When the hour came, he took his place at the table and the apostles with him. He said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”
Past, present, and future are interwoven in Jesus’s last supper with his disciples. So it is for us as we experience communion with God. We look back to God’s grace poured out for us in Christ, especially in his suffering. We look forward to the time when God’s kingdom comes in full when God’s love and justice fill the earth. And we experience God’s presence right now through the reality of the Holy Spirit. God is there for us in past, present, and future.
Our passage from Luke today is the beginning of what we call the Last Supper, the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples before his death. Jesus knew what was coming. He knew his mortal life was about to end. Thus, he said to his disciples, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (22:15-16).
In Jesus’s last supper with his disciples, there was a remarkable interweaving of past, present, and future. Jesus shared how much he had been looking forward to this time, this present time with those he loved so dearly. He brought up the past, not his own past, but that of the Jewish people, by mentioning the Passover, the meal in which Jews remember how God set them free from slavery in Egypt. He also pointed to the future, by saying that he would not eat the Passover again “until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:16).
In this pregnant phrase, Jesus was pointing ahead both to what he was about to do and to the distant future when the kingdom of God would come in full. Jesus was about to die, taking the role of the sacrificial lamb who brings life. Even as the lambs sacrificed in the first Passover led to life for Israel, so Jesus’s own sacrifice would lead to life abundant and eternal for all. Yet our complete freedom, our comprehensive exodus, if you will, won’t come until the reign of God comes fully on the earth.
When Christians re-enact Jesus’s last meal with his disciples, in what we call “Communion” or “the Eucharist” or “the Lord’s Supper,” we also experience the interweaving of past, present, and future. We remember Jesus’s death on the cross in the past. We experience his grace in the present through the power of the Holy Spirit. And we look forward to the time when we will share this meal with Jesus and his people in the age to come (see 22:17-18; 1 Cor 11:26). Our hearts are filled with gratitude for what Jesus did in the past even as we feel a yearning hope for what is coming in the future.
Even in the midst of a pandemic, when it’s difficult or impossible for us to share in the Lord’s Supper as we ordinarily do, we can still experience the power and meaning of this last meal. As we meditate on Scripture, we join the last meal of Jesus in our God-inspired imaginations. We remember, not just this meal, but the suffering and sacrifice it represents. As we do, the Spirit of God who is fully present stirs up new thankfulness within us, making real our communion with the Triune God. And we yearn for the future when God’s kingdom comes in full when we will know God even as we are fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12) when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream (Amos 5:24).
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