As Often As You Drink It

When Jesus said to remember Him as often as we drink "it", He did not mean that Christians must start keeping the Old Testament Feast of Passover and remember Him annually while doing so.

Rather, Jesus morphed the Passover into a New Covenant cup, in which we can now remember Him "as oft" as we drink it - without any special annual observance being required. I feel this is clear for three reasons:

 

1. Because when He took the cup He said, "This is the New Testament in my blood". 

He'd never said that before at any previous Passover. In His last Passover Jesus officially morphed the Old Testament feast into something new, something else. Something we can do "as often as we drink it".

 

2. Paul quoted these very words in his letter to the Corinthians when instructing them concerning the Lord's table. The Lord's Table was something the Corinthians partook of weekly, not annually - and they never called it the Passover. And Paul directly linked this function of the Church with Jesus' statement. 

In other words Paul understood Jesus to be referring to the Lord's Table. Paul never required Gentiles to keep the Feast of Passover.

 

3. It's not possible or legal to keep the Passover any more, even for Jews. According to Moses' Law, the Passover had to be: 

 

a) observed exclusively in Jerusalem; 

b) a blood sacrifice was mandatory, not optional; 

c) it had to be offered on the altar in the tabernacle or Temple, nowhere else; 

d) a Levite priest had to be officiating; 

e) if the priest couldn't prove his descent from Levi by written genealogy, he wasn't qualified to officiate; 

f) it had to be observed in the Spring, in the month of Nisan (it isn't Spring during the month of Nisan in the southern hemisphere). 

 

All of that is impossible now, especially in Australia. Observing it in any other way, any other place, any other time, any other manner - adding or deleting even a single detail - was forbidden by Moses' Law, and a curse was attached if someone even tried.