At the Last Supper, Jesus held the cup of wine in his hand and said, “This is my blood of the covenant.” Matthew 26:28.
This is perhaps the most poignant verse in the New Testament. Jesus is looking at a drink of grape juice and he sees his own face reflected there.
The disciples are silent, transfixed, then they hear Jesus say quietly, ‘this is my blood, the blood of the covenant.’ All history has converged to this one moment. The face in the wine reveals the history of the universe.
But what is Jesus talking about? Firstly, what is a covenant? Strong’s concordance says a covenant is a contract, so in effect Jesus said, ‘this is my blood, the blood of the contract.’
What contract? And what contract is so important in the sight of God that it requires the outrage of a human life to fulfil it? To begin with, a contract is an agreement that something will be done, and it must be witnessed and dated to be valid.
Peter tells us plainly that, at a specific time in history, the contract was made. He said ‘He [Jesus] was chosen before the creation of the world,’ 1st Peter 1:20, and Revelation concurs saying he was ‘slain from the creation of the world.’
That is the when but on what date, who are the witnesses and what is the fine print?
It was witnessed by God’s triune self, Father, Creator and Holy Spirit; and the precise date was the sixth day of creation. The fine print is this: ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’
Two chapters afterwards, the contract stalled because Adam added the likeness, not of God, but of the serpent, Satan, to humanity.
Adam could not then fulfill the contract but the contract was still valid so the blood of the contract is called in, the blood of the life that went guarantor before ever man was created, ‘the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world,’ Revelation 13:8, or as John said earlier, ‘the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.’
Paul assures us that the contract to ‘make man in our image’ has not failed, it has been done in and through Jesus Christ, ‘the last Adam’ because, he said, Jesus ‘is the image of God.’ 2nd Corinthians 4:4.
And we see the face of Christ in the wine every time we celebrate the communion service because Jesus is ‘in the image of God’ for us. The last supper is the symbol of God’s everlasting covenant to make ‘man in his image.’
Elizabeth Price