Reflections on Luke 24: 13 – 35
That story of the risen Jesus walking alongside the disciples on the Emmaus Road is one of my favourite passages of scripture. And the sentence about how the disciples recognised him in the breaking of the bread for me has that ‘tingle-factor’.
As Christians we tend to immediately associate those words with the Last Supper, and Jesus breaking bread with his disciples in the Upper Room immediately before his arrest and crucifixion. But already as Jesus took and broke bread on that fateful night, bread was already loaded with meaning for Jesus and his Jewish followers.
Bread first appears in the Hebrew Scriptures at the Exodus where the Israelites are commanded to make bread to eat before their journey; bread that doesn’t have time to rise before they leave. They eat in urgency and haste. Bread and meat, sustain them on that journey: the lambs sacrificed and the bread eaten unleavened.
After the great escape, and after the people have passed safely through the River Jordan, they begin to complain at Moses. In Egypt they may have had whips at their backs, but at least they had food in their stomachs:
The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egpyt,where we sat by the fleshpots and had plenty of bread! But you have brought us out into this wilderness to let this whole assembly starve to death.’ Exodus 16: 2 – 3.
It is in response to this complaining that God provides the manna in the wilderness: mysterious bread from heaven which appears in the morning but which by noon has melted away in the heat of the sun. However much each person gathered, they all had the same amount, and all had sufficient for their needs. If anyone stored some over to the next day, it was found to have gone off, except at the Sabbath:
Each morning every man gathered as much as he needed; it melted away when the sun grew hot. On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, two omers each, and when the chiefs of the community all came and told Moses, he answered, ‘This is what the Lord has said: Tomorrow is a day of sacred rest, a Sabbath holy to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake now, and boil what you want to boil; what remains over put aside to be kept till morning.’ So they put it aside till morning as Moses had commanded, and it neither stank nor became infested with maggots. ‘Eat it today,’ said Moses, ‘because today is a Sabbath of the Lord. Today you will find none outside. For six days you may gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.’ Exodus 16: 21 – 26.
So the Israelites lived on God’s provision in the wilderness for forty years – manna in the morning and quail in the evening – until they came to the border of Canaan, the land where they would settle. And as a remembrance of God’s faithfulness, God commands Moses thus:
‘Take a full omer of (manna) to be kept for future generations, so that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness when I brought you out of Egypt.’ Moses said to Aaron, ‘Take a jar and fill it with an omer of manna, and store it in the presence of the Lord to be kept for future generations.’ Aaron did as the Lord had commanded Moses, and stored it before the Testimony for safe keeping.’ Exodus 16: 32 – 34.
Thus we see the emergence of the concept of the Bread of the Presence (Lethem haPanim) : bread that represents God’s enduring presence, faithfulness and provision, maintained constantly in a Holy Place.
As God’s commandments to the people of Israel are further revealed throughout the books of Exodus and Leviticus, we find a development in instruction about the Bread of the Presence at the Sabbath. In Leviticus 24: 5 – 9 (Revised English Version) we read:
You are to take flour and bake it into twelve loaves, two tenths of an ephah to each. Arrange them in two rows, six to a row on the table, ritually clean before the Lord. Sprinkle pure frankincense on the rows, and this will be a token of the bread, offered to the Lord as a food offering. Regularly, sabbath after sabbath, it is to be arranged before the Lord as a gift from the Israelites. This is a covenant for ever; it is the privilege of Aaron and his sons, and they are to eat the bread in a holy place, because it is the holiest of holy-gifts.
Or as the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition of the Bible puts it: Leviticus 24: 5 – 8: “Every sabbath day Aaron shall set it in order before the Lord continually [tamid] on behalf of the people of Israel as a covenant for ever [Berit Olam]. And it shall be for Aaron and his sons, and they shall eat it in a holy place, since it is for him a most holy portion out of the offerings by fire to the Lord, a perpetual due.”
So in Leviticus we see that as well as God commanding the Israelites to keep the Sabbath as a day of rest and a day of worship, in addition every seventh day the priest is commanded to offer a special sacrifice of bread, the bread of the presence. This bread of the presence becomes especially important in Jewish understanding because it is the only sacrifice that is called a ‘perpetual due’, an ‘everlasting covenant’. Throughout the centuries as worship took place each week on the Sabbath, first peripatetically in the travelling Tabernacle, as a wandering people, and then established in the Temple, the priests would consume the old bread and replace it with fresh loaves from the fine flour and frankincense supplied by the people. And because the loaves of bread were considered holy, a constant reminder of God’s everlasting covenant with his people and his provision for the twelve tribes of Israel represented in the twelve loaves, they could be eaten only by the priests.
As directions are given throughout the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) about the way worship of God and sacrifice to God should be ordered, Moses is given instructions by God for the building of a table on which the Bread of the Presence should be presented, and how it should be housed:
‘You shall make a table of acacia wood, two cubits long, one cubits wide, and a cubits and a half high. You shall overlay it with pure gold, and make a moulding of gold round it. You shall make round it a rim a handbreath wide, and a moulding of gold around the rim. You shall make for it for rings of gold, and fasten the rings to the four corners at its four legs. The rings that hold the poles used for carrying the table should be close to the rim. You shall make the poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold, and the table shall be carried with these. You shall make its plates and dishes for incense, and it’s dragons and bowls with which to pour drink-; offerings; you shall make them of pure gold. And you shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before me always. Exodus 25: 23 – 30.
In chapter 26: 31 – 35 the instructions continue:
You shall make a curtain of blue, purple and crimson yarns, and of fine twisted linen; it shall be made with cherubim skilfully worked into it. You shall hang it on four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold and rest on four bases of silver. You shall gang the curtain under the clasps, and bring the ark of the covenant inside, within the curtain; and the curtain shall separate for you the holy place from the most holy. You shall put the mercy-seat on the ark of the covenant in the most holy place. You shall set the table (of the bread of the Presence) outside the curtain, and the lampat and on the south side of the tabernacle opposite the table; and you shall put the table on the north side.
There are no doubt many other references that could be traced through the scriptures regarding the mention of bread and its significance in the Hebrew faith. These alone, however, will suffice to show that Bread had special symbolic and actual meaning within the Jewish of Jesus’ day.
In chapter 6:35 the writer of St John’s Gospel has Jesus declare “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Later, in verse 51, he says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” Those of us who have been brought up within the Christian faith in the 20th century take those words as read. Many years ago, when I preached my first sermon, I took as my theme, Jesus as the bread of life: that which is our staple diet, without which we cannot live. I spoke too about the maxim, ‘You are what what you eat’, and how metaphorically-speaking what we feed on to sustain us spiritually impacts our everyday life, well-being and action. As a sermon topic the contents of that address would still be appropriate. However, what we see here in tracing the theme of bread back to the earliest origins of the Israelite faith, is the many layers of meaning that reference to bread would have had in the time of Jesus. And those words of Jesus, which we take as fundamental to our faith today, would have been scandalous to the Jews who heard Jesus speaking. Jesus describing himself as the Bread of Life! It is God and God alone who gives the bread of life.
But Jesus takes this further, not only does he declare that he is the bread of life, but in breaking the bread at the last supper he declares that the bread broken is his body and together with the cup shared is the sign of the new covenant. Remember in Exodus, the bread prepared for the Lord for the Sabbath offering was to be the reminder of God’s everlasting covenant with his people. And now, with bread and wine, Jesus is instituting a new covenant, which he describes as being ‘sealed with his blood.’ More than this, however, the bread of the Presence could be consumed by the priest alone. The bread that Jesus offers is shared by all (compare also the various stories of the feeding of the five thousand, where all eat and are filled and there is yet an abundance left over).
Brant Pitre, an American Catholic theologian, who has written a fascinating book entitled, ‘Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist: Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper’ (Image 2016), also makes this further proposition in an online article. With reference to the Jewish Mishnah at the time of Jesus, he notes that if the Friday, the day before Sabbath, fell on a feast day, then the priests were supposed to prepare the bread of the presence on the Thursday evening because they couldn’t be working on a festival day. He therefore makes the suggestion that whilst the priests were preparing the Bread of the Presence, bread symbolizing the everlasting covenant with Israel on Thursday in preparation for the Sabbath, Jesus was offering bread as his body as a sign of the New Covenant. There is however difficulty with Pitre’s thesis. It assumes that the Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples was not a Passover meal, since if it was, the whole of Jerusalem would have been engaged in eating Passover, not least the religious authorities. This need not however be a major obstacle, since in fact St John’s dating has the Passover meal taking place on the Friday evening with the Passover lambs being sacrificed in the Temple on the Friday afternoon just as Jesus is being crucified. Whilst the synoptic gospels, following the lead of Mark, are clear that the Last Supper was a Passover meal, some scholars have favoured St John’s timescale as being the more accurate.
Either way, it seems, you pays your money and you makes your choice. But the fact is that Bread was imbued with a significance beyond it just being a convenient loaf from the freezer. Pitre asserts that as the priests were getting ready the bread and wine of the Presence ready for the Sabbath/ Passover feast the next day, Jesus knew exactly what he was doing in the Upper Room. He was not simply revealing himself as the new Passover (the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world), but as the new bread and wine of the presence, who would be offered the next day at Calvary on the cross. Pitre acknowledges that sometimes scholars may say, “How could Jesus have expected his Jewish disciples to get their heads around the idea of bread and wine containing, and in a real way becoming his very presence?” His answer to them is that as Jews they would have known that every Sabbath day the bread of the presence would be offered in the Temple. So, he argues, it wouldn’t take much to move from the bread of the presence in the Old Testament to the bread of the presence in the New Testament and realize that what was just a shadow in the old covenant (and in the old temple), has now become a reality.
Was this something of which the stranger, walking with the pair on the road to Emmaus, was talking about. Was he opening their eyes to the wonder of God’s presence in bread and wine, now made new in the sacrifice of Jesus, prefigured in the offering of bread and wine. We do not know. But we do know that their hearts burned within them as he opened the scriptures to them afresh.And we do know that as bread was broken, they recognised the risen Christ alive with them, and, forgetting their tiredness and despondency, returned in haste to Jerusalem, to tell what had happened to them on their journey, and how the risen Lord had been made known to them in them in the breaking of the bread.
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Rectory Ramblings 