Proleptic Recapitulation: Passover, Eucharist and God's saving acts

Abstract

We may speak casually of ‘salvation history’ and look for patterns in the Bible which bear out a claim that the sacred writers saw a movement toward a particular goal, the fullness of revelation in Christ Jesus (cf. Heb 1:1—2). Such a view can influence how we interpret both the Old Testament itself and its relationship to the New Testament. These interpretations may range from a searching out of phrases and themes which may then be applied to the New Testament—giving the impression that the New Testament author created a patchwork of sources—to a searching for patterns of God’s grand design which is manifested in the sweep of the Bible, irrespective of the time, place, or particular interest of the biblical author. What is proposed here is an examination of a mode of relating the past to the present which can be found throughout the Old Testament and to see how this relationship in a cultic context has far-reaching implications for the understanding of both the Christian Eucharist and the Jewish Passover in relation to one another and to the memory of God’s saving acting.A frequent pattern in the Bible is the recapitulation of origins to explain new beginnings. This is reflected in various ways.One is to use the imagery of creation to describe a new creation. For example, the author of Gen 6—9 describes the punishment of the human race in terms of a return to chaos and a re-emergence of dry land from the waters as in Gen 1. One finds other references back to the days of creation throughout the Old Testament literature, where both the imagery of Gen 1—2 as well as extra-biblical myths (some unknown) are used.