's laying out here.

Number one, when we drink from the chalice, we're participating in the blood of Christ.

When we eat of the Eucharistic bread or loaf or 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 the head, we're also united one with another as the body of Christ.

He's gonna expound on that theology more a couple chapters later in 1 Corinthians 12.

But I'm gonna 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 gonna explain how this can be, and the first way he's gonna look is, well, look at the practice of Israel.

Are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?

What's he mean there?

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 with 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.

You know, let's say you're 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 'cause 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 old, because they're not just remembering.

Like, 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 offer to demons and not to God.

And so they become partners by making idolatrous 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 you can If you understand Jewish sacrifice, then 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, uh, 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 altar at which the lamb is to be sacrificed tomorrow, and the other is the altar 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 Seamus Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.

Have a blessed Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and pretty soon, Easter Sunday.