The night before His crucifixion Jesus gathered with His disciples to celebrate the Passover meal. For the disciples, this must have been quite the clash of the familiar and the confusing. They had grown up sharing Passover meals every year for their entire lives, but this meal was different. They were eating with Jesus, and Jesus was doing and saying things that cast a cloud of foreboding over the room. He was speaking of a deceiver and betrayer in their midst. He warned of future persecution and rejection for the disciples. He spoke of His own impending death, though they could scarcely understand or believe His words.

Yet throughout all this, the Passover meal continued. The traditional blessings were spoken and the symbolic elements that would have littered the feasting table slowly were consumed. Two elements of the feast would come to have lasting significance, not only for the Jewish world, but for Christians everywhere. First, there was the unleavened bread which was broken as a symbol of the broken body of Jesus. Second, there was a cup of wine.

The cup of wine that would herald the change of an epoch in redemptive history was likely not the first, but the third of four cups consumed as part of the Passover feast. Symbolic meaning for these cups is often seen in the language of Exodus 6:6-7. In these verses God gives His people four strong promises.

Before the meal, the first cup would be shared.

Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians…

This cup is often called the cup of sanctification. God sets His people apart and brings them out from Egypt to be a people for His own possession. This cup looks forward to the coming of the Messiah who will perfectly set Himself apart in holiness to God. This, however, was not the cup that Jesus raised when He instituted the Lord’s Supper.

The second cup was consumed traditionally after the retelling of the Passover story.

…and I will deliver you from their bondage.

This cup, variously referred to as the cup of deliverance, plagues, or judgment, likewise points us to Christ. He is the one who will bring us from bondage into freedom. He will bring judgment down upon sin and cast His enemies into ruin one day. This too, however, was not the cup of communion.

A third cup was lifted after dinner was over.

I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.

This is the cup of redemption. The cup that points to the price that would be paid to secure the deliverance of God’s people. As Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 11:25, it was this cup, the cup taken after supper, that Jesus held aloft before His disciples. He explained to them that the cup of redemption would now forever hold a fuller significance. It would not only look back to God’s redemption of Israel from Egyptian bondage, it would point to the blood of a Messiah shed for the redemption of His own from every nation, tribe, and tongue. It would point to the death that marks the beginning of a New Covenant, the final covenant. This is the cup we remember, with its new meaning in Christ, every week when we partake of Communion together. But a fourth cup remained.

The fourth cup followed the singing of praise Psalms.

‘Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.

Matthew and Mark both mention the singing of these songs, though the cup that accompanied the singing is not mentioned. This cup, the cup of praise, celebrates God’s presence with His redeemed. It is the great longing of the ages for mankind, created in the image of God, to be His holy people, and for God to be with us. Regardless of the circumstances that attended Jewish life, every Passover ended with this cup of praise and a longing for God and man to dwell together in perfect love and unity.

What, then, is this fifth cup of Passover?

It is both the most important, and the most exclusive, of all the cups. In fact, in over 30 centuries of Passover observance, the fifth cup has only been consumed once, and it was the bitterest of all drinks to consume.

The fifth cup is the cup of divine wrath. It was the cup which stood unconsumed in the background of every Passover. After all, what is Passover if not a remembrance that God’s wrath was averted only by the sacrifice of the Passover lamb? Year after year this sacrifice was repeated, a constant vigil pleading mercy from a holy judge who could not forever overlook sin’s just penalty. The cup of wrath was delayed, but not removed.

“Father, if You are willing,” the Lamb of God prayed so earnestly in the garden that night, “remove this cup from me.” It had all come to this moment. Would the Messiah drink the fifth cup of Passover? Every cup of every Passover past, present, and future would be worthless if Jesus would not drink the cup of God’s wrath. There would never come another Messiah able to drink it, and as long as the cup of divine wrath contained so much as a single drop, the ultimate doom of sinful man was inevitable.

Each week as we lift the cup of redemption to our lips in Jesus name, to partake in remembrance of Jesus’ gift of everlasting life through His blood, let us never forget the great cup that now sits empty in heaven.