“And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.” (1 Corinthians 11:24 KJV)
When Jesus broke this bread and passed it around for those at the table, what kind of bread was He passing around? When you look at paintings of the last supper you usually see these small loaves of bread near everyone’s plate. Yet, this was a passover meal that they were eating. “Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the passover must be killed. And he sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the passover, that we may eat.” (Luke 22:7-8 KJV) Do you recall passages like Leviticus 23:6 which clearly indicated that at such feasts the diet was unleavened bread? Why unleavened bread? For starters, yeast takes time to rise and there was no time in the original passover night to delay for such things because the appointed time was that very night. Jesus had also made a connection between leaven and sin in Matthew 16 in His warnings about the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. One might conclude that it would be equally reasonable foreseeing the events that were to transpire that night that there would be a lack of time for rising bread that night as well. Yet, this meal was at the end of Jesus’s life. All that could have risen in Him should have by now. All the questioning He had been through. All the harassment they had given Him. We are about to see in His “trial” that even then no one is able to come up with leaven on Him. So, when He passes around broken bread to be eaten as a representation of His body, He is passing around unleavened bread.
During such traditional “Lord’s supper” meals do we see the bread as unleavened simply because that was the tradition, or do we see the reason that it is legitimately and literally without ferment? Our desire to manage our situations perpetuates itself throughout all we do and the entire situation. When our surrender to Jesus is complete He is then able to remake all things.
“Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” (1 Corinthians 5:6-8 KJV)