Jesus told his disciples that he had yearned to share Passover with them before he suffered (Luke 22:15), and then instituted what we now call the Lord’s Supper. But Luke reports that Jesus did it differently from how we do it: first cup, then bread, and then cup again (21:17-20). Wait, what?

The manuscript tradition is a bit jumbled right here. There are a number of early manuscripts that do not include the second mention of the cup, thereby giving us the sequence first cup, then bread. Apparently the copyists themselves were confused by the text they were copying, and tried to fix what they thought must be a previous scribe’s copying error by either adding in or subtracting out the second mention of the cup.

Moreover, the Words of Institution are different in the other synoptic gospels (Matthew 26:26-28; Mark 14:22-24), and different again in Paul (I Corinthians 11:23-26), and John has a last supper without any Words of Institution (John 13:1-17), and he puts his theology of the Sacrament after the feeding of the multitude (6:52-58). The variety of ways the New Testament writers report all this makes it useless to claim that the main thing about the Lord’s supper is to make sure we do this “the way Jesus did it.”

Instead, the main thing is to make sure we come to the Table and share in this Sacrament. We do this not because we know we’ve got it right, but because all the witnesses agree on the reality of this event. “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19).

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Just as we cannot live without food and drink, so we cannot live without you, O Lord. Sustain us with your broken body, with your blood poured out: for we know that without you, we will surely die.