When the junior senator from Illinois officially entered the presidential race in February of 2007, he did so not in Chicago, his hometown, but rather some 200 miles south-west of there, at an outdoor rally in Springfield. The assembled crowd, he declared, stood ‘in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together’. Likewise, a little later in the speech, Senator Obama said this: ‘Divided, we are bound to fail. But the life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible.’Footnote 1
I want to make four brief points about this bit of political theatre as a kind of overture and entry into the topic of the relation between the Christian Eucharist and the Jewish Passover meal. First, the operative rhetorical play that brisk February morning was an exercise in political typology: that is, it was Senator Obama's attempt to present his own candidacy, and by extension his own leadership and his own person, in terms of the candidacy, leadership and person of Abraham Lincoln. That is precisely how the great majority of major media outlets covered the story; the evocation of Lincoln was either the story's lead or appeared in the second paragraph of most print coverage.Footnote 2 Accordingly, the first point is that we are dealing here with a particular rhetorical, figural move we might call a performative type.
Second, this typological figure was carried off not only by means of speech, but also – and principally – by means of non-verbal cues and arrangements having less to do with words and more to do with the overall composition of the situation: its geographical location, its calendrical location (Lincoln's birthday is 12 February; Obama announced on the nearest Saturday to that date, 10 February) and not least, the fact that a ‘tall, gangly, self-made lawyer’ from Illinois stood that very morning at the podium. Moreover, here was a tall, gangly, self-made lawyer from Illinois who also happened to be an African American, the first African American to enter a race for the presidency of the United States with a serious chance of winning it. In that sense, implicitly at least, Obama may be understood to lay claim to being an icon for the fulfilment – or at any rate the progress – of Lincoln's legacy as it relates to slavery in the United States.Footnote 3
Most of these evocations of Lincoln were effectively communicated; the major print press coverage provides sufficient evidence of that. But of the more than 2,600 words in the senator's actual address, only a few mention Lincoln directly. In fact, those few words might best be described as rhetorical ‘triggers’ which helped set off a whole network of associations already built in to the rally's structure and scenario.
Third, this performative, largely non-verbal typological figure does not conform particularly well to the garden-variety definition of typology commonly found in Christian sources, as well as in many sources critical of Christianity. That is, it does not conform particularly well to the so-called ‘prophecy and fulfilment’ model of typological interpretation, according to which an Old Testament personality or episode is understood as a ‘type’, prefiguration or ‘shadow’ of a New Testament personality or episode, which in turn is understood as the former's ‘antitype’, completion or fulfilment. In fact, by virtue of its widespread association with this prophecy-fulfilment model, Christian typology in general is often deemed to be, to greater or lesser degrees, fundamentally supersessionist in character, since in this unidirectional model of prophecy and fulfilment, the occurrence of the latter seems to render the former either obsolete, no longer necessary or, at best, still venerable but nevertheless subordinate.Footnote 4
But the basic dynamic, direction and structure of this prophecy-fulfilment, supersessionist typological model manifestly does not fit with what happened that February morning at the Old State Capitol in Springfield. The event did not cast President Lincoln as somehow prophetic in relation to Obama's own candidacy, nor did Obama cast himself as somehow superseding or superordinate to President Lincoln. On the contrary, Obama did two things: first, he cast himself precisely as subordinate to Lincoln, in the sense of ‘standing in his shadow’, or ‘walking in his footsteps’. And second, Obama cast himself as coordinate to Lincoln, in the sense of being a contemporary version of him for another age – colloquially, we might say, ‘another Lincoln’. But even here, the strength and gist of the coordination claim relies as much or more on Lincoln's prestige and political legitimacy as it does on Obama's, such that even the coordination claim rhetorically leans on the subordination claim. In other words, even and especially a ‘new Lincoln’ relies for his own credibility and legitimacy on the ‘original Lincoln’ of old.
Theoretically, at least, it may be that one day down the road, the ‘new Lincoln’ eventually surpasses the original in some sense – but that claim had no place in Obama's argument in Springfield. Indeed, that claim simply did not arise. Rather, Obama's rhetorical bid was to position himself as an heir to Lincoln's legacy and so as ‘another Lincoln’ in just that sense. As such, he aimed in no way to degrade Lincoln's personal prestige and political legitimacy, but instead to evoke and affirm that prestige and legitimacy and then to trade on them. In other words, his bid was to persuade his audience that his candidacy stood under Lincoln's mantle and tradition. In this sense, the typological figure involved no claim to supersession – and in fact, to sharpen the point, any claim to supersession would have seriously undermined the rhetorical move, since the move depends on exalting the mantle under which one claims to stand. Not supersession, then, but rather the reverse: call it, ‘subsession’. That is, Obama's manœuvre involved laying claim to a position underneath, so to speak, a particular mythohistorical pedigree and paradigm, precisely as a contemporary version of it for a new day. The implicit typological argument here goes something like this: political deliverance came once in this way, and behold, it is doing so again. The present and the future are framed under the terms of the familiar, cherished, prestigious past. Call it not supersessionist, but rather subsessionist typology.
To sum up these three points: in this bit of political theatre in Springfield (which of course is only a relatively recent, well-known example of a common political and cultural gambit), the rhetorical figure at play is typological, performative and subsessionist. In the rest of this article, I want to argue that the Christian Eucharist is, too, and that it is so in relation to the ancient Jewish Passover meal.
Eucharist and Passover
Contemporary Christian construals of the Eucharist, both in doctrine and in practice, generally tend to subordinate, de-emphasise, obscure or omit altogether explicit reference to the Passover meal. And yet the key Gospel texts in which the Eucharist's institution is variously narrated – the very texts and institution allegedly ‘remembered’ in eucharistic rites – are arguably unintelligible apart from Passover. Matthew, Mark and Luke each explicitly name the supper as a Passover meal meticulously and miraculously directed, dramatically hosted and ‘eagerly desired’ by Jesus himself (Luke 22:15). And while John's chronology places the last meal just prior to Passover, he thereby coordinates Jesus’ death with the festival's Day of Preparation, thus typologically figuring Jesus as a Passover lamb. Thus at the heart of Christian doctrine and practical life sits a particular theological problem: namely, precisely how to relate the distinctively Jewish character of the Eucharist's origins as narrated in the New Testament to the distinctively Christian character of eucharistic doctrine and liturgy.
This question is a crucial case study in the theology of Christian–Jewish relations, since it involves no less than the respective pinnacles in each religion's liturgical calendar (Pesach and Triduum) and narrative treasury (Exodus and Last Supper). Accordingly, how Passover and Eucharist are theologically related will model and epitomise how Judaism and Christianity are related more generally. Moreover, in recent years, scholarly attention to the so-called ‘Jewishness of Jesus’ – and likewise, the Jewishness of Christian origins more broadly – have laid groundwork for new theological reconsideration of eucharistic doctrine and so by extension, for new eucharistic liturgical forms more explicitly framed by the biblical narratives of the Exodus and the Passover meal.Footnote 5
But these new doctrinal and liturgical possibilities simultaneously raise new questions. How can Christian theologians and practitioners interpret the Eucharist in terms of Passover without compromising Christian distinctiveness, or appearing to discredit Jewish practices, or giving rise to a specious, hybrid ‘Christian Seder’? How can Jewish origins be named in Christian liturgical contexts without crude co-option, supersession or theft? How can scriptural texts pertinent to Passover and Eucharist be fruitfully coordinated and understood in ways which provide a sound basis for developing eucharistic doctrine?
To engage such questions, I propose an approach illustrated by the political overture with which this article began. That is, I propose that eucharistic doctrine and practice be developed according to the idea that the Eucharist is related to the Passover meal typologically, in the performative, subsessionist sense just described. And I want to ground this proposal not in the 2008 election and not even first of all in the New Testament itself, but rather in a form of scriptural poetics already quite common in the Hebrew Bible.
Renewal of Past Wonders
Let me turn, then, to the work of two Jewish scholars, Michael Fishbane and Yair Zakovitch. In his essay, ‘The “Exodus” Motif/The Paradigm of Historical Renewal’, Fishbane argues that the narrative of Israel's flight from Egypt in Exodus 1–15 depicts that event as ‘the consummate expression of divine power and national redemption’ and so as ‘the temporal-historical paradigm in whose image all future restorations of the nation are to be manifest. A concord between the first and succeeding redemptions is the issue, for each generation looked to the first exodus as the archetypal expression of its own future hope.’Footnote 6 In other words, as the Hebrew scriptural canon took shape, the exodus from Egypt emerged as a theological-literary motif, ‘a lens of historical perception and anticipation’.Footnote 7 Fishbane writes of a ‘layering of Israel's historical consciousness’, which ‘fit new events to the archetypal armature of its formative experiences’.Footnote 8 Past events were retro-fitted to this armature and future events were pro-fitted to it, precisely because, Fishbane argues, for Israel, in and through the exodus from Egypt, ‘the once and future power of the Lord of history is revealed’.Footnote 9 The typological argument here goes something like this: Israel's deliverance came once in this way, and behold, it is doing so – or will surely do so – again. Fishbane puts it this way: ‘the future redemption will be a renewal of past wonders’.Footnote 10
The prophet Micah provides a case in point, as he foretells a time when Israel will arise from the ruins of the Assyrian empire. First, the prophet speaks to God: ‘Tend Your people, the flock of Your inheritance, with Your staff; / Let those that dwell alone, like stubble in a field, pasture in Bashan and Gilead, as they used to. / [And then God's response:] “I will surely show them wonders as in the days when you came up from the land of Egypt”’ (Micah 7:14–15). Of this passage, Fishbane writes: ‘The reference to exodus here serves to articulate the felt inner unity of Israel's history with God.’Footnote 11 The past is prologue, and so deliverance tomorrow will come according to the pattern of deliverance already revealed in days of old.
Likewise, Isaiah prophesies Israel's return from exile as nothing less than a second exodus: ‘There will be a paved way for the remnant of His people, which will remain from Assyria, / Even as it was for Israel when he came up from the land of Egypt’ (Isa 11:16). Again, in Isaiah 43, the exodus event is cast as a ‘former thing’ to which the ‘new’ salvation and restoration will correspond.Footnote 12 And moreover, in Isaiah 19, the motif is transposed such that even Egypt will turn to the God of Israel and be delivered and thus the exodus pattern becomes, as Fishbane puts it, ‘No longer . . . the private tradition of Israel alone . . . [but] the symbolic form through which a messianic moment is envisaged. Egypt, the first oppressor of Israel, will one day have its share in an “exodus”-type event.’Footnote 13
Further examples of this typological play on exodus throughout Hebrew scripture can be reproduced indefinitely from other prophets, the psalms and the legal and historical narratives. Indeed, Yair Zakovitch, in his book, ‘And You Shall Tell Your Son’: The Concept of the Exodus in the Bible, argues that ‘No other event in the history of Israel is given so much attention by biblical writers as is the Exodus – as many as one hundred and twenty references in a variety of literary genres’ across the canon.Footnote 14 But Zakovitch's particular interest is in what he calls the relatively ‘covert’ references, the myriad implicit, structural ways in which the exodus paradigm ‘shapes the recounting of events both before and after it: the dawn of history and the time of the patriarchs, as well as events and periods long after the Exodus itself’.Footnote 15 This range includes a wide variety of biblical characters who are, as Zakovitch puts it, ‘assimilated to Moses’, or ‘formed in the image of Moses’, from Joshua to Gideon to David to Elijah and Elisha.Footnote 16 For Zakovitch, the premise and purpose of this vast typological network of association and resonance ultimately has to do with divine pedagogy and providence. What Fishbane calls ‘the once and future power of the Lord of history’, the interpretative historical key revealed in the exodus from Egypt, Zakovitch describes this way: ‘the impression of repetition or even periodicity in history is created to teach that the world is not governed by chance but by a well defined plan, discernable in patterns set by divine providence . . . [T]o believe the world is governed by its God and creator and the future foreseeable according to past events, awakens confidence.’Footnote 17
For both Fishbane and Zakovitch, then, the key terms for conceiving the relation between the exodus from Egypt and other remembered or anticipated redemptions are these: ‘concord’, ‘correspondence’, ‘paradigm’, ‘pattern’ and so on. If Isaiah's new exodus is prophesied in terms of the old exodus, this is by no means to supersede the old event, but rather precisely to subsede it, that is, to narrate the new exodus as another manifestation of the basic archetype of salvation already revealed as the ‘once and future power of the Lord of history’. In other words, for ancient Israel, this is how deliverance happens. It happens typologically, because God is a typological poet. Indeed, if a new or anticipated deliverance were described in terms entirely disconnected from what Fishbane calls ‘the paradigm of historical renewal’ outlined in Israel's exodus from Egypt, such novelty would appear suspect and unpersuasive. The divine signature of authenticity, we might say, is correspondence with the exodus motif.
This typological logic takes the form of thought: ‘just as . . . so also’. Just as Moses led Israel across the Sea of Reeds, so also Joshua led Israel across the Jordan River. Just as God delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt, so also God will deliver Israel from bondage in Babylon. And by contrast, this typological logic manifestly does not take the form of thought native to supersessionist typology: ‘Whereas . . . but now’. Whereas Moses led Israel, but now Joshua will lead Israel. Or, to return to our opening illustration, whereas Abraham Lincoln led the United States, but now Barack Obama will. Such ideas simply do not arise and in fact they invert the rhetorical move actually at play in these texts. The typology here is not supersessionist; it is decidedly subsessionist. ‘Just as . . . so also’, according to the pattern of old.
Another Exodus
And so, too, I contend, in the case of the Christian Eucharist and the Jewish Passover meal. By now, I trust that my argument is beginning to come into view: Matthew, Mark, Luke and in his own way, John, by connecting the Last Supper with the Passover meal and festival, mean to typologically cast the supper as an inauguration of a new exodus – or perhaps better, not a ‘new’ exodus but rather ‘another exodus’, a contemporary version of the classic paradigm and so one that by no means seeks to render that paradigm obsolete, but rather to trade on its prestige and theological legitimacy. As Micah and Isaiah and so many others already have testified, the exodus paradigm is the way God delivers Israel – and behold, the New Testament evangelists insist, deliverance is happening again.
Thus for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus’ last meal signals another departure from another house of bondage – and moreover, it typologically telescopes the broad exodus journey, since the climactic language of ‘blood of the covenant’ evokes Exodus 24:8, the ceremony led by Moses at the foot of the mountain of God which arguably serves as the governing telos of the Exodus narrative itself. After all, the reason given in Exodus 1–15 for Israel's liberation is not so that they might be unfettered in some abstract sense, but precisely so that they might be free to worship God in the wilderness, and that freedom comes to fruition in the blood ceremony in Exodus 24.Footnote 18 Even in the Eucharist's words of institution, then, an exodus typology is at work – though Christians often overlook or neglect it.
Accordingly, Christian eucharistic doctrine and practice should develop interpretations of the supper in light of its subsessionist, typological relation to the Israelite Passover meal. In both constructive theology and liturgical life, the Eucharist should be invested – at least significantly and even, I would argue, primarily – with exodus themes: liberation from bondage; intimacy with God in wilderness; covenantal relationship; trials along the wandering journey; and so on. To be sure, the Eucharist should not be understood or practised as a ‘Christian Seder’,Footnote 19 both because the Jewish Seder is Judaism's distinctive, subsessionist typological development of the exodus motif and because, as Israel Yuval and others have recently argued, the Seder as we know it today is likely a rabbinic development subsequent to the life of Jesus of Nazareth.Footnote 20 Accordingly, the Seder may well have developed in connection with and contradistinction from simultaneously developing eucharistic ceremonies – a possibility which provides a tantalising template for helping to explain how we have arrived where we are today, with so much eucharistic practice seemingly having little or nothing to do with the Exodus from Egypt. That is, it may well be that over the course of the Eucharist's history, both crude anti-Judaism and more subtle but nonetheless distorting tendencies to define Christianity over and against Judaism effectively drew eucharistic doctrine and practice away from its biblical, exodus-orientated roots. In any case, however, both the Jewish Seder and the Christian Eucharist are properly understood as distinct, subsessionist, parallel typological developments of the Israelite exodus motif, and on the Christian side of that parallel, this opens up an important direction for contemporary doctrinal and liturgical development today.
A New Passover?
Liturgically, part of what Christian churches require are new verbal liturgical materials: new eucharistic prayers, for instance, or more common use of already existing eucharistic prayers which emphasise exodus themes. But much of what may help most in this regard may well be non-verbal, or sparsely verbal. As in the political illustration with which we began, the Eucharist should function as a subsessionist, performative type and the best designs in this regard may have less to do with speech and more to do with the overall composition of the situation. Well placed words may act as concise, rhetorical ‘triggers’ which help set off a network of associations already built in to the liturgical structure and scenario. For example, a brief, judiciously chosen reading from Exodus could introduce the meal, thus setting up the ancient liberation from Egyptian slavery as a kind of backcloth against which the supper's typological allusions may more clearly stand out. The Eucharist is, to borrow a phrase from Erich Auerbach, ‘fraught with background’Footnote 21 – and so part of the challenge is to renew Christian familiarity with that background, both in liturgical and other Christian-educational contexts, precisely so that the sacrament may be more richly understood and celebrated.
And this brings us to what is finally at stake here, in my view. The kind of framework I propose in these pages can help clarify the way Christianity and Judaism are related generally, and it can do so in terms of two of the most privileged liturgical practices in each tradition – and I take this as no small good. To recap, I propose we understand the two religions as parallel, sister traditions, each of which distinctively develops the sacred scriptures of ancient Israel, often by way of subsessionist typological forms and, crucially, often by way of key exodus images and themes. Vertically or diachronically, then, the Christian Eucharist is a subsessionist, performative, typological recapitulation of the ancient Passover meal. Horizontally or synchronically, a Christian Eucharist is a parallel, distinctive interpretation alongside and apart from contemporary Jewish Seders (themselves subsessionist, performative, typological recapitulations of the ancient Passover tradition in their own right).
Is the Eucharist a ‘new Passover’? It is, but only in a subsessionist sense: not a ‘new and improved Passover’, but rather ‘another Passover’, a meal conspicuously cast in the prestigious, ancient paradigm of deliverance and therefore standing underneath that familiar mantle, marked by that divine signature. In this way, for Christians, the Eucharist properly functions as testimony here and now to the ‘once and future power of the Lord of history’. God's deliverance came once in this way, and behold, it is doing so – and will surely do so – again. So far from a triumphalist ‘prophecy-fulfilment’ typology in which the ‘old’ is valuable only insofar as it serves as a signpost pointing to the ‘new’, eucharistic liturgies instead evince a ‘paradigm-rendition’ typology in which the new performance is clarified and authenticated precisely insofar as it corresponds to the old, exalted original.
This initial typological orientation, then, is nothing less than a reversal of the ‘prophecy-fulfilment’ model: that is, subsession is a reversal of supersession. This initial move, however, may well extend into a hermeneutical circle of Christian interpretation, an ongoing, reciprocal choreography in which the ‘old’ throws light on the ‘new’ and in turn, the freshly illuminated ‘new’ throws light on the ‘old’ and so on.Footnote 22 But the sine qua non of this potentially virtuous circle is the subsessionist orientation with which it begins and continually proceeds, for in order for that wheel to keep turning, the whole idea of the obsolescence, inferiority or subordination of the ‘old’ must be decisively ruled out. Christians may speak of a ‘new Passover’, a ‘new covenant’, a ‘New Testament’, Jesus as a ‘new Moses’ and so on – but only on subsessionist typological grounds. For the old and original Passover, covenant, testament, Moses and so on together constitute an indispensable part of what the church can only consider, to borrow Fishbane's phrase, ‘the archetypal expression of its own future hope’.
Indeed, from a Christian theological point of view, the principal argument I want to make for this approach is that it promises to help repudiate a kind of de facto Marcionism in Christian communities today, a phenomenon whereby Christians either simply lose track of the Old Testament background to the New or actively (though perhaps unwittingly) work towards cutting that background away. Alongside the long-standing and still urgent problem of Christian anti-Judaism, crypto-Marcionism is a major theological hazard of supersessionist conceptions of Christianity: in the end, any attempt to leave ancient Judaism behind is also an attempt to leave Jesus behind. To the extent that such attempts explicitly or implicitly hold sway, we Christians divide our own house – and we do so, with bitter irony, in the midst of one of the most important events in Christian life: the celebration of the eucharistic meal. In response to this state of affairs, we may say two things: first, as someone once said, a house divided cannot stand. And second, for Christians, there is no more appropriate place to carry out the work of restoration than around the eucharistic table, that banquet where all Christians sit, we may recall, as guests of a Jew.
