The Last Passover

When we read the accounts of what happened in the Upper Room, we often call it the "Last Supper." Even though, of course, we continue to celebrate this supper in our Christian worship and thus, it really is to most of us, the first supper. This was the moment when Jesus poured out His blood and broke His body and told His disciples to do this in remembrance of Him. 

While it seems like perhaps this was, in fact, the first supper, the truth is that it was also the last Passover. 

Passover is a celebration that Israel had recognized since all the way back in their days in Egypt. In the first Passover, God told His people to prepare a feast for themselves and eat it with their shoes on because they were going to leave slavery that very night and walk out of their captivity and into His promise. And how were they going to do this?

He was going to go through the land of Egypt and kill every firstborn son. Every single one of them. There would not be a house in all of Egypt that was not touched by death that night. Only the blood on the doorposts in the land of the Israelites would keep them from knowing this death; He would literally pass over them. 

What the disciples didn't know in that Upper Room, what they didn't understand, was that that night would be the last night that a firstborn Son would die. 

And once again, God's people would walk out of slavery and into freedom, out of captivity and into His promise. 

That's what the Supper was about. 

That's why we still celebrate it. 

It wasn't the first Supper; it was the last Passover. From here on out, things were going to be different.