The Eucharist: Accepting Our Covenant with God

There are some phrases we hear so often that we eventually just come to accept them as normal no matter how odd they may actually be. Take the phrase “kick the bucket” for instance. If you sit back and think about it, it is pretty absurd. What does dying have to with kicking or buckets? Daily life is full of these overlooked oddities, and even the Bible isn’t exempt. For example, take a look at Jesus’ words over the wine at the Last Supper in the Gospel of Matthew:

Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26:27-28)

We have heard these words a million times before, and we are so familiar with them that their weirdness usually goes right over our heads. However, if we read them closely, something should stick out to us like a sore thumb: what does it mean for the wine to be Jesus’ “blood of the covenant”? For us Catholics, the phrase “this is my blood” is understandable enough, but when you extend it with the words “of the covenant,” it seems to border on nonsense. What could that possibly mean? The key to understanding this odd phrase, I would suggest, lies in its Old Testament background, so if we want to really know what Jesus was talking about on that fateful night 2,000 years ago, we need to go back to one of the earliest parts of the biblical narrative.

Moses’ Blood of the Covenant

In the book of Exodus, after God rescued the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt, he brought them to Mt. Sinai and made a covenant with them. The entire story of this covenant-making ceremony covers several chapters of the book, so we won’t go over the entire thing here. For our purposes, we just need to note one key element of it.

Multiple times throughout the story, the Israelites agreed to obey all of God’s commands (Exodus 19:8; 24:3, 7), and right before they repeated this promise for the last time, they performed a strange ritual. First, the Israelites sacrificed some animals to God, and then Moses sprinkled some of the blood from these sacrifices onto the altar. Next, the people agreed one final time to do everything God commanded, and at the end of it all, Moses did something unexpected: he took the sacrificial blood and sprinkled it on the people, saying, “Behold the blood of the covenant which the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words” (Exodus 24:5-8).

This ritual is a bit disgusting to us modern westerners, but it was profoundly meaningful to the ancient Israelites. In fact, it had two meanings. The altar represented God, so by sprinkling blood on both the altar and the people, Moses was symbolizing two key elements of the covenant God was making with Israel. First, covenants join their parties together as family, so this ritual symbolized the new bond between God and the Israelites. As family, they were now bound by blood. Secondly, it was also a warning that if the people broke the covenant, their blood would be shed just like that of the animals whose blood was being sprinkled on them.

Jesus’ Blood of the Covenant

Once we understand that background, we can easily see why Jesus called the wine at the Last Supper his “blood of the covenant.” He wasn’t simply telling his disciples that it was his blood, although that was definitely part of it. He was also alluding back to this central event in Israel’s history and implying that his blood functioned just like the blood Moses sprinkled on the altar and the people at Sinai.

So when we receive the Eucharist (even if we only receive the host, we still consume the “blood of the covenant” because every part of the Eucharist contains Jesus’ body, blood, soul, and divinity), we are accepting the New Covenant just like the Israelites accepted the Old Covenant at Mt. Sinai. And just like the ancient Israelites, we too are agreeing to do everything God commands us to do under the New Covenant.

In other words, when we receive the Eucharist, we are agreeing to abide by all the teachings of our Catholic faith. Not just some of them, not just the ones we like, but all of them. What’s more, we are also calling down a curse of death upon ourselves if we break our covenant with God and fail to repent. However, unlike the Old Covenant, the punishment for breaking the New Covenant isn’t just physical death. It is spiritual death (Hebrews 10:26-31), and that is much worse.

So the next time you are at Mass, don’t just mindlessly receive Communion and then think about a million other things when you get back to your seat. Be conscious of what you are really doing. Realize that you are accepting an invitation to enter into a deep bond of kinship with God himself, and you are agreeing to obey everything he commands us through his Church. That is serious business, and we should never take it lightly.