I. The Cup to us speaks of a Divine treaty or covenant. Ancient Israel had lived for nearly two thousand years under the charter of their national existence, which, as we read in the old Testament, was given on Sinai amidst thunderings and lightnings; and that covenant, or agreement, or treaty, on the part of God, was ratified by a solemn act, in which the blood of the sacrifice, divided into two portions, was sprinkled: one half upon the altar, and the other half, after their acceptance of the conditions and obligations of the covenant, on the people, who had pledged themselves to obedience. The new covenant, which Christ seals in His blood, is the charter, the better charter, under the conditions of which not a nation but the world may find a salvation which dwarfs all the deliverances of the past. The new covenant, in the exuberant fulness of its gracious purposes, is at once the completion and the antithesis of the ancient covenant with its precepts and its retribution.
II. This Cup speaks to us of the forgiveness of sins. One theory, and one theory only, as it seems to me, of the meaning of Christ's death, is possible if these words of my text ever dropped from Christ's lips, or if He ever instituted the rite to which they refer; He must have believed that His death was a sacrifice, without which the sins of the world were not forgiven, and by which forgiveness came to us all.
III. This Cup speaks likewise of a life infused. "The blood is the life" says the physiology of the Hebrews. The blood is the life, and when men drink of that cup they symbolise the fact that Christ's own life and spirit are imparted to them that love Him. The very heart of Christ's gift to us is the gift of His own very life to be the life of our lives.
IV. And lastly, it speaks of a festal gladness. They who live on Christ, they who drink in of His Spirit, should be glad in all circumstances, they and they alone. We sit at a table, though it be in a wilderness, though it be in the presence of our enemies, where there ought to be joy and the voice of rejoicing. But beyond that, this Cup points onward to a future feast. At that solemn hour Jesus stayed His own heart with the vision of the perfected kingdom and the glad festival then. So this communion has a prophetic element in it, and links on with predictions and parables which speak of the marriage supper of the great King, and of the time when we shall sit at His table in His kingdom.
A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth,Nov. 5th, 1885.
References: Matthew 26:28. Expositor,1st series, vol. xii., p. 49; A. Barry, Sermons for Passiontide and Easter,p. 89. Matthew 26:29. Spurgeon, Three Hundred Outlines from the New Testament,p. 29.