Mark 14:22 Commentary and Bible Study

In John's Gospel we find that after the initial stage of the supper, Christ rises, and he takes a towel and he teaches his disciples that great lesson in humility. He washes their feet. Then it seems, after the washing of feet – if we understand it correctly in John's Gospel – the supper resumes, and Judas receives a token piece of bread from the Lord’s hand (John 13:26), and he goes out to commit this act of betrayal. It is at this stage that the Lord's Supper itself begins. First there is the Passover supper. Then there is the great act of humility on the part of the Lord as he washes the feet – depicting how on Calvary he will bring about the washing away of sin, as well as being a lesson in humility – and then Judas is dispatched, and he is not there for the first Lord's Supper. Here then is the inaugural Lord's Supper, right after the Passover feast, and so it should be. The Passover feast commemorated the lamb that they ate on the last day in Egypt before their great deliverance. That lamb was itself a foreshadowing of the Lamb of God, Christ, who would take away the sin of the world. Now there will be no more Passovers. Now the Jewish order, the Old Testament order and their worship is at a close. Christ has fulfilled all the illustrations, the types and the shadows of the Old Testament law, and now is the first Lord's Supper which replaces it. ‘Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body.’ Luke adds, ‘This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.’ We look back in the Lord’s Supper to Christ offering himself once for us. Says Paul, it is his body broken for us even though his body was never literally broken. This is symbolism, but it is very appropriate symbolism, because his body was indeed metaphorically broken as much as anybody could be. It describes the agonies and the torment which he suffered, as if his very body was shattered into pieces. His body is emphasised to remind us that it was the God Man, literally in human flesh and personality, who suffered this for us. He wasn’t simply a divine person without a body, who, because he was a divine person could presumably absorb any amount of suffering without necessarily feeling it. No, he was both God and man and in that human body he was our real representative.Of course, anyone can see it wasn't his body, literally. How could it be? He was standing there. He was not yet crucified and risen from the dead, and glorified and in heaven. It was not his body, but he said, ‘Take, eat, this is my body.’ How could that be when it was not his body? Because ‘this is my body’, clearly and obviously and incontrovertibly, means, this represents my body. This is a symbol of my body. That is the only possible meaning, because he was still alive in the body. That means that the belief of the Roman Catholic Church that the bread becomes his body is a complete absurdity, and a nonsense. It is not literal; it is figurative. ‘This is my body’, the symbol of my body. That's the meaning, and that's the meaning until Christ comes again. The cup is the symbol of his poured out blood, his life and his blood, poured out and shed for us. The bread, the loaf: that represents his body broken, as it were, on Calvary's cross and punished for us. His body broken and tortured. Of course, the largest part of his suffering, by far, was within in his soul, when God the Father laid upon him all the guilt of every single person who would ever be forgiven: those who would come to him and love him and live for him, those who would trust in him. For them, he would suffer and die. It was a suffering beyond description. In the body, yes, but in his holy being and soul, vastly more so. Films about the passion of Christ focus on the bodily pain. The bodily pain inflicted by the Romans was a tiny fraction of what Christ suffered. The real pain was that that came from on high, when God put upon him all the guilt of the people for whom he would die, and poured out upon him that awful weight of eternal punishment due to them, and he suffered separation from God in his holy soul. The physical agonies – the scourging, the crown of thorns, the nails through his hands and feet – could never by themselves pay the price for the sin of all the elect. He must suffer the equivalent of what we would have suffered in hell for ever. We may imagine that when the Father poured out the wrath of the whole Godhead upon Christ, he, as it were, veiled his sight. Nothing could be more terrible for the Father than to punish the Son. There could be nothing worse for the Son and the Father and the Holy Spirit than separation for those hours. All three members of the Godhead in torment, you may say, but Christ suffering it in his human flesh, so that men and women could be saved and sin could be forgiven.