Today’s reading: Leviticus 6; 1 Thessalonians 5
With Easter coming up and this being Holy Week, I thought it would be a good time to talk about Leviticus 6 in terms of communion as Jesus instituted it at The Last Supper.
What does Leviticus 6 have to do with communion? Quite a bit actually!
As we get into Leviticus 6 we begin to see a picture of what is essentially a holy feast in the tabernacle. I don’t know about you, but when I picture Old Testament sacrifices I tend to imagine someone dropping their animal or their offering off at the door and leaving, and then the priests do some prep and throw the thing on the fire and burn it up. But that wasn’t really the case.
We see reference here in Leviticus 6 to offerings that nobody is allowed to consume, but the majority of offerings would be divided, and a portion would go to the Lord, and the rest would be available to be eaten, with any leftovers only being burned up if it didn’t get eaten. Some of these offerings were just for the priests, but others were actually for the person bringing the offering, as we will see in a few chapters.
But what we want to focus on this morning is the holy offerings that were only to be eaten by the priests or their families (depending on the offering). It was explicitly wrong for a non-priest to eat part of one of these sacrifices, but at The Last Supper, Jesus takes the bread, tells His disciples that it is His body, and then gives it to them to eat. In this, they are partakers of the most holy offering of Jesus Himself, and in a sense He is declaring them priests of the new covenant He is inaugurating. This language of the priesthood of all followers of Jesus is then used in the New Testament, but to an Israelite who knows that only the priests get to eat of the sacrifice, this imagery from Jesus would not have been lost on them.
What’s even more striking though, when we compare communion to Leviticus, is the blood. Under Mosaic Law, blood was never to be consumed. God explicitly says that the life of an animal is in it’s blood, so the blood is the Lord’s and is never to be consumed. The blood becomes an important part of different sacrificial rituals, with it sometimes being splashed on the altar, sometimes being put on the horns of the altar, sometimes being poured out, etc. Whatever the blood was applied to was made pure and holy, but it was never consumed.
So when Jesus takes the wine and tells them to drink the blood of the new covenant which is poured out for many, this would have been entirely different from anything else. There are so many layers to this that they would have picked up.
The idea of the blood of the covenant would have immediately taken them back to Moses when God instituted His covenant with Israel at the base of Mount Sinai, and the blood of the covenant was poured out and sprinkled on the people. So Jesus saying He is going to inaugurate a new covenant in His own blood is putting Himself at the level of Moses in instituting a new covenant, but greater because this one uses His own blood instead of the blood of a sacrifice.
Then the suggestion that they drink blood, on the other hand, to an Israelite, would have been abhorrent. Much like eating an unclean animal, drinking blood was just completely off the table for an Israelite, but this is symbolically important here. Whatever the blood was sprinkled or poured out on is what was made clean, but Jesus is not just sprinkling them with his blood, but having them take the blood into themselves. He is making them clean and pure on the inside. He is preparing them, by His blood, to be cleansed sacred space, ready for God to take up residence inside them, just as the blood purified the tabernacle as sacred space for God to continue to reside there.
The other side to them drinking His blood then is that they are taking in His life. This was the basis for the prohibition against drinking blood in the Old Testament, that the life of the animal is in it’s blood, and life belongs to the Lord. But here, Jesus is not just pouring His life out at the base of the altar, He is pouring His life into His disciples.
So in this one very symbolic meal Jesus is inaugurating His disciples as priests of a new covenant, purified and made ready for the presence of God to take up residence within them, and given Jesus’ eternal life as their own.
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