by Dennis Gladden, By Green Pastures, ©2024
(Jul. 25, 2024) — One of the things I love about the Bible is how you can read it day after day for years and new insights still emerge.
For this reason, I want to return to Luke 22:14-20, the passage for a previous post.
The words of Jesus—Remember Me—deserve our attention again because Jesus is revealing another I AM along the lines of the I AM statements that John recorded in his gospel.
On this Passover night, when Jesus took the cup and bread and told His disciples in the Upper Room, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” He declared, “I AM the Passover.”
This isn’t a new teaching—Paul told the Corinthians, “Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7)—but Jesus’s command struck me with a new force as I prepared the last post.
Jesus took all the memories of that Passover night and wrapped them in Himself.
He and the disciples had eaten the bitter herbs, reminding them of their affliction under Pharaoh—their years of slavery and the days of hard labor.
They ate the unleavened bread, remembering how quickly their fathers fled Egypt. There was no time to mix yeast in the dough and wait for it to rise.
The meat recalled the cost of their freedom. A lamb, a year-old sheep or goat without blemish, died for each household.
They spent the evening, like the other households in Israel, remembering.
And then, Jesus took the bread and the cup and announced a whole new order.
Read the rest here.