We are partaking of the Lord’s Supper on Pentecost, the time when we mark the pouring out of the Holy Spirit into the world, the fulfillment of the glorious prophecy of Joel. This gives us opportunity to reflect that the Lord’s Supper, although it was instituted at Passover, is not simply the fulfillment that one Jewish festival. Rather, all the festivals and sacrifices of Israel culminate in the person of the Lord Jesus, and all the festivals of Israel are rolled into the two sacraments of the new Israel, the Christian Church.
In fact, after Jesus left them, the first recorded observation of the disciples observing this meal was on the day of Pentecost. And while leavened bread was not only not used at Passover, and had to be entirely absent from the premises altogether, on the day of Pentecost one of the required offerings in the law was leavened bread. This bread was necessarily present on the day of Pentecost.
We use leavened bread in our observation of the Supper, and this raises reasonable questions. One of them has to do with what Jesus used when He instituted the meal. On Passover, that was the only kind of bread available, and St. Paul tells us that we follow the Lord in this by getting rid of the yeast of malice and wickedness.
But this image raises another question. In the Bible, doesn’t leaven represent sin? Yes, sometimes. We are to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, Jesus taught us, and in the passage just mentioned, leaven represents malice and wickedness. But leaven also represents the kingdom of God in the world, and, just as we are the one loaf that we break (for one another), so also we are that leaven.
We affect the town and community around us the same way that leaven works through a loaf of bread. As the leaven works, silently, we do not hear clanking noises. We do not see smoke. The process is silent grace, quiet love, and inexorable kindness.