{"id":106728,"date":"2026-09-03T14:06:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=106728"},"modified":"2026-09-03T14:06:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:06:42","slug":"what-is-communion-cup-jesus-refused","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/what-jesus-teaches\/what-is-communion-cup-jesus-refused\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Communion? The Cup Jesus Refused to Drink"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='booster-block booster-read-block'>\n                <div class=\"twp-read-time\">\n                \t<i class=\"booster-icon twp-clock\"><\/i> <span>Read Time:<\/span>13 Minute, 6 Second                <\/div>\n\n            <\/div><p>You have probably watched it happen. A tray goes down the row. Small pieces of bread. Small cups. Everyone goes quiet. Somebody reads a few words about a body and blood, and then it is over and the singing starts again.<\/p>\n\n<p>And maybe you sat there thinking: what is communion, really? Because I have no idea what I just watched.<\/p>\n\n<p>That is a fair place to be. Most of us learned the motions long before anyone explained the meal. So let us do it the other way round. Let us go back to the room, and the table, and the night it actually happened \u2014 because there is one detail in that room that changes what the whole thing means, and most of us have read straight past it for years.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What Is Communion? Start With the Meal Jesus Was Already Eating<\/h2>\n\n<p>Communion did not begin as a church ritual. It began as dinner.<\/p>\n\n<p>Jesus and his friends were keeping Passover \u2014 the yearly meal that remembers God bringing Israel out of Egypt. It had a fixed order to it. Cups of wine, bread, bitter herbs, songs, in a sequence everyone knew by heart. Every person at that table had eaten this meal every year of their life. They knew what came next the way you know the words of a song you have sung since you were small.<\/p>\n\n<p>So when Jesus stopped in the middle of it and said something nobody had ever said at this meal before, it did not land as a nice thought. It landed like a needle scratching across a record.<\/p>\n\n<p>Luke tells it plainly:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.&#8221; \u2014 Luke 22:20, KJV<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Hold on to four words in there: <em>the cup after supper<\/em>. They are doing more work than they look like they are doing, and we will come back to them.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"884942602c\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/884942602c\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>The Meal Had Four Cups, and They Were Not Optional<\/h2>\n\n<p>Here honesty matters more than a tidy story, so let us be careful.<\/p>\n\n<p>The Gospels never number the cups. They never say &#8220;the third cup&#8221; or &#8220;the fourth cup.&#8221; The four-cup order of the Passover meal comes down to us in the Mishnah, a written collection of Jewish teaching compiled around AD 200 \u2014 roughly a hundred and seventy years after this dinner. So when people talk about four cups at the Last Supper, they are reading the Gospels alongside a slightly later source. That is a reasonable thing to do. It is not the same as the Gospels saying it.<\/p>\n\n<p>What the Mishnah does say is worth stopping for. In its Passover section, the four cups are not a nice extra for people who can afford wine. Even the poorest person in the community must be given no fewer than four cups \u2014 paid for out of the charity fund if that is what it takes. Nobody was permitted to be too poor to drink all four.<\/p>\n\n<p>Sit with that for a second. The community would rather buy your wine than let you miss a cup.<\/p>\n\n<p>A later Jewish tradition, recorded in the Jerusalem Talmud, ties the four cups to four promises God makes in Exodus:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;&#8230;I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments: And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God&#8230;&#8221; \u2014 Exodus 6:6-7, KJV<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Bring out. Rid. Redeem. Take you to me for a people. Four promises, four cups. Again \u2014 that connection is drawn in later Jewish sources, not in the Gospels themselves. But it tells you what the meal felt like from the inside. Each cup was a promise being raised and swallowed.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Which Cup Was It? Two Clues Hiding in Plain Sight<\/h2>\n\n<p>The Gospels will not number the cup for us. But they describe it twice, from two different writers, and both descriptions land in the same place.<\/p>\n\n<p>The first clue is Luke&#8217;s phrase: <em>the cup after supper<\/em>. In the Passover order, the cup that comes after the food is finished is the third one. It is poured when the meal is done and the blessing over the meal is said.<\/p>\n\n<p>The second clue is Paul. Writing to the church at Corinth about this exact practice, he calls the cup by name:<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?&#8221; \u2014 1 Corinthians 10:16, KJV<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>&#8220;The cup of blessing&#8221; is not Paul being poetic. It is the ordinary, everyday Jewish name for the cup drunk after the meal with the blessing \u2014 the third cup. Paul grew up inside this world, and he uses the household term without pausing to explain it, the way you would say &#8220;the good plates&#8221; at home and expect your family to know exactly which ones.<\/p>\n\n<p>Two writers, two different angles, one cup.<\/p>\n\n<p>And notice the other word sitting in that same verse: <em>communion<\/em>. That is the King James Bible translating the Greek word <em>koinonia<\/em> \u2014 a word about a shared life, not a quiet ceremony. If that word is new to you, it is worth <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-themes\/koinonia-meaning-greek-word-fellowship\/\">meeting koinonia properly<\/a>, because it quietly reframes what the tray going down the row is even for.<\/p>\n\n<p>One more small thing most people never notice. Your Bible may say &#8220;the new covenant&#8221; while the King James says &#8220;the new testament.&#8221; That is not two different ideas. It is one Greek word, <em>diatheke<\/em>, rendered two different ways in English \u2014 and it is the same word behind <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/articles\/matthew-2628-explained-how-the-new-covenant-frees-you-to-stop-carrying-guilt\/\">what Jesus said about forgiveness one verse earlier in Matthew 26<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Then He Said He Would Not Drink the Next One<\/h2>\n\n<p>Here is the line most of us have read a hundred times without ever hearing it.<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father&#8217;s kingdom.&#8221; \u2014 Matthew 26:29, KJV<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Mark records the same refusal. And then, one verse later in Matthew, this: &#8220;And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<p>Read the room. They are mid-meal. There is a cup still to come. And the host sets his down and says: not this one. Not yet.<\/p>\n\n<p>Then they sing, and they walk out into the night with the table still set behind them.<\/p>\n\n<p>Nobody cleared it. Nobody said the closing words. The meal was not finished. It was left.<\/p>\n\n<h2>But Didn&#8217;t He Drink It on the Cross?<\/h2>\n\n<p>This is the natural next question, and there is a popular answer to it: that Jesus took the fourth cup at Golgotha, and &#8220;It is finished&#8221; was the meal being closed at last.<\/p>\n\n<p>The text is genuinely interesting here. At the cross He is offered a drink twice and turns it down both times \u2014 vinegar mixed with gall, which He tastes and will not drink, and wine mixed with myrrh, which He does not receive at all. Only at the very end does He take anything. &#8220;When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost&#8221; (John 19:30, KJV).<\/p>\n\n<p>So the reading is not invented out of nothing. But hold it loosely, because the Gospels never actually say it, and because of what Jesus promised in the upper room.<\/p>\n\n<p>He did not simply say &#8220;I will drink it.&#8221; He said He would drink it <em>new<\/em>, and <em>with you<\/em>, in the kingdom. A mouthful of sour wine, alone, on a cross, is not that. &#8220;It is finished&#8221; is spoken over the work. It is not spoken over the table.<\/p>\n\n<p>Which leaves the more interesting answer standing: the fourth cup is still waiting.<\/p>\n\n<h2>The Turn: You Are Not Remembering. You Are Waiting at a Table.<\/h2>\n\n<p>Most of us were handed communion as a memorial. Something closed. A backward look at a death that happened a long way from here.<\/p>\n\n<p>But that is not how the meal was left. And it is not how Paul describes it either. He puts it in one sentence we skip past because it sounds like a closing formality: &#8220;For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord&#8217;s death till he come&#8221; (1 Corinthians 11:26, KJV).<\/p>\n\n<p><em>Till he come.<\/em> There is an expiry date built into the practice. It is not a monument to something over. It is a place setting that keeps getting laid again because the guest of honour said He was coming back to finish what He started.<\/p>\n\n<blockquote><p>He didn&#8217;t end the meal. He left it \u2014 with your seat still set.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p>And if you have ever stood near that tray feeling like the whole thing belonged to other people \u2014 people who understood it, who had the right history, who had never done what you have done \u2014 this is the part worth hearing.<\/p>\n\n<p>The people at that first table were about to abandon Him. Every single one of them. He knew it while He was pouring. He handed them the cup anyway, and then promised to see them again at a table.<\/p>\n\n<p>You do not get invited to that meal by understanding it. You were invited because the host set an extra place before you had ever heard of Him.<\/p>\n\n<h2>What to Do With This on an Ordinary Tuesday<\/h2>\n\n<p>A meal that is still open changes small things immediately.<\/p>\n\n<p>It means you are allowed to come to God unfinished. The disciples came to that table confused, arguing about which of them was greatest, hours away from running. Nobody was cleaned up first. If you have been waiting until you have your life sorted before you pray properly, you are waiting for a condition that was never on the invitation.<\/p>\n\n<p>It also means your ordinary table matters more than you think. Jesus did the most significant thing He ever did around bread and cups with a handful of people who had let Him down and were about to do it again. You do not need a special room. You need a table and someone to share it with.<\/p>\n\n<p>And if you are reading this from outside \u2014 not sure what you believe, fairly sure this was never meant for you \u2014 the honest thing to say is that the invitation moves first and understanding catches up later. If you want a plain, no-pressure walkthrough of what that first step actually looks like, we made one: <a href=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/how-to-become-a-christian-your-first-6-steps\/\">how to become a Christian, in six steps<\/a>. No church membership required to read it.<\/p>\n\n<h2>Actions to Take Today<\/h2>\n\n<ol>\n<li><strong>At your next meal, before you eat, say one sentence out loud.<\/strong> Not a formal prayer. Something like: &#8220;God, thank you. This is enough for now.&#8221; Ten seconds. The whole practice we are talking about started as gratitude at an ordinary table.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Read Luke 22:14-20 slowly, once, and stop at &#8220;the cup after supper.&#8221;<\/strong> Four words. Now you know which cup He was holding. It takes three minutes and you will never read the passage flat again.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Message one person you have drifted away from and ask to share a meal.<\/strong> Tea, rice, bread, whatever you have. This is the hardest one on the list and it is the one closest to what the meal was for.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n<h2>Journaling Prompts<\/h2>\n\n<ul>\n<li>Where in your life are you living as though the story is already finished \u2014 as though what has happened to you is all that is going to happen?<\/li>\n<li>When you picture that room, where do you put yourself: at the table, near it, or watching from the doorway? Why that spot, and who taught you to stand there?<\/li>\n<li>What would genuinely change about this week if you believed a place was being kept for you?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2>A Prayer for the Person Standing Near the Door<\/h2>\n\n<p>God, I have watched this meal happen and felt like I was on the outside of it. I do not fully understand what I am doing, and I have spent a long time pretending that I do. Thank you that Jesus poured that cup for people who were about to walk away from Him \u2014 because that means the invitation was never about me getting it right first. Help me sit down at the table today instead of hovering near the door. I am coming.<\/p>\n\n<h2>One Question<\/h2>\n\n<p>Has the church lost something by teaching communion mainly as a memorial of the past rather than a meal that is still unfinished? Tell us what you think in the comments \u2014 we read them.<\/p>\n\n<div class=\"convertkit-form wp-block-convertkit-form\" style=\"\"><script async data-uid=\"884942602c\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.kit.com\/884942602c\/index.js\" data-jetpack-boost=\"ignore\" data-no-defer=\"1\" data-no-optimize=\"1\" nowprocket><\/script><\/div>\n\n\n<h2>Share This<\/h2>\n\n<ul>\n<li>I always thought communion was a memorial. Turns out Jesus stopped the meal partway through and said He would not drink the last cup yet. It is not a closed ceremony. It is an unfinished dinner with your seat still set.<\/li>\n<li>The Passover meal had four cups. Jesus lifted the third, called it the new testament in His blood, and refused the fourth until the kingdom. He didn&#8217;t end the meal. He left it.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The cup of blessing&#8221; wasn&#8217;t poetry \u2014 it was the ordinary household name for the cup after supper. Paul used it without explaining it, and it points straight at which cup Jesus was holding.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n<h2>Questions People Ask About Communion<\/h2>\n\n<p><strong>What is communion?<\/strong><br \/>\nCommunion is the Christian practice of sharing bread and a cup of wine or juice in remembrance of Jesus&#8217; death, based on what Jesus did at his final Passover meal with his disciples. It is also called the Lord&#8217;s Supper or the Eucharist. The English word &#8220;communion&#8221; comes from the King James translation of 1 Corinthians 10:16, where Paul uses the Greek word <em>koinonia<\/em>, meaning a shared or common life.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Which Passover cup did Jesus call the new covenant?<\/strong><br \/>\nThe Gospels never number the cups, but two details point to the third cup of the Passover meal. Luke 22:20 calls it &#8220;the cup after supper,&#8221; and the third cup is the one drunk after the food is finished. Paul calls it &#8220;the cup of blessing&#8221; in 1 Corinthians 10:16, which was the ordinary Jewish name for that same after-meal cup.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Do the Gospels say the Passover meal had four cups?<\/strong><br \/>\nNo. The four-cup structure of the Passover seder is described in the Mishnah, a collection of Jewish teaching compiled around AD 200, and the connection between the four cups and the four promises of Exodus 6:6-7 appears in the Jerusalem Talmud. Both are later than the Gospels. The Gospel writers simply refer to &#8220;the cup&#8221; without numbering it.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Did Jesus drink the fourth cup of Passover?<\/strong><br \/>\nNot at the meal. In Matthew 26:29 he says he will not drink of the fruit of the vine again &#8220;until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father&#8217;s kingdom.&#8221; Some teachers believe he took the fourth cup at the crucifixion, when he received vinegar and said &#8220;It is finished&#8221; in John 19:30. The Gospels do not state this, and Jesus&#8217; own promise describes drinking it &#8220;new&#8221; and &#8220;with you&#8221; in the kingdom, which points to a future meal rather than the cross.<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Why does the King James Bible say &#8220;new testament&#8221; instead of &#8220;new covenant&#8221;?<\/strong><br \/>\nBoth are translations of the same Greek word, <em>diatheke<\/em>. Older English translations often rendered it &#8220;testament,&#8221; while most modern translations use &#8220;covenant.&#8221; There is no difference in meaning in Luke 22:20 or 1 Corinthians 11:25 \u2014 it refers to the binding agreement God makes with people, not to a section of the Bible.<\/p>        <div class=\"booster-block booster-reactions-block\">\n            <div class=\"twp-reactions-icons\">\n                \n                <div class=\"twp-reacts-wrap\">\n                    <a react-data=\"be-react-1\" post-id=\"106728\" class=\"be-face-icons un-reacted\" href=\"javascript:void(0)\">\n                        <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/wp-content\/plugins\/booster-extension\/\/assets\/icon\/happy.svg\" alt=\"Happy\" title=\"\">\n                    <\/a>\n                    <div class=\"twp-reaction-title\">\n                        Happy                    <\/div>\n                    <div class=\"twp-count-percent\">\n                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Jesus lifted the third Passover cup, called it the new testament in His blood \u2014 then refused the fourth. He left the meal unfinished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":106727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_wp_convertkit_post_meta":{"form":"-1","landing_page":"0","tag":"0","restrict_content":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[3485,3458,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible-history","category-bible-study","category-what-jesus-teaches"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106729,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106728\/revisions\/106729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}