Eucharistic meditation

1 Corinthians 5:7: purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened. For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.

As Pastor Sumpter has pointed out, the rules for using Manna are similar to the rules for Passover. Israelites were to collect enough for each man’s eating, according to the mouths in each tent, and they were to leave no leftovers. In the middle of this second month, exactly a month after the first Passover, they celebrate a second Passover, with manna. And this second Passover, like the first, inaugurates a second Feast of Unleavened Bread, when Israel is supposed to be purging out the leaven of Egypt.

Israel eventually moves on to Sinai, where they celebrate the first feast of Pentecost in the third month. Yahweh descends to the mountain in his Spirit cloud and gives the law on tablets of stone, anticipating the future Pentecost when he will write with his finger on tables of the human heart. Israel moves on past their second Passover and their Feast of Unleavened Bread, but in another sense Israel remains in a perpetual state of unleavened bread until they celebrate the next Passover just after they’ve crossed the Jordan into the land. For forty years in the wilderness, Israel is cleansing out the old leaven.

Israel clearly needs more un-leavening. Though they have left Egypt, Egypt hasn’t left them. They regularly pine for the pleasures of Egypt. Some want to go back, and others want to reproduce Egypt in the wilderness, setting up an Egyptian calf to worship. When they are first sent into the Promised Land, they balk. Instead of taking their inheritance, they want to go back to the safe slavery of Egypt. If they are forced into a forty-year feast of unleavened bread, a feast of purging, it’s because they need it.

Paul says something similar about our feast. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us, and because that final Passover is offered, we are called to keep a feast of unleavened bread, continuously purging out the old leaven of malice and wickedness.

In fact, this meal itself cleanses. At this table we anticipate of a future feast of eternal joy, but for now this table is also a continuous food test. The Lord comes near to judge us, and some are sick and dying because they fail the food test. Here the Lord feeds us as He fed Israel with bread from heaven, even Jesus Christ, to humble us and to expose what is on our hearts, so that we can purge the old leaven, and become a new lump.