With the solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, we round off the initial part of the post-Easter season before the ordinary time of the year begins again. Saint Mark’s account of the Lord’s Supper (Mark 14:12-16, 22-26) emphasizes the new community that the sacrifice of Jesus creates nourished by the bread He breaks with them and the cup they drink.
In the company of His disciples
The opening line “On the first day of the Feast of the Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb” (i.e., in the afternoon of the previous day, 14th of Nisan) is not a chronological lapse but a theological statement (as also in 14:1) that closely associates the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, Jesus Christ, with the eating of the Christian Unleavened Bread, the Eucharist. The narration of the preparation for the Passover meal did not include the details about the necessary procurement of the blessed lamb, the herbs, sauces, salt water, apple and nuts, etc. As an excerpt from the passion narrative, the principal concern here was the Passover of Jesus in His passion and death.
Pointedly, Jesus was asked where He would want to eat the Passover meal. And as the end-time prophet with messianic authority and abilities, Jesus (as in 11:1-7) gave the unusual directive that a man with a jar of water would meet the two disciples He was sending for the purpose. The jar of water seemed to be a prearranged signal. They were to follow the man inside the house he would enter, and they were to ask the master of the house that “the teacher” is asking “where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?” It must be the house of a follower because “the teacher” is enough identification. There is an upper room the disciples prepared for the Passover, and there Jesus would eat the sacred meal in the company of His disciples.
‘Take…My body’
The second part of the gospel reading is not a play-by-play description of the Passover meal but the institution of the Eucharist. In character highly liturgical, this Eucharistic tradition of Saint Mark’s community of the 60s shows that the Eucharist, both bread and wine, was celebrated near the end of the meal. The discernible set pattern of the liturgical action: taking of the bread/cup, blessing/thanking, breaking the bread and distribution, establishes intended similarity with the multiplication sequences in Mark 6:41 and 8:6-7. In all these, the writer obviously wanted a liturgical and Eucharistic understanding to surface.
The cup Jesus identified as His blood was probably the third cup of wine of the Passover meal following the main course and before the singing of the Hallel psalms. He interpreted the cup as “my blood of the covenant which will be shed for many.” Jesus, therefore, explained His own coming suffering and death in terms of the suffering servant’s passion and death for many (Isaiah 53:10-11). By his sacrifice on the cross, He forged a new covenantal bond with God “for many,” a Semitism for all. The early Christians already recognized that in celebrating the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, they are commemorating Jesus’ cross and remembering the new covenant by Him, and waiting in anticipation for the fullness of the feast “in the Kingdom of God” in eternity.
Alálaong bagá, those who today eat of the bread and drink of the cup given by Jesus become participants and beneficiaries of the reconciliation and salvation the bread and the cup signify. Then as now, this covenant participation entails the assumption of responsibility for the standards and ideals of the communion and fellowship. The cross and the bread and cup are not to be separated; they are parts of the same mystery of God’s saving love. Covenant fidelity and Eucharistic bond are integral facets of the gift of the cross.
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