The Last Supper

What is the Lord's Supper all about? Does it memorialize what Christ accomplished at His crucifixion?

Or is there something more to it? We'll find out next on Renewing Your Mind. Welcome to the Sunday edition of our program.

Today Dr. R.C. Sproul is going to address one of the most important gifts that Christ gave His church. This is a sermon that Dr. Sproul delivered at St. Andrew's Chapel, the church he co-pastored for many years. This morning I'm going to be reading again from the Gospel according to St. Mark from the fourteenth chapter, beginning at verse 10 and reading through verse 26.

Please stand for the reading of the Word of God. Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went to the chief priests to betray him to them. And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money.

So he sought how he might conveniently betray him. Now on the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, Where do you want us to go and prepare that you may eat the Passover? And he sent out two of his disciples and said to them, Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water.

Follow him. Wherever he goes in, say to the master of the house, The teacher says, Where is the guest room in which I might eat the Passover with my disciples? Then he will show you a large upper room, furnished and prepared.

There make ready for us. So his disciples went out and came into the city and found it just as he had said to them, and they prepared the Passover. In the evening he came with the twelve. Now as they sat and ate, Jesus said, Assuredly, I say to you, one of you who eats with Me will betray Me. And they began to be sorrowful, and to say to him one by one, Is it I?

And another said, Is it I? And he answered and said to them, It is one of the twelve who dips with Me in the dish. The Son of Man indeed goes just as it is written of him. But woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed!

It would have been good for that man if he had never been born. And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, Take, eat, this is My body. Then He took the cup, and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And He said to them, This is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many. And assuredly, I say to you, I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. This is the inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God Almighty.

Please be seated. We read in verse 10, Then Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went to the chief priests. Notice that it is at Judas' initiation that this transaction takes place. He goes out of His way to visit those whom He knew were taking counsel together to find a way to get rid of Jesus. And He went to the chief priests in order to betray Jesus to them.

Now when they heard it, that is when the chief priests heard this, they were glad, they were delighted, and they promised to give Him money. The other gospels make it clear that the amount of that money was thirty pieces of silver. We mentioned the value of the perfume that had been poured out by Mary across the body of Jesus, and the value of that precious gift was two times the value of thirty pieces of silver. In other words, Judas was prepared to betray Jesus for half the amount of money that the devoted woman had spent in her effort to honor Him and to give Him glory. In this sense, Jesus' life is being sold at a cheap rate, relatively speaking. And Mark goes on to tell us that Judas sought how he might… Now notice this. It doesn't simply say Judas sought how he might betray Him, but rather he sought how he might conveniently betray Him. It wasn't enough that he intended to deliver Jesus into the hands of those who would kill Him, but at the same time that he undertook this deed for monetary gain, he wanted to carry it out in such a manner that he would not be inconvenienced. When murders are committed in our culture today and the investigators begin to seek for the guilty party, they immediately ask a couple of questions. One, who profits?

And two, how can we follow the money? Not that every murder is committed out of the motive of self-enrichment, but so many of them are that investigators certainly follow that particular trail. Also, when murder is committed in the courtroom, it's important to discern whether the murder was committed in an act of sudden anger or if it was planned, if it was premeditated. Now when we look at this account, we know that every one of the twelve who sat with Jesus at the Lord's Supper would in the hours to come betray Him out of fear, out of weakness, out of the pressure of the moment, but only one of them betrayed Him by premeditation.

This was premeditated treason against the King of Kings. So then Mark goes on with the record of the actual Passover, and he says, On the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover lamb, His disciples said to Him, Where do You want us to go and prepare that You may eat the Passover? And notice the similarity here between the instructions that Jesus gave His disciples on this occasion and the instructions that He had given them on the occasion of Palm Sunday and of His triumphal entry into the city, how He sent them to look for a person who had the donkey that was never ridden before. Now He sends them into the village. So as you go into the city, and you look for a man carrying a jug of water, and you follow Him, and wherever He goes in, that's where we will celebrate the Passover together.

That's the place that has already been prepared for us to meet and to eat. Now we could read over this very quickly and miss some of the significance of that directive that Jesus gave to His disciples because in the first instance, the carrying of water jugs was considered women's work by the biblical Israelites. Not a bad insight. And the only time you would see anybody but a woman carrying a jar of water, it would be if that male was a slave, except for one exception. We read a lot today about this group of ascetics that lived in the desert and who became famous with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, who was that sect of the Jews who divorced themselves from the mainstream of Israel, and some have even tried to make out that Jesus had been influenced by the Essenes.

But this text has fostered even more speculation because the Essenes had no women among their company. And so if you would see a man carrying a jug of water in Jerusalem and if that man was not a slave, then in all probability it would have been an Essene, a member of that particular sect. In any case, Jesus said, Go into the city. A man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water.

Follow him. Even if it was an Essene, still as remarkable as it would be to find a man carrying a jar of water, it would be even more remarkable to be able to find, identify somebody like that in the city of Jerusalem at this time of the year. We know that when Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 A.D., according to the Jewish historian Josephus, 1.1 million people perished in that holocaust. And we wonder how in the world Jerusalem could have 1.1 million people in it. Well 1.1 million people didn't live in Jerusalem, but on the occasions of Jewish feasts, Jews from all over the area would go up to Jerusalem to celebrate the feast.

The only place in which it was lawful to celebrate the Passover was in Jerusalem. And Josephus tells us that in the year 66 A.D., over two million people were crowded into the city of Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. So now Jesus says to His disciples, go into the city and look for a man carrying a bottle of water amidst two million people, not an easy task, but one that had been prepared by the providence of God from all eternity. And when you see that man, say that the teacher wants to know where the guest room is in which he may eat the Passover. He will show you a large upper room, furnished and prepared.

You go there and make ready for us. And so Mark tells us the disciples went out. They came into the city, and they found it exactly as He said to them, and so they prepared the Passover. And on the evening He came with the twelve, and as they sat and ate, the Passover knew. Jesus said assuredly, without a doubt, one of you who eats with Me will betray Me. Here the disciples are gathered around Jesus, reclining, celebrating the most sacred feast of the Jewish nation, and Jesus interrupts this mood of worship, this mood of celebration.

He says, I want to tell you something. Beyond a doubt that one of you who is eating with Me right here is going to betray Me. And you can imagine the pall of horror that descended over the disciples. They were terrified, and they looked at Jesus, and one after another they asked about their involvement in this, and they looked at Jesus and said, Is it I? And another said, Jesus, is it I who will betray You?

And one by one they go around asking the question as to whether they would be the one. And first Jesus answers in general terms. He says, It's one of the twelve. Presumably there were others gathered in that room that night.

It's one of the twelve, one who dips with Me in the dish. The Son of Man indeed goes, just as it is written of Him. But woe to the man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed!

It would have been good for that man if he had never been born. In the other accounts that we get in the gospels, that when Jesus came around the group and Judas said, Lord, it is it I that Jesus looked at Judas and said, Thou hast said. Yes, Judas, you're the one. And what you have to do, do quickly. As if Jesus were saying to Judas, God forbid that I should inconvenience you.

Go out into the night. Finish your transaction. Then Jesus says about Himself, The Son of Man indeed goes, just as it is written of Him. Jesus was aware of the messianic prophecies regarding the servant of Yahweh. He knew that He was destined to be betrayed, that the betrayal was not a sudden invention of Judas. At this last minute in Jesus' ministry, but the betrayal of the Son of Man had been ordained by God from the foundation of the world. And Jesus says it's working out.

It's going exactly as the Father ordained it from the beginning of the world. Here we see the intersection between the secret counsel of God and the machinations of the human will. And many read this text and leap to the conclusion, wow, if God predestined the betrayal of Judas, how could He possibly justly hold Judas responsible for this evil deed? You can hear Judas on the day of judgment saying, Lord, I was just carrying out Your will. In fact, if it weren't for me and for my betrayal, the atonement would never have taken place. Your people would still be in your sins. But you used me to bring Jesus to the cross, through which cross His people were redeemed. Therefore, pin upon me the heavenly medal of honor.

No, no, no, no. We look back to Joseph and his betrayal in the Old Testament and his later meeting with his brothers when they feared the wrath of Joseph upon him. And Joseph said, wait a minute, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.

Isn't this incredible in the mystery of God's providence that we call the mystery of concurrence when two streams come together and meet, the sovereign will of God, the earthly will of human flesh. It's not as if God and His sovereignty coerces Judas, forces him to this evil act, but rather the divine Savior and the divine Sovereign One works His will in and through the choices of His creatures. Judas was doing exactly what Judas wanted to do. He can't stand up at the last judgment and say, the devil made me do it, blame him.

You made me do it, blame yourself. But Judas did according to Judas' own intentions. That's the wonder of how God even brings good out of evil, brings redemption out of treachery, as He did in the case of Judas and Jesus' remarks at the moment. The Son of Man goes according to what is written of Him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. I'm going according to God's foreordination, but curses are upon the man by whose hand I am betrayed. And better for that man if he'd never been born. There have been those in the history of the world who cursed the day of their birth.

If there was any human being who ever had reason to curse the day of his birth, it was Judas Iscariot. And then Mark turns his attention to Jesus' changing of the Passover liturgy to the institution of the Lord's Supper. We read as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it and broke it and gave it to them and said, Take, eat, this is My body.

If He spoke these words in Aramaic, which He probably did, basically what He would have been saying is, Eat this, My body. And so we can't imagine the number of theological disputes that have gone on in church history on how to interpret this one single line of the New Testament. One of the great tragedies of the Protestant Reformation is that the Reformers under the leadership of Calvin and Zwingli could not come to an agreement with Luther and the German Protestants on this issue of the Lord's Supper. The issue was whether or not the human nature of Jesus was physically present in the Lord's Supper. Calvin insisted that the human nature is confined by space and time and cannot be in Orlando, Chicago, St. Louis, and Beirut all at the same time.

The divine nature, yes, but the human nature, no. The human nature always is limited by the attributes of humanity, whereas Luther insisted that the divine attributes of ubiquity or omnipresence are communicated to the human nature, making it possible for Jesus in His humanity to be all of these places at the same time, and insisted that the presence of Jesus in the Lord's Supper is in some way physical or corporeal, based on the words of institution. At one point of discussion, Luther, like Khrushchev at the United Nations, remember many years ago when the Soviet premier took off his shoes and banged it on the table at the U.N. and said, We will bury you. So Luther, at this colloquy, pounded his fist on the table saying, Hoke est corpus mayum.

Hoke est corpus mayum. This is my body. The reformer said, Wait a minute. Jesus said, I am the door. You don't take that in a literal sense to mean that my flesh is the veneer of mahogany, my navel is a doorknob, nothing like that, so crass. So Psalm wanted to say what Jesus meant was that this bread, this wine represents my body.

Luther said, No. It's far more than that. And I think the truth is somewhere in between. If you make an identification, an equation between the bread and the wine and the physical body of Jesus, you've got Christological problems that just won't quit. And yet at the same time Calvin understood that in the mystery of the Lord's Supper there was something going on there, and what Jesus was saying is, not this is just my physical person, this is my person, and that there's a reality involved here in the celebration of the Lord's Supper beyond a memorial.

Yes, Jesus touching His humanity is in heaven, but touching His deity He is not restricted by time and space so that we can have full assurance that we come to be in His real presence. He's here. You say, but He's always here. Every time we gather together, He's with us.

Yes, that's true. So what's the difference? The difference is what He's doing. He's inviting us to a situation of intimacy at His table. He invites us to feed on Him, to be nurtured by Him, to be strengthened by Him. The Lord's Supper, the sacrament that Jesus graciously gave His Church so that we would remember Him and the sacrifice that He made for sinners. We're grateful that you joined us for the Lord's Day edition of Renewing Your Mind.

It took Dr. R.C. Sproul more than a year to preach through the Gospel of Mark. In each sermon, R.C.

points us to Christ and provides solid application for our lives. We have a great resource to complement these audio sermons. It's Dr. Sproul's commentary on Mark, and we'd be glad to send you the digital version for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. As a reminder, our offices are closed today so that our staff can enjoy the Lord's Day and worship with their families. So to request this resource with your gift, just go to renewingyourmind.org. On behalf of all of us here at Ligonier Ministries, I want to thank you for joining us today, and I hope you'll make plans to be with us again next Lord's Day in Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.