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 (22:17-20). Wait, what?

The manuscript record is actually quite confusing right here. There are a number of early manuscripts which do not include the second mention of the cup, thereby giving us the sequence first cup, then bread. Apparently some of the copyists were uncertain about the text they were copying, and tried to “fix” what they thought must be a previous scribe’s copying mistake. Scholarly opinion differs as to whether the “fix” was to add in or subtract 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 at all (John 13:1-17), and he puts his theology of the Sacrament not at the last supper but after the feeding of the multitude (John 6:52-58). The variety of ways the New Testament writers report all this makes it useless to claim that we must do this “the way Jesus did it.” It’s very clear in all the witnesses that a significant theology and practice of the Lord’s Supper was present from the beginning of the Christian church, and the content of the sacrament is the same in all the texts. But clearly the early church was not concerned to make sure the words were exactly the same every time, as if there were some magic formula which must be repeated perfectly in order for the thing to work.

Instead, we come to the Table and share in the bread and cup, not because we know “we’ve got it right” (while those others have it wrong), but because we trust in Jesus, who gave us this sacramental reality: “This is my body 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 without you we will surely die.

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