“Do WHAT in Memory of Me?”

On Sundays in America, in a beige rectangles with a coffee bars in the lobby and a stages lit like a Nickelback reunion tour, men like “Pastor Phil” stand in cargo shorts and a fitted blazer, guitar strapped on at a jaunty angle, are about to explain the Lord's Supper. He is going to get it wrong, with a fog machine and a worship band that sounds like Creed had a baby with an Applebee's jingle. Forty-five minutes later, several hundred nice people will climb into their Ford Explorers having watched a man reduce the New Covenant God cut with His own Blood to a Live, Laugh, Love wall decal.

Welcome to Fun-Time Family Non-Denominational Church, whose sermon series is "Just Be Nice, Y'all: A Six-Week Journey," and where communion happens once a quarter with Ritz crackers and a novelty shot of grape drink, passed around like a blood drive for people squeamish about blood, which, theologically, is exactly what it is.

Pastor Phil will tell you that when Jesus said "do this in memory of me," He simply meant: think about me sometimes—like a photo on the fridge. Or your grandmother's meatloaf — fondly recalled, never once reconstituted. It's sentimental. It's symbolic. It's scrapbooking with bread, and Pastor Phil would like you to know he really prayed about this interpretation, by which he means he Googled it.

He is wrong.

He is wrong in Hebrew. Wrong in Greek. Wrong in Latin. And, wrong in Aramaic, for good measure, though nobody at Fun-Time Family Church has ever heard the word "Aramaic" and lived to discuss it at small group. And he is wrong in every century of Judeo-Christian tradition prior to roughly 1520 — right around when a bored, excommunicated Augustinian monk decided fifteen consecutive centuries of unbroken Church teaching had all been a group hallucination, correctable by one German man with a hammer and a grudge.1

Let's fix that.

Zikkaron Is Not a Scrapbook

The concept Jesus invokes at the Last Supper doesn't originate at the Last Supper, because Jesus, unlike Pastor Phil, did not improvise His theology in the shower. It originated at Sinai, and before that at the Passover in Egypt, where God commands Israel: "This day shall be to you a memorial [zikkaron], and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD."2 In Hebrew vocabulary, zikkaron is not a warm nostalgia you take or leave. It is a liturgical re-presentation — an act that makes a past saving event genuinely present and operative for the people performing the ritual right now, fog machine or no.3 The Passover Haggadah does not say "remember, as your ancestors did, that they escaped Egypt — what a lovely bit of family history." It says each Jew, in every generation, is obligated to regard himself as though he personally came out of Egypt.4 Not "think fondly of." Personally. Came. Out. That is not a metaphor some youth pastor cooked up at a lock-in over pizza rolls. That is the load-bearing theology of the oldest continuously practiced ritual meal in Western civilization, and it has survived three thousand years without ever needing a haze machine.

This is why the blood of the Passover lamb on the doorposts wasn't a decorative nod to a protection that happened somewhere else — it was the protection, re-actualized, every year, for households who were never anywhere near Egypt in 1250 BC and have the receipts to prove it.5 Covenants in the Ancient Near East were not contracts you signed and framed. They were living relationships, ratified and renewed through blood and meal, generation after generation.6 God does not do escrow. God does not do a "Snack Moment."

God does covenant, and He is, historically, quite serious about it.

Then Comes Anamnesis, and Somebody Should Have Told Martin Luther

Fast-forward to the Upper Room, where nobody is wearing cargo shorts. St. Paul, writing in Greek to the Corinthians roughly two decades after the event, records Christ's words: "Do this in remembrance [anamnesis] of me."7 Anamnesis is not the Greek word for nostalgia. It's not mnemosynon, a simple keepsake — a ticket stub taped into a scrapbook. Liddell-Scott will tell you anamnesis means a re-calling into present reality — the exact same technical term used for the exact same category of cultic memorial as zikkaron. Consistent across two languages, in a way Pastor Phil's sermon notes are not consistent across two Sundays.8 When the Septuagint translators needed a Greek word for Israel's memorial offerings, centuries before Christ, before there was a single "worship experience" to speak of, anamnesis is the word they reached for.9 Paul — a Pharisee trained at the feet of Gamaliel, who could recite Hebrew liturgy in his sleep and probably did — did not accidentally select a word that happened to mean "no big deal, catch you next quarter." He selected the precise technical term for covenant re-presentation, because that is precisely what the Eucharist constitutes.10

This is the part where I would love for Pastor Phil to explain, using the theological firepower of his associate's degree in “Worship Arts”, why he feels qualified to override two and a half millennia of Hebrew liturgical vocabulary and the documented choices of the Septuagint using nothing but his own ear for what "remember" sounds like when his wife tells him to remember the trash.11 That is not exegesis.

"It's Just Bread and Wine" — Cool Story, Except Jesus Didn't Think So

At the same meal, Christ doesn't say "this represents my body," or "this is a nice visual aid for my body." He says "this IS my body," full stop, in the precise sacrificial language of covenant ratification — echoing Moses at Sinai, who sprinkled the blood of the covenant on the people and did not, as far as the text records, follow it up with a fog machine.12 He is not composing a metaphor. Metaphors are for youth pastors. He is doing what Melchizedek did with bread and wine, what the Passover lamb did with blood, and what every covenant meal in Israel's history did: establishing a new covenant, in His own Body, really and substantially present, no sound system required.13 Malachi had already prophesied a "pure offering" among the nations — not a symbol, not a "faith reminder," an offering, the technical language of actual sacrifice.14 The early Church, unanimously and without dissent for over a thousand years — an era with no PowerPoint or six-week sermon series, and yet somehow got the theology right anyway — understood the Eucharist as the literal Body and Blood of Christ, re-presented at every Mass. Not reenacted, like a Civil War weekend with worse costumes. Not remembered, like an unwanted class reunion. Made present. That is what anamnesis has always meant, long before anyone set it to a drum loop.15

None of this is complicated once you accept the mildly inconvenient premise that words mean what they meant in their original context, rather than whatever a guy with a soul patch and a mic felt like in 1985. But that premise is exactly what the Reformers had to quietly set down, because the actual Hebrew and Greek data points, stubbornly, toward the Mass — not toward a quarterly cracker ceremony set to a Michael W. Smith deep cut.16 "Sola Scriptura" sounds impressive in Latin — a language nobody at Fun-Time Family Church has ever learned, or expressed the faintest curiosity about, before confidently overruling St. Paul, the Septuagint, and roughly forty Church Councils.

So next quarter, when Fun-Time Family Church passes out the Ritz crackers under the laser light show, say a little prayer for Pastor Phil. He is a nice man. He is sincere. He has excellent hair for a man his age. And he is standing up there, guitar in hand, on the wrong side of two languages, five thousand years of covenant theology, and his own Bible — which is sitting closed on the podium the whole time anyway.

Endnotes

1. Martin Luther, having concluded that fifteen centuries of unanimous patristic and conciliar witness on the Eucharist could be set aside on the strength of his own reading of John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11, nonetheless retained a doctrine of the Real Presence (consubstantiation) that his own theological descendants — Zwingli and the memorialist tradition that produced modern low-church Protestantism — went on to abandon entirely, proving that even the man who started the fire thought the building was worth partially keeping. See Hermann Sasse, This Is My Body: Luther's Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Adelaide: Lutheran Publishing House, 1977), 13–36.

2. Exodus 12:14 (RSV-CE): "This day shall be for you a memorial day [zikkaron], and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as an ordinance for ever." Note the total absence of the phrase "or a nice symbolic gesture, whichever feels right to you."

3. Brevard S. Childs, Memory and Tradition in Israel, Studies in Biblical Theology 37 (London: SCM Press, 1962), 74–75, describing zikkaron in Israel's cultic vocabulary as an act of representation that makes a past redemptive event contemporaneously effective for the worshiping community, not a subjective recollection of it — i.e., a category that does not include "vibing about Egypt for a minute."

4. Mishnah, Pesachim 10:5: "In every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he had come forth out of Egypt." Cf. the Passover Haggadah, Maggid section, which incorporates this obligation directly into the liturgy of the Seder — no lyric video, no fog, no lowered lights, and it has worked for over three thousand years without a single guitar solo.

5. Exodus 12:13.

6. George E. Mendenhall, Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East (Pittsburgh: Biblical Colloquium, 1955), 32–39; Meredith G. Kline, Treaty of the Great King (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 13–20, on the suzerain-vassal treaty form underlying Mosaic covenant and its periodic cultic renewal — the Bronze Age equivalent of a subscription you cannot cancel, except good.

7. 1 Corinthians 11:24–25 (RSV-CE): "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance [anamnesis] of me... This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance [anamnesis] of me."

8. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. "ἀνάμνησις" — a calling to mind, recollection, with cultic/technical usage denoting a memorial offering, distinct from ordinary terms for casual remembrance such as μνεία. Liddell and Scott did not consult a worship pastor before publishing.

9. Septuagint, Leviticus 24:7 and Numbers 10:10, where ἀνάμνησις (and its cognate ἀναμιμνήσκω) designates the memorial portion of the grain offering and the trumpet-blasts accompanying sacrifice — technical cultic re-presentation, several centuries before anyone had the option of misreading it in a modern language they don't speak.

10. Acts 22:3, on Paul's formation "at the feet of Gamaliel," the leading Pharisaic teacher of the era, establishing that Paul's Greek vocabulary choices were the product of rigorous rabbinic training, not, as far as the record shows, a weekend Worship Arts intensive.

11. No citation offered for this observation. Some claims are self-evidently true and do not require a footnote, which is itself, ironically, a very Protestant way of arguing.

12. Exodus 24:8 (RSV-CE): "And Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people, and said, 'Behold the blood of the covenant which the LORD has made with you.'" Cf. Matthew 26:28, where Christ applies the identical covenant-blood formula to the cup at the Last Supper. Nobody present filed this under "symbolic."

13. Genesis 14:18, on Melchizedek's offering of bread and wine; Hebrews 7:1–17, on the typological connection between the priesthood of Melchizedek and the priesthood of Christ, read by the Fathers as prefiguring the Eucharistic offering — a priesthood, notably, with no stage banter and no merch table.

14. Malachi 1:11 (RSV-CE): "For from the rising of the sun to its setting my name is great among the nations, and in every place incense is offered to my name, and a pure offering." The Church Fathers read this as a prophecy of the Eucharistic sacrifice offered among the Gentiles; see the Catechism of the Council of Trent, Part II, ch. 4. "Pure offering" has never, in any translation history, meant "seasonal cracker."

15. St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 7, ca. AD 107, on those who "abstain from the Eucharist... because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ." Ignatius wrote this roughly a decade after the Apostle John died, which is an inconveniently short window for the "the early Church actually agreed with Pastor Phil" theory. See also St. Justin Martyr, First Apology 66, and St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures 22.

16. On the Reformers' departure from received exegetical tradition regarding the words of institution, see the Council of Trent, Session XIII (1551), Decree on the Most Holy Eucharist, chs. 1–4 and accompanying canons, restating the constant faith of the Church against the memorialist interpretation — drafted, notably, by men who had each completed more than a six-week video series to earn the title "Pastor."