A pattern for the meal
The words for the bread and the cup — yours to make your own.
A pattern for the bread and the cup — offered as a help, not a script to perform. Any covenanted member may lead it; no one official is needed. Keep it at the real meal, and make the words your own. What follows is simple, and old.
The bread and the cup belong inside the supper, not beside it. As the meal begins, take the bread, give thanks, and break it; the cup comes after. Children are present for all of it.
Blessed are you, LORD our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.
On the night he was handed over, the Lord Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said: This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.
Break the bread, and pass it down the table.
Blessed are you, LORD our God, King of the universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.
In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying: This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.
Pass the cup.
As often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Then eat, and let the meal be glad.
The two blessings are the table blessings of Israel — the words our Lord himself would have spoken over bread and wine — and the words between them are the ones he gave that night (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). The Greek for “handed over” is the same root as paradosis, the thing handed down: at this table we receive what was handed to us, and we hand it on.
That first night was a seder. Jesus was not inventing a ceremony; he was keeping the oldest meal of his people — the Passover, Israel’s yearly remembrance of the night the LORD brought them out of Egypt, when the blood of a lamb on the doorpost turned death aside and an enslaved people walked out free.
Passover was already a “do this.” It had been given as a memorial forever, a feast kept year after year so that when the children asked what does this mean?, the story of redemption would be told again (Exodus 12). So when the Lord took the bread and the cup of that meal and said do this in remembrance of me, he was not starting from nothing. He reached into a remembrance already in their hands and filled it past the brim.
For now the meal looked two ways at once. Back, to the lamb and the exodus — God breaking the grip of Egypt. And forward, to a greater exodus he was about to accomplish: not out of Egypt but out of death itself, his own body given and his own blood poured, a new covenant sealed (Jeremiah 31). The cup he lifted “after supper” was the cup of redemption; in his hands it became the cup of a redemption larger still.
And it still looks forward. As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Every table points down the years to a table not yet set — the wedding feast of the Lamb, when the redeemed of every exodus sit down together. So we eat between the two: remembering the deliverance behind us, leaning toward the one ahead. One people, brought out of Egypt and out of the grave, kept by the same hand.