Jesus did not come to start a new religion. His famous “Last Supper” was a Passover Seder—an annual event he had taken part in since childhood.1 But that particular year, as he observed Passover with his disciples, Jesus made a shocking announcement. And what he said that night is the reason why he still has Jewish followers today.

When Jesus took the cup of wine after supper,2 he said, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”3 While that may sound gory and weird, remember, this is Passover—so talk of blood is pretty normal. To this day, we still recount how the angel of death passed over us because we put the blood of the lamb on the doorposts of our homes.

But why did Jesus talk about his blood—and more to the point, why did he identify himself with a “new covenant” if he was not starting a new religion? The answer is sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout the Tanakh.

What God Remembered at Passover

If you’re used to a traditional Passover haggadah, you’ll recall the part where God heard the people of Israel groaning as we suffered in Egypt, and he remembered his covenant.4

Toward the beginning of the Passover story, there’s this quick flashback to the covenant that God made with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—promising a land and a nation of descendants that would eventually bring blessing to all the people of the earth. The Bible talks about covenants as binding agreements5 and this agreement could not be kept as long as we were slaves in Egypt.

So God tells Moses that he has come to free his people from slavery in Egypt, adding, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the LORD your God” (Exodus 6:7).

Which is why, after God delivered our people from slavery, he gave us the law—to solidify the relationship by making it clear how we were supposed to live as his people. He promised blessings if we obeyed the law and curses if we did not.6 This is often referred to as the Covenant at Sinai. We collectively promised to obey.7

What Does God Take Us For?

What does it mean for God to take us for his people? Does it sound like we’re pieces of property—still slaves but with a different owner? And what does it mean for us to know that he is the Lord our God? Does it seem kind of authoritarian and outdated—like the reason a lot of people don’t want to be “religious”?

The part where God calls us into a relationship that may sound too close for comfort.

If we see the Passover story through that lens, we might enjoy all the food, family, and fun of celebrating how he set us free from Pharaoh—while choosing to “pass over” the part where God calls us into a relationship that may sound too close (and include too many obligations) for comfort.

But there is another way to look at it. What if being taken is not always a bad thing? Think of marriage. At weddings, the officiant says, “do you take” this man or woman to be your husband or wife. When the couple vows to “take” one another, they are actually making a promise to give.

When you take someone to be something to you, it’s a commitment. You’re giving them yourself.

Married or single, we all commit ourselves to people and things that we love. And we give ourselves (our hearts, our time, and our resources) to those people and things. It works the same way with God. When he takes us as his people, he gives us himself to know, love, and depend on.

God really wants us to understand that dynamic. That is why, in the Bible, he continually describes himself as the one who brought us out of slavery, who fed us, who fought for us, who loves us, and who is keeping his covenant promise to us—even to this very day.

If God is so committed to the Jewish people, you’d think it would inspire us to be committed to him in return. And the Bible shows how, at times, we have been. But our record is far from perfect.

From the book of Exodus on, the Tanakh records the roller coaster of Israel’s response to God, alternately rejoicing in and rebelling against being his people. But eventually, our rebelling far outweighed the rejoicing.

It’s Not Because We’re Jewish

But let’s be fair, this is not a uniquely Jewish problem—it is a human problem that began long before our people existed.

From the beginning, human beings have not trusted God to be “our God.” The whole point about the first humans in Genesis eating the forbidden fruit is that they preferred to trust their own judgment, not God’s, about what is good and evil.

That may not sound so catastrophic but think about all the dysfunction, distrust, and hatred in the world. Where does it come from? Is it not billions of people doing their own version of what they think is right—or at least right for them?

The world is a mess—but God has never given up on us.

That’s not to say none of us is altruistic. But true altruism is based on an understanding of what is good and what people need. And without God’s take on that as creator, we don’t always get it right. So even well-intentioned attempts to help some groups of people can end up doing incredible harm to others. How many revolutions to free the oppressed have ended with tens of thousands dead and the revolutionary leaders becoming the new tyrants?

The world is a mess—but God has never given up on us. He created the Jewish people to be his people and to eventually bring the benefits of being his people to the rest of the world.

God’s Promise of a New Covenant

Through the prophets, God called us out for cheating on him, for running after whatever or whoever promised to satisfy us, for neglecting justice and mercy for others, and basically, for breaking the covenant. And things were going terribly for Israel as a result.

Then, like a beam of light piercing the darkness, God promised to restore and renew our relationship with him. That promise included a new covenant:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant… that they broke …

For this is the covenant that I will make . . . I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

… they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” Jeremiah 31:31-34

The new covenant was a promise of forgiveness—a promise that one day we would know God for who he truly is. And the joy of belonging to God would be so deeply embedded within us that we would not need an intricate system of dos and don’ts to set us apart as his people.[8]

This is the new covenant Jesus talked about at Passover—not a new religion, but the newly restored relationship with God that he promised us so long ago, through Abraham and Moses.

Again With the Blood?

So why was Jesus’ announcement of the new covenant so dark? Why did he refer to it as the new covenant in his blood?

Jesus understood his role of Messiah in terms of Isaiah 53, which includes the following:

All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
…like a lamb that is led to the slaughter . . .

Out of the anguish of his soul

he shall see and be satisfied;

by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.

Just like the blood of the lamb over our doors caused the Angel of Death to spare us on that first Passover, Jesus offered his blood to spare us from the deadly consequences of our rejecting God.

When Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”[9] he was experiencing far more than the physical pain of an incredibly cruel execution. In spiritual terms, you could say that he was experiencing God’s response to our rejection—which is to leave us on our own, fully cut off from the ultimate source of love, light, and life is ultimate death and darkness. That is what Jesus was saving us from by enduring it himself.

This was—and is—amazing love: incredibly courageous, gracious, and fully committed love. It’s a love that makes it possible for us to trust God, and it is why many people, including many Jewish people, still follow Jesus today.

For Reflection

Imagine God telling you that he wants to take you to be his person. Does that feel like a good thing?

Endnotes

1. Luke 2:41-42

2. Today’s Seder has more moving parts than in the days of Jesus. We can think of his Seder as version 1.0, while today we are at version 2.0, 3.0, or even higher. We don’t know how many cups of wine they had in Bible times, but today the cup we have after the meal is the third cup, often referred to as the cup of redemption or the cup of blessing.

3. Luke 22:20

4. Exodus 6:5: When the text says God remembered his covenant, it does not mean that he had forgotten it; God remembered it in the sense that he was about to act on it.

5. The Hebrew for covenant is brit, as in brit milah or bris (the “covenant of circumcision). “Cutting” (the shedding of blood) was a common way to ratify ancient near Eastern agreements as it showed the seriousness of the commitment.

6. Deut 11:26-28

7. Exodus 24:7

8. That is not to say there would no longer be objective standards for how to live (think Ten Commandments), but our desire to live out these standards would come straight from the heart. And it doesn’t mean we would no longer be set apart as Jewish people—but we would be able to do so without angst over all the minutiae that religious authorities had added over the years (see what Jesus said about this in Matthew 15:1-9 and Mark 7:7-13).