During the Passover meal they wouldn’t just use any sort of bread, they would use a special kind of bread called Matzah or unleavened bread was used, but why is this so important?
Read Matthew 26:26 and journal your thoughts
Whenever we read the Scriptures we usually see that yeast is viewed as a bad thing. This raises the question; what is so bad about yeast? Why is it that it is almost always seen as this negative thing? Today when we think about adding yeast to dough we think of opening a small packet and pouring this powder into the batch, but in their time and culture it looked very different. For the ancient Jews, yeast was added by taking a small piece of old bread and adding it to the new bread. Eventually the yeast from the old bread would be mixed throughout the new batch.
Now the ancient Rabbi saw this as a parallel to humanities sin. At one point we were pure, but now there is this old, rotten, nasty piece of us that is passed from generation to generation. While the leavened bread was seen in relation to our sin, unleavened bread was seen as pure, whole, it was seen as the way we should be.
So when Jesus holds up the bread and says “this is my body”, he is making a direct reference to this bread. Jesus is saying that he is like this bread that is untainted by the old, nasty, rotting bread of the past. That he is pure, he is what we should look like.
Today meditate on what it means that Jesus was like the Matzah, and meditate on what it means then when we live like Jesus
**NOTE: All the journals this week were inspired by Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith by Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg. I cannot recommend this book enough!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002AKPFT4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=engedrescen-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002AKPFT4
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