Roman Catholic Doctrine of the Eucharist, part 3—The Passover Seder and the Last Supper

Please note that neither Judaism nor Christianity (nor secular history for that matter) has been able to accurately reconstruct the precise and intricate details of the Passover meal as it was celebrated at the time of Jesus. What we can know is pieced together from Jewish, Christian and secular writings. Thus, we comment below on the two aspects of the meal, which interest us in relation to this series of articles, namely the bread and wine.
Rabbi Morris Kertzner wrote,

For generations the promise of the messiah was a literal truth to every Jew. Especially on Passover, the time when God once redeemed Israel from Egypt, the messiah was expected to arrive…He is riding on a donkey, and the prophet Elijah is heralding his coming.1

The Last Supper was the Passover meal, or Seder (seder means order, the order in which the ritual takes place). ^{Jesus’ statement that the bread is His body and the wine His blood was a look back to the symbolism of the Passover Seder as well as looking forward to His sacrifice on the cross}. It is absolutely essential to understand this because in referring to the elements as His body and blood, Jesus was giving definition to symbols that the Jewish people have used for millennia. We simply cannot disregard this fact as is done by Roman Catholicism who have mistakenly taken the Last Supper as the starting point in building its doctrine of the Eucharist.
While it is understandable that many Christians are not aware of the deep Messianic symbolism of the Seder the fact is that this ignorance leads to false doctrines such as transubstantiation. One reason is that many Christians have never witnessed or participated in a Passover meal and because some of the detailed symbolism expressed in the Seder is not found in the Scriptures. Rather, they have come about due to tradition, tradition that the Jew Jesus and His Jewish Apostles understood.2
The New Testament gives relatively few details, we are told that Jesus “…took bread…took the cup….” But the writers of the New Testament were Jewish (except the Greek Dr. Luke who interviewed eyewitnesses and traveled with the Apostles). They knew what Jesus meant when He took the specific piece of bread that gets broken (to this very day in Jewish Passovers), and a specific cup, after the meal (1st Corinthians 11:25). It is this symbolism that Jesus was referring to when He identified the bread and wine as His body and blood. This means that Jesus did not take just any piece of bread and any cup of wine to call His body and blood. If He had taken any piece of bread and any cup of wine during any meal then the Catholic Church could do with the doctrine as they wished. However, since they do not look back in order to draw out the symbolism and only look forward they end up constructing a false doctrine by ignoring this important historical context.

^{Within the Seder, even as the Jewish people celebrate it to this day, there is astounding symbolism right down to the very details that point directly and solely to Jesus Christ. Jesus was looking back to millennia of symbolism and identifying Himself in it}. The Roman Catholic Church has taken it upon itself to give brand new meaning, by means of eisegesis (or, isogesis), to the bread and wine by utterly ignoring these facts, ignoring the grammatical and historical context. In thinking itself to be the replacement of the Jews as God’s people, the Roman Catholic Church has ignored many facts that could keep it from various doctrinal errors.
The Bread:
The bread they were eating at the Last Supper was unleavened bread, because leaven represents sin. Go to any supermarket and you might find a section of Jewish food, if you buy a box of matzah (unleavened bread, aka; matza, matzoh, matsah, matzo, matzoh, matze) you will find that no matter which brand you buy, the matzah has a particular appearance; it is both striped and pierced throughout, “By His stripes we are healed…He was pierced for our iniquity” (Isaiah 53:5 some translations vary and matzah may not have looked the same 2,000 years ago).

The afikoman has always been regarded as somehow special; in Poland, the custom was to pierce it; in North Africa, it was sometimes nailed to the wall and kept throughout the year as a good luck charm.3

Jesus did not just pick up any piece of bread off of the table. The custom is that in the middle of the table there is a piece of fabric that looks like a square pillowcase known as a Matzah Tosh, it has three compartments rather than one.4
One matzah is placed in each of the three compartments, they are known as the Matzah Shel Mitzva: Matzos used in the observance of the commandments. Before the meal begins the middle matzah is brought out, it is called the afikoman.

Nahum Glazer explains:

Entertainment (afikoman): Correctly, epikomios, a Greek word meaning festival procession; the meaning is already uncertain in the Talmud, where it is variously explained as ‘dessert,’ ‘dinner music,’ and ‘the practice of going from one company to another’ (Pesahim 119b; Yerushalmi Pesahim 37b). The term covers the after-dinner revelry which was a customary sequel to the ancient banquet, especially for the young. The sages prohibited the afikoman on the Passover night so that attention be not diverted from the paschal sacrifice.5

Keep in mind that Passover “lasts for seven days (eight days outside of Israel).”6

The eating of the afikoman is an essential part of our Seder service, for it is a reminder of the paschal lamb. In Sephardic and Oriental rituals the following formula is pronounced before the eating of the afikoman: In Memory of the Paschal sacrifice, eaten after one is sated.7

The afikoman is broken in half, one half is placed back in the Matzah Tosh, the other half is wrapped in a cloth or napkin and hidden until the end of the meal when the children look for it, unwrap it and then it is broken into small pieces that are distributed among the partakers of the Seder. This is how we know that this is the bread of which Jesus spoke, because He broke it and distributed it (see Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19).
^{In the Seder there are also many representations of the Godhead, the Trinity}:

The North African Sephardim, for example, at one point in the Seder have the Baal-Haggada (the leader of the ceremony) get up and march around the table three times with the plate containing the matzah on his shoulder. He stops at every place on his way, circling the head of the person sitting there three times with the plate.8

The three sectioned Matzo Tosh and or the three matzot represents the Trinity, there is only one yet there are three. The Matzah Shel Mitzva likewise represents the Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The middle one, the afikoman [the Son, the second person of the Trinity] is taken out [came forth from the Trinity] and broken in half [2 comings of one Messiah]. One half is put back with the other two [He ascends returning to the other members of the Trinity awaiting the 2nd Coming], the other half is wrapped in a napkin [burial shroud] and hidden [buried] until the end of the meal when it is brought back [resurrected] it is broken in pieces and eaten by all [sharing Communion], this is why Jesus said, “This is my body.” Remember that the afikoman is a reminder of the paschal lamb, “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (see John 1:29, 36). “Like a lamb lead to the slaughter He opened not His mouth” (Isaiah 53:7; Acts 8:32).
Also, consider how important it was to partake in the Passover, “But the person who is clean and not on a trip who fails to observe Pesach (Passover) will be cut off from his people; because he did not bring the offering for Adonai at its designated time, that person will bear the consequences of his sin” (Numbers 9:13 The Complete Jewish Bible). This may very well be symbolic of the serious implication of not partaking of the Lamb of God. Utilizing Isaiah 53 as a Messianic passage, Rabbi Elijah de Vidas stated in the 16th century,

The meaning of ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities’ is, that since the Messiah bears our iniquities which produce the effect of His being bruised, it follows that whoever will not admit that Messiah thus suffers for our iniquities must endure and suffer for them himself.

This afikoman is the bread that Christ identified as His body, this is where communion comes from. Moreover, in light of all this symbolism we might, admittedly without linguistic support, but relying on symbolism, paraphrase afikoman as good news, which is to say the Gospel.

The Wine:
Rabbi Shraga Simmons, “It is best to use red wine, since this alludes to the blood spilled by Pharaoh, the blood as part of the Ten Plagues, and the blood the Jews put on their doorposts.”9
Of course, as Jesus explained that moreover the wine ultimately alludes to His shed blood. By the end of the Passover meal there is one cup of wine left that no one drinks, it is called the cup of redemption or cup of Elijah, the “practice of setting (in the center of the table) a cup in honor of Elijah, the harbinger of messianic deliverance.”10
^{To this very day Jewish children are sent to the door to see if Elijah has come because he comes to proclaim the Messiah. This is the cup that Jesus took because it pertained to Him; He was proclaiming the redemption}. This is why He identified it with His blood, “after supper He took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me’” (1st Corinthians 11:25).
Note that each act of Redemption is represented by a cup of wine:

The first act of Redemption that G-d did for us in Egypt was to stop the oppression…The second act of Redemption that G-d did for us in Egypt was to end the slavery…The third act of Redemption that G-d did for us in Egypt was to rescue us from Egypt with many miracles…The fourth act of Redemption that G-d did for us was to bring us to Mount Sinai, give us the Holy Torah, and thus declare us his Chosen People…
The fifth act of Redemption was to bring us to the Land of Israel. Unfortunately, that was not expected to be permanent, and indeed has not been. Even now, when many Jews live in Israel, it is not the kingdom that G-d has promised us. When the Messiah comes, we will institute the drinking of the Fifth Cup, to commemorate ‘And I will bring them to the land.’ We pray daily that the Messiah arrives soon. Thus many people, near the end of the Seder, have the custom to fill one extra cup, and place it somewhere prominent on the table.
This symbolizes our hope that we will soon be permitted to drink a Fifth Cup. The Prophet Malachi tells us that G-d will send us the Prophet Elijah before the Final Redemption, to prepare us (Malachi 3:23). For this reason we call this cup of hopefulness the ‘Cup of Elijah.’11

In saying that the bread was His body, Jesus was not saying that He would take on the form of bread as He once and for all took human form. Jesus was saying that the specific piece of bread was His body because ^{the bread represented His sinlessness, coming forth from the Trinity, His two comings, His death, burial and resurrection}. Jesus was saying that the specific cup contained His blood because the wine represented a proclamation of salvation. Jesus was giving definition of ancient and absolutely beautiful, meaningful symbolism.

1. 1. Rabbi Morris N. Kertzner, What Is a Jew? (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), p. 119
2. 2. Please keep in mind that the assumption we work under is that traditions in and of themselves are not problematic; the problem comes when traditions contradict the Word of God
3. 3. Saltshakers Messianic Network, Ask the Messianic Rabbi
4. 4. Three napkins or a large napkin folded in three may be used
5. 5. Nahum N. Glazer, ed., The Passover Haggadah (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 27
6. 6. Judaism 101, Pesach: Passover
7. 7. Glazer, pp. 55-57
8. 8. Michael Asheri, Living Jewish, the lore and Law of the practicing Jew (New York: Everest House Publishers, 1978), p. 167
9. 9. Rabbi Shraga Simmons, Laws of the Four Cups of Wine
10. 10. Glazer, p. 11
11. 11. The Being Jewish Web Site, The Four Cups of Wine