Broken (body). (1 Co 11:24). It is interesting that Christ in the Passover implies but never states that the breaking of bread is the prophetic breaking of His body and of messianic prophecy itself. It is for Paul to give this interpretation. Christ says that the Passover bread is His body, but only Paul says it represents the broken body of Christ fulfilled, in 1 Co 11:24.
In Luke 22:19, the bread is “given”; the breaking and eating of the bread are for remembrance of Him. In Matthew 26:26 and Mark 14:22, Jesus broke it and commanded the disciples to eat. For the wine, Christ is more elaborate about its meaning, interpreting it as the blood of the New Testament, its life force, “which is shed for many” “for the remission of sins” in Mark 14:24, Mat 26:28, and Luke 22:20.
Christ’s body is broken in symbolism at the Last Supper, and His blood of the wine is “poured out” (Phillipians 2:17).1 Both bread and wine, body and blood, are presently consumed. But what is really being consumed?
Christ’s body, the bread, is for “remembrance,” referring to the consumed (read, understood, believed) OT prophetic promises. The body will be shamefully treated, humiliated, scourged, spit upon, broken. But within that body is the blood, its life force, which is the particular promise of the death of the Messiah, and by extension the resurrection. Jesus says in the present tense these are broken and shed, but this is referring to the future, sure fulfillment of the Word of God that predicted them.
Compare Zec 12:10 and Isa 53:5, 10. The blood is said for the remission of sins because its exegetical truth and historical expression is the final capstone, confirmation, and completion of Christ’s (the PW) authenticity and truth before it is vindicated by resurrection. It is also for the Word the most difficult one to accept. The resurrection is then God’s seal that such a faith upon the fulfillment of these Messianic oracles, the Word of God, is the only form of essential righteousness, that resurrection itself also being a Messianic oracle.
“Bread” and body” are the prophetic scriptures of the Old Testament which have bear relatively easy 1-to-1 correspondences of promise-fulfillment. Blood is a little harder to swallow, but just as scripturally attested. “Body” is the corpus of the Prophetic Word of the Messiah to come, who will be rejected. But “blood” is a particular organ of that body in Messiah’s death. The spiritual life of that oracular body is the spiritual organ of the death of Messiah when that prophetic body is drained of it. Before this, it is the difficult but integral future blood, and after it is the integral blood of redemption so believed fulfilled.
Blood, or the present and coming life of the prophetic body, is blood which must be completely drained from it, killing it, in order for that the restoration of that body is to be a permanent moral fixture of history.
A mere beating of the scriptures leading to its death is not a historically sufficient cause for its death (prophetic failure); it must be completely emptied of its lifeblood, thus its life force, taking it beyond any conceivable means for natural revival, in order for God to perform its ultimate restoration.[1]
The prophetic scriptures and Messianic prophecy are self-resolving and represent the end of the signification process. A broken body, as with that of Christ, is the shameful and scandalous treatment of the body of the prophetic scriptures which are re-interpreted, denied, and misapplied by the religious leaders. It would then take only the triumphant fulfillment of the greatest of all prophecies, Messiah’s death and by extension the resurrection, to restore honor to them, confirm them as forever true, and raise it as a rallying signal to the world under which the goodness of God saves.
[1] The so-called “swoon theory” is in fact the same forced conclusion of Rabbinic Judaism: a rejected Messiah is acceptable, but not his death. Corrupt Judaism found a way to revive the scriptures they destroyed of its dominating Messianic emphasis by an emphasis on personal, bodily law-keeping, instead of faith in Christ’s fulfillment of the prophecies by offering himself up to death as the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.
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