Matthew 26:26-28

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.

 When Jesus first proposed this idea of eating his body, it didn’t go over very well.

John 6:56 — He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.

 John 6:60-61 — Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you?

Jesus often used over-the-top hyperbole to teach a lesson and make it memorable. And, boy, what a lesson that would stick in the minds of his disciples.

“Hey, remember the time Jesus told us we had to eat his flesh and drink his blood?”

“Oh yes, yes I do!”

Sometimes we hear what we want to hear and then stop hearing (or listening). As my wife often reminds me, you’re not hard of hearing, you’re hard of listening.

Jesus explains this in the next verse:

John 6:62-63 — What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life. Jesus explains that he isn’t talking about literally eating his actual flesh. He means it spiritually.

Jesus was God in the flesh. He was and is 100% God and 100% man. How do you explain that? I just did.

Jesus was the perfect man. He never sinned. He was perfectly righteous and kept the whole law of God during his life here on Earth to a jot and a tittle (including every tiny punctuation mark). His flesh was perfect, sinless, all the way through. The opposite of ours. Ours is sinful through and through.

When Jesus died on the cross, he took all of our sins on him and died for them, and he gave us his perfect righteousness in exchange, so that we could be seen as holy in the eyes of a holy God. Not because of anything we have done, but only because of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Jesus wants us to consume or ingest his righteousness. That’s the way we’re supposed to live our lives here. Follow Jesus in righteousness.

So, when the time came for him to go to the cross, he desired with desire to eat his last Passover with his disciples, the twelve.

After the Passover supper, he instituted a new supper for us to remember what he had done for us. For us to remember. Do this in remembrance of me, he said until I come again.

He took the elements of the Passover supper, unleavened bread and wine, and he assigned them new meaning. His body and blood.

Why unleavened bread and wine?

Leaven or yeast is a symbol of sin in the Bible. Jesus was sinless, so only unleavened bread may represent his body. Yeast causes bread to rise; unleavened bread is flat and cracker-like.

I love fluffy yeast rolls with butter brushed on the top of them. And those Krispy Kreme donuts with yeast, right out of the oven are so light and sweet and melt in your mouth. Being puffed up like that reminds me of pride, the source of all sin, when we place our own wants above what God has commanded. But, there’s no yeast in the bread that represents our Lord!

And the wine is even more interesting. Yeast is essential to the fermentation of grape juice into wine. The yeast (a bacteria) eats the sugar in the grapes and converts it to alcohol. Once the alcohol reaches a certain level, it kills off the yeast and the wine stabilizes.

There are two ways yeast gets into the wine. First, there are naturally occurring yeast on the grapes that are harvested. This symbolizes sin that so easily besets us that we often don’t even know we’re committing the sin. Secondly, the winemaker will often add more yeast to the grape juice to speed the fermentation process. This is symbolic of the sin that we deliberately commit, even though we know better.

But, whether naturally occurring, or placed there on purpose, this yeast (sin) is completely wiped out in the wine making process, just like our sin is completely wiped out by the blood of Christ.

When we eat the bread and drink the wine at communion, let us remember every time we do it, that the perfect, sinless body of Christ was given for our sins, and that His blood covers every sin of every child of God, wiping them away, to be remembered no more.

May God Bless You