Leavened and Unleavened, East and West

The churches of Asia kept the memory of the cross by its date. There is another place where the same week has left its mark in the life of the church, and it is not a calendar at all. It is the bread on the table.

The Word on the Table

In Chapters 22 and 23 we saw that the Gospels have two words for bread. Azumos is unleavened bread, the bread of the feast. Artos is ordinary bread, the bread of every day. When the four witnesses describe what Yeshua took in His hands at the last supper, all four use artos ἄρτος ar'-tos, and Paul adds when it happened: He “took bread” “in the night in which He was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23). It was the evening that began the thirteenth, the household’s last leavened meal, and the bread in His hands was ordinary bread.

The Eastern Churches

To this day the Eastern Orthodox churches use leavened bread, ordinary bread, in the Lord’s Supper. When they are asked why, they point to the Greek text of the Gospels and its word artos. They read it as it stands and set ordinary bread on the table.

The churches of Asia kept the date of the supper and the cross. The Eastern churches have kept the bread. Both point back to a meal eaten before the Passover.

The Western Change

The churches of the West came to use unleavened bread. By the Middle Ages it was their settled custom, and the difference had become a sore point between East and West. Shortly before 1054, Leo, archbishop of Ohrid, wrote against the Latin use of unleavened bread, and the bread was one of the open disputes when Rome and Constantinople broke communion with each other in 1054. The bread of the Lord’s table, and with it the Gospels’ word artos, was among the questions in a separation that has lasted to this day.

How did the West come to its custom? John Calvin, the Reformer of Geneva, gave his answer in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. In the 1845 English translation, his words read:

“History relates that leavened and ordinary bread was used before the time of Alexander the Bishop of Rome, who was the first that was delighted with unleavened bread: for what reason I see not, unless it was to draw the wondering eyes of the populace by the novelty of the spectacle, more than to train them in sound religion” (Institutes 4.17.43).

Alexander was an early bishop of Rome, at the beginning of the second century. Calvin was reporting what history told him: before Alexander’s time the table had ordinary bread, and the unleavened bread came with him, for no reason Calvin could see. Later historians place the change in the Western churches later still; either way, the first churches broke ordinary bread.

That is enough for our purpose. A Reformer of the Western church recorded that the first churches broke ordinary bread, as the Gospels say Yeshua did.

Why It Matters

Why does a word for bread deserve a chapter? Because it carries the whole timetable inside it. If the last supper had been the Passover meal of the fourteenth, the bread on the table would have been azumos ἄζυμος ad'-zoo-mos, unleavened, as the Torah commands for that night. The Gospels say artos. By itself the word would not settle the question, for artos can name any loaf; but it agrees with John’s words: the supper came before the Passover, as the thirteenth began.

And the bread carries meaning as well. As we saw in Chapter 25, this was the threshold meal, the last leavened supper before the house entered the days of unleavened bread. At that very meal Yeshua took ordinary bread and said, “Take, eat — this is My body.” He was without sin, and yet within the festival timetable He identified Himself with what had to end and be removed. His death, in the daytime of that same thirteenth, was the removal of the old leaven. Paul says it this way, in the verses we read in Chapter 23: “Messiah our Passover has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us celebrate the feast” (1 Corinthians 5:7-8). The feast that followed His death was kept with unleavened bread, and the believer is called to keep it “with the unleavened bread of sincerity and aletheia ἀλήθεια al-ay'-thi-a(truth).”

The End of Part Five

This part began with a high day. We read that John called the sabbaton σάββατον sab'-bat-on after the cross “a high day,” and we found that the Hebrew shabbat שַׁבָּת shab-bawth' and shabbaton שַׁבָּתוֹן shab-baw-thone' are carried in one Greek word. We counted three sabbatons in a row, the Passover, the great sabbath of Unleavened Bread, and the day of the first sheaf. We read mia ton sabbaton as “one of the Sabbatons,” and opse ὀψέ op-seh' de sabbaton as the far end of that run of feasts, dawning toward one of them. We stood on the morrow after the Shabbat, when the first sheaf was to be waved and Messiah rose as the first fruits, and we read how the spirit of each one who receives Him is raised first. Then we counted the three daytimes and three nights. We gave the familiar translation its due, for the fruit it bore. And we heard the early churches, which kept the fourteenth by its date and broke ordinary bread at the table.

All of it says the same thing. Yeshua kept God’s appointed times to the day and to the hour, and the sign He gave was fulfilled exactly as He said.

The sign of Jonah, then, has been counted to the day and to the hour. Part Two opened the name He was given before He was born, and the parts since have followed the days He filled: a supper, a cross, a tomb, and an empty grave at dawn. The last chapter gathers it all together.