The context which makes the cultic
reading the most plausible is Jesus’ own activity. He has just occupied the
Temple, where he made the issue of purity paramount. That incursion is no temperamental
outburst, but the culmination of a program which had stressed forgiveness and
genuine ownership of what was offered as requirements of acceptable sacrifice
in the Temple. But once Jesus’ halakhah clearly is not to be accepted in
the Temple, the character of his meals with his disciples changes. Earlier,
they have been enactments of the purity which was demanded within sacrifice.
Now, that social purity, and especially the food and drink consumed, are the
sacrifice. God, Jesus, teaches is better pleased with that “blood” and “body”
than with what is offered incorrectly on Mount Zion.
The meal still anticipates the kingdom, on the assumption that the Temple will be the seat of God’s ultimate rule, but Jesus at the end of his ministry as surely withdraws from ordinary cultic practice as the sectarians of Qumran did. The issue of the withdrawal is purity, rather than priestly succession and calendar, but the breech is all the more dramatic for Jesus’ proximity to the Temple. Moreover, and crucially, Jesus begins to refer to what he offers in the meals which enact the purity he strove for as his “blood” and “body.” Where the Essenes longed for the time when they would control the offering of sacrifice, they did s outside of Jerusalem, and in the meantime many of them took part in the regular worship of the Temple. Their intramural theory was far more confrontative than their extramural practice. By contrast, Jesus’ theory of purity, although it affirmed the centrality of the cult as it was then conducted, resulted in a demand for practice which put him in opposition to the authorities of the Temple over the question of the location of the vendors; those authorities were correctly informed that the teacher who had demanded a new view of purity in the Temple was acting in a way which set up alternative cult, a surrogate of sacrifice, and he was found guilty of blasphemy. . . . . After Jesus’ occupation of the Temple, and his failure to reform cultic worship, he presented his “blood” and “body” as the replacement of conventional sacrifice. Matthew 26:26-2/Mark 14:22-24//Luke 22:19, 20 (with v. 17 in respect of the correct order)/1/1 Corinthians 11:24, 25 reflect that development clearly, although in an indirect and elaborated form. At the level of dominical practice, however, the sense of the gesture is plain; pure wine and bread, shared in a community created by mutual forgiveness, is a better sacrifice than the priesthood of the Temple is willing to permit. (Bruce Chilton, A Feast of Meanings: Eucharist Theologies from Jesus through Johannine Circles [Supplements to Novum Testamentum LXXII; Leiden: Brill, 1994], 69-70, 71)
