For Christians, the most important thing to note about Jesus is that he is not simply one more in a long line of prophets and teachers. He is not merely, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, or David, a good man who represents God. Rather, he consistently speaks and acts in the very person of God. In the words of N.T. Wright, Jesus is like a portrait of Yahweh, in all of its richness and complexity, sprung to life. When he claims interpretive authority over the Torah, when he forgives the sins of the paralyzed man, when he calls his disciples to love him above mother and father, indeed above their very lives, when he cleanses the temple, Jesus says and does things that only Yahweh could legitimately say and do.

And he declared that this act of unity must be repeated down through the ages as the defining gesture of the Israelite nation. The Passover meal, in a word, was a recovery (however imperfect) of the easy unity and fellowship of the Garden of Eden, God hosting a banquet at which his human creatures share life with him and each other.

Let us look a bit more closely at two Old Testament presentations of the sacred meal. At the very center of the Jewish story of salvation is the event of Exodus and Passover. The children of Israel, who had wandered into Egypt during the time of the patriarch Joseph, became, after many centuries, slaves to the Egyptians, compelled to build fortified cities and monuments for the pharaoh.

Ch. 1: The Eucharist as Sacred Meal, continued

But why then the prohibition? Why is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to them? The fundamental determination of good and evil remains, necessarily, the prerogative of God alone, since God is, himself, the ultimate good. To seize this knowledge, therefore, is to claim divinity for oneself—and this is the one thing that a creature can never do and thus should never try.