“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
I don’t think much about the concept of covenant, yet it’s a concept that is at the heart of the Lord’s Supper. All four accounts of the establishment of the Supper record that Jesus spoke of the cup as being the new covenant in his blood. Did the apostles think of Jeremiah 31 when they heard those words? Possibly, for Jeremiah spoke of the day when God would “make the covenant new,” when the law of the covenant would be written on the hearts of men. Rather than being physically sprinkled with the blood of the covenant, we are symbolically washed in the blood of Jesus as we accept the responsibilities of the new covenant.
As we share in the covenant meal, we make public our acceptance of the covenant that God has offered. We remember the sacrifice that brought the covenant into effect and we pledge ourselves to loyalty to the God who purchased our salvation through the death of his son. We are now his and he is our God. We have all come to know God and to be known by him. Having received forgiveness and cleansing from God, we commit ourselves to live lives of service to him.
The bread and the wine that we take are our covenant meal, the celebration of the pact that God has offered us and that we have joyfully accepted.