The Cup of Blessing

Jesus drank the bitter cup of divine wrath so that His people may freely enjoy the cup of God’s blessing. Today, Sinclair Ferguson marvels at the wonder of Christ’s sacrificial love displayed for us in the Lord’s Supper.

On yesterday’s edition of Things Unseen, I asked a question: What do you think about when the Lord’s Supper is being celebrated in your church? Our minds, I think, can easily drift towards a kind of hazy dreaminess, can’t they? So, it helps us to have a particular truth on which to focus, like nails we can hang our thoughts on that will help us to fix our eyes on the Lord Jesus. After all, we need to receive more than just a small piece of bread and a tiny drink of wine; we need the blessing of meeting with the Lord Jesus Himself. In fact, the word I want to think about today is the word blessing, or if you want it to rhyme with yesterday’s word, proclamation, I think you could probably call it benediction.

It’s a word Paul specifically uses in connection with the Supper. In 1 Corinthians 10:16, he talks about the cup in the supper as “the cup of blessing that we bless.” If you use the New International Version, it’s translated, “The cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks,” but I don’t think that’s quite right nor did the translators of the English Standard Version. Paul uses a Greek word that comes from the verb eulogeō, “to bless.” It’s a verb which I think has lost the full weight of its biblical meaning today. But if we want to understand what the Lord’s Supper means, we need to recover its significance. And I find one of the most helpful ways to do that is by thinking about what may still be the most common use of the verb “to bless.” It’s when someone sneezes and we say, “Bless you.”

Why do we do that? Well, it may well go back to the Middle Ages, when sometimes a plague—the bubonic plague—swept away large proportions of the population of Europe. It was regarded as an indication of the curse and judgment of God. And guess what? Sneezing was one of its common symptoms, just as it was sometimes said in 2021 and 2022, “If you’ve got a sore throat, you’ve probably got Covid.” And so, saying “bless you” was actually a kind of prayer. It was saying: “May you not be under the curse. May you be blessed. May the curse be turned away from you.”

And that, of course, is what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. That’s what happened at the cross. Christ took the curse in order to give us the blessing. That’s how Paul puts it in Galatians 3:13, isn’t it? Christ became a curse for us that the blessing promised to Abraham might come not only to the Jews but also to the gentiles. It looks as though at the Last Supper, Jesus took the last cup of the Passover meal, which was called the “cup of blessing,” and gave it to His disciples and said that He Himself would not drink of the fruit of the vine until He drank it anew in His Father’s kingdom.

So, did our Lord not drink the cup of blessing, but instead give it to His disciples? Why would that be? Well, if we read on in the Gospels, we find the answer: Jesus was about to go to the garden of Gethsemane and having said to His disciples, “Take and drink,” His Father now pressed into His hands another cup and said, “My Son, take and drink.” That cup was ultimately the cup that was filled with the judgment curse of God against our sins, and Jesus drank it to the last bitter dregs. He said, you remember: “The cup that My Father gives Me to drink, the cup of the divine cursing, shall I not drink it so that my disciples may drink of the cup of blessing?”

What a wonderful picture of the gospel, isn’t it? Jesus drinks my cup, the cup of cursing. He gives me His cup, the cup of blessing. And I think this helps us to understand the Lord’s Supper better. It fills us with awe that Christ Jesus drank the bitter cup for my sake and out of deep love for me. And now He gives me the cup of blessing, which I want to bless, and as I receive it, I have fellowship with Him, and I’m able to praise Him for the wonder of His love.

That’s our second word about the Lord’s Supper—proclamation and benediction. We’ll come to a third word tomorrow, and so I hope you’ll join me then on Things Unseen.