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Your Testimony About Me
I spent this past week with a few close fellow pastors studying the theology of wine. Yes, you read that right. My friends and I were awarded a grant that has enabled us to explore the ordinary elements of the Lord’s Supper and how they inform a life of feasting. We’re not only investigating bread and wine in their historical near eastern context, but also the physical cultural implications of these today. Does it “matter” what wine or bread we use? What about the process undertaken to produce them? How locally sourced they are? Is there something uniquely profound about the choice Jesus made to use bread and wine, or could he have used popcorn and beer?
One of the things I’ve explored in this study is the tradition and nature of a drink offering. As far back as Genesis 35 we see Jacob pour out a drink offering as his first act after being renamed Israel. Remember, this happened at Bethel, just after his strange dream of a ladder to heaven. But a veil-piercing offering is not a uniquely Judaic idea. Pagans, too, made the connection between a drink poured out and special access to another realm. If Odysseus wanted to visit the afterlife, he needed to find a thin place and pour out libations. So, for the pre-modern mind, the idea of blood in a cup was a preloaded image. Might there be a connection here to the cup of the new covenant, which was God’s wrath poured out and received by Christ, whose own spilled blood then opened the gate of Heaven? Well, I certainly think so.
Our passage this week comes toward the dregs of Paul’s own cup. He had once told the Philippians that he himself was a drink offering being poured out for their benefit. By the time he writes his final letter from prison in Rome, Paul tells Timothy he has already poured himself out completely. He has nothing left. Given the level of unrequited heart-pouring he does in this text, I can absolutely see why he would say that. Fortunately, even though his life is a potent imitation of Christ, Paul’s mission (and ours) depends not on his own noble self-sacrifice, but the all-sufficient blood of the new covenant shed once and for all.
-js