64. What About the Four Cups At the Seder Meal? - Better Questions

Matt wrestles with a question from Julie in Ohio. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Better Questions. Rest with hard questions and seek to ask better ones. Today's question has come in from a listener. And it is from Julie in Ohio. The question is: why do we use one cup at communion when Jesus was celebrating a Passover meal that had four cups? What's the significance of the four cups and why don't we mention them? It's a really great question. Uh I had the joy and just, I mean, it was such a rich learning experience in one of my seminary classes on Jewish Christian relations to get to know a couple of the rabbis in in Wichita when I was there. And one was a Messianic Jew, the other was an Orthodox Jew, and they both had different sort of perspectives and takes, but I got to experience really be fully immersed in that culture, and it was really fascinating. So just a little context. Um The Last Supper wasn't just a dinner. Um, they were celebrating Passover, Jesus and his disciples. This was something that would happen often. It was the most important meal in the entire Jewish calendar. It was this annual remembrance of the night that God delivered Israel out of Egypt. And when the blood of the Lamb on the doorpost caused death to pass over their homes, it was this very significant moment in time. And so when they would gather to have Passover meal, it had a very specific structure. It wasn't just like casual, like grab some food, we're headed upstairs. It was very, there's there's a liturgy to it. There was a scripted ordered ceremony called the Seder, which literally means order. And so every element meant something from the bitter herbs to the unleavened bread, and as mentioned, the four cups of wine. Now, here's what I think most Christians don't know, and I didn't know this until I had taken that class, is that those four cups, they're not just a Jewish tradition that got tacked on. They actually come directly out of the scripture, out of the Torah. So Exodus chapter six and seven, um, God gives four specific promises to his people about what he's going to do. They're uh to simplify them, it's just I will bring you out, I will deliver you, I will redeem you, and I will take you as my people. Right? Four promises, four cups, one for each declaration of God. It's let me walk through them quickly because each one tells part of the story. The first cup is the cup of sanctification. Uh, it's the cup that opens the meal and is tied to God's promise, I will bring you out. It marks the beginning, it kind of sets the night apart from everything. It's essentially God saying, Look, you are mine, and I'm going to separate you from everything that has held you captive. The second cup is the cup of deliverance tied to I will deliver you from bondage. This is where the plagues are are um plague. Plague, plague. I'm sorry. I just as an aside, I got made fun of when I moved from Minnesota to Kansas because I would say my A is wrong, like I would say bag or tag instead of bag or tag. And so as a public speaker, anytime I would say bag, all my students when I was in youth ministry would all go bag and make fun of me. And now I mess it up. Like words like plague, it's actually you're supposed to say plague, but I just said plague. Anyway, uh that was a that was just a weird rabbit hole. Where the plagues, so let me go back. Where was I? Oh my goodness, cup of deliverance. I should cut this out. Um tied to I will deliver you from bondage. Right. This is where the plagues are recounted, where the story of Egypt itself is retold. It's where the halal psalms begin. Um, it's the cup of praise for freedom from slavery, essentially. And the third cup, now this is really important. So the third cup is called the cup of redemption, and it's tied to I will redeem you with an outstretched arm. And this cup was was drunk after the meal was finished. And this is the cup that Jesus picks up in Luke 22 and 22. I want to say 20, I don't have my Bible in front of me. It's somewhere in there. And he says, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. Right? So this cup is what we refer to when we say communion, the cup of the Lord's Supper. It was always this third cup. The cup that is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. And then there's the fourth cup, right? The cup of praise, or sometimes called the cup of acceptance, um, which is tied to God's final promise I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. This was the climax of the entire meal, and it completed the Seder. There was nothing else that came after the final cup. And so here's where it gets extraordinary. Like, honestly, this is I think this is so fascinating. Like at the Last Supper, after Jesus takes the third cup, which is again the cup of redemption, and he says, This is the blood of my cup uh blood of the covenant, he stops and he does not drink the fourth cup. Interesting. Instead, he makes this decor declaration in Matthew 26, 29. He says, I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine again until that day when I drink it new with you in my father's kingdom. And so think about what that would have felt like in the room. Every person at the table knew the Passover Seder. Every one of them knew, right, that they hadn't finished the whole liturgy. The fourth cup was still sitting there. In many ways, it would have felt like the meal was incomplete. For a rabbi to deliberately stop short of the final cup of the most sacred meal of the year, that would have been shocking, jarring, bewildering, like borderline offensive, right? It would have been a weird feeling. Um I'm trying to think of like an example. It'd be like if you gather together for um you know, Christmas dinner and didn't open the dinner with a prayer. And that's not a great example, but you get you get the point. Like it was weird. But then Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, what does he pray? He says, Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Which cup? The fourth cup. The cup that was still unfinished. Because he walks out of the upper room with the open pastor behind him, and he does not complete it until the cross. If you look at John 19, Jesus is hanging on the cross, what does he say? He says, I thirst. And a sponge spoked in sour wine is lifted up to his lips on a hyssop branch. Interestingly, John, I think he he notes specifically that it is hyssop, which is the same branch used in the original Passover to apply blood's lamb uh like blood from the lamb on the doorposts in Exodus. And so Jesus receives the wine and then he says, What? It is finished. Scholars uh like Scott Hahn have argued that what Jesus was sort of declaring in that moment, it is finished, is that the Passover meal is complete. That he drank the fourth cup on the cross with his last breath. Now the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, while they are certainly separate events in the chronology, in many ways, they're a single act of sacrifice, right? This sort of from the upper room to Golgotha, there is this connection which brings just such a heavy weight of significance to every time we gather to do the Last Supper. And so this brings us back to our question. Why do we only use one cup of communion? I think my attempt to sort of wrestle with it is to say, because we are specifically remembering that moment, a cup of redemption, where Jesus says, This is the blood of the new covenant, right? There was a covenant with Israel, the old covenant, and through Christ's death, there is now this new covenant that opens the door, that brings ushers in not just Jews, but also Gentiles, those who were once outside the floor engrafted into the love of God. And so when we reenact communion, we're not doing the whole Seder, but that specific defining moment when Jesus took the cup of redemption and said, This is about me. I am what this cup has been pointing to, that He is the Passover Lamb. He is the outstretched arms, he is the ultimate redemption. And here's the thing I maybe I don't want you to miss in all this, is like the fourth cup also has not been drunk with us yet as followers of Jesus and Christians. Because Jesus said he would not drink it again until he drinks it with us in his father's kingdom. Which means that every time we take communion, we are sort of living between the third and the fourth cups, between the now and not yet, between redemption and the ultimate consummation of all things, between what Christ has done and also what Christ promised to do. And so communion is not just looking backward, but it's a declaration of anticipation. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians, for whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again. That line is so important, until he comes. So we are sitting at the unfinished table, holding the cup of redemption in our hands, waiting for the day for our host, for Christ to return, and finally say, Now, now we celebrate with the fourth cup at the wedding feast of the Lamb. And ultimately, Jesus says, I take you as my people and I am your God. So this isn't I think I think the thing to wrestle with too is that you know this isn't just an arbitrary tradition. It's not a religious ritual that's stripped of meaning that every time you take the cup, you are holding the cup of redemption. The same cup Jesus held in that upper room, surrounded by his closest friends the night before he died. And you are saying, I believe what this cup represents. I believe his blood was poured out for me, and I am waiting for him to come back and finish what he started. I think that changes how we think about communion. Anyway, man, great question. Really great question. Um I've added to the podcast is an ability to text in questions. It's it's located. If you pull up the podcast and Apple Podcasts, um it is located. Pull it up right now so I can explain it. Uh better questions. Yeah, there's a little section that says text in your question. It's like underneath the episode. So like here it says episode 61, blah blah blah. Underneath there, there's a little link. And you can text your questions directly to me. You can even follow up. You can disagree with my analysis or my my wrestling, or whatever you want to disagree with, and I'm happy to kind of go back and forth and start a dialogue. So anyway, please send in your questions um and or just send a hello. But thank you for tuning in. Uh it's so good to be back and engaging with you. The questions are flooding in, which is super fun, and uh I'm really, really enjoying this. So have a great morning.