Food for thought: the Passover feast Big Idea: Bread and juice remind us of Jesus love. Key verse: 1 Corinthians 11:26 - When you eat the bread and drink the cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until he comes again. Thoughts for leaders Today might be a good day to celebrate communion with your volunteers. Communion is a time where we choose to remember Christ s sacrifice by eating bread and drinking wine (juice). It is also a time that unifies us as believers, brings us together and celebrates our freedom in Christ. Small groups this week will offer an opportunity for children to remember Jesus through eating bread and drinking juice as well. Depending on your faith traditions, you may choose to skip this element of the lesson. Jesus gave us strong words not to mock the communion service, and we recognize that many of the children in our ministries would not identify themselves as Christ-followers. We chose to still include this element in our curriculum, but hope you have the freedom to choose what works for your faith tradition as well. Communion is meant to unify, not divide, the church, so if you are uncomfortable with this step, feel free to use the alternate small groups time. All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Reader s Version, NIrV Copyright 1995, 1996, 1998 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIrV and New International Reader s Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc. Images courtesy of: Designed to a T http://www.designedtoat.com/food.htm Web Weaver http:www.webweaver.nu 1
Supplies list: Attention Grabbers - 2 blindfolds - Small table - 3-4 Food samples (2 of each) Small Group - printout of Passover Activity Sheet (pg 8) for each child - pens or pencils - Prayer Journals (optional) Memory Verse - whiteboard - whiteboard pen - whiteboard eraser 2
For this game, you need 2 blindfolds, a small table and several samples of food that represent holidays/events/places. Foods tend to be very regional, so choose samples that make sense for your region. We have provided some ideas to get you started, but keep your demographics in mind: refugees and recent immigrants may not associate turkey with thanksgiving, and many urban children have not been to carnivals where cotton candy is served. Choose 3-5 identifiable foods for your group to sample. - birthday cake (birthday) - Thanksgiving turkey (thanksgiving maybe more on TV than at home!) - ice cream cone summer days - Hot chocolate cold days - Popcorn movies - Cotton candy carnivals - Cinnamon hearts Valentine s Day - Cadbury Easter eggs/peeps marshmallows Easter Leader: Food can give us wonderful or horrible - memories. Have you ever smelled or tasted a food and right away thought of a time in your life? Maybe it s when you eat a certain chocolate bar, or smell a particular restaurant, you might often think of a person or time in your life. Is anything coming to mind? We re going to call up some volunteers and have them taste foods and see if they can think of what each food might represent. Can I get some volunteers? Call up several volunteers. You ll need 2 volunteers for each mystery food (6 suggested total). Leader: Alright, to start I m going to blindfold each of you. Once you re blindfolded, I will give you a food to taste, and you tell me if an occasion or place comes to mind when you eat it. See if you can guess what it is! 3
Leader: Here s our first (second/third) food! Ready to try it? One, two, three, eat! Allow some time for chewing & tasting. Leader: Okay! Contestant number one, what is that food, and what does it remind you of? Allow volunteer to guess. Leader: Thank you for your guess. Contestant number two, what is your guess? Allow volunteer to guess. Leader: The answer? You were eating birthday cake, and it often reminds people of birthdays! Great job, contestants! Now, let s bring the next two contestants forward! We ll put your blindfolds on, and are you ready to try your food? Repeat from top of the page until all sample foods have been tasted & tried. Leader: And our last contestants! Come on up! We ll make sure you are blindfolded and when we re all set, we ll start. Pause to get blindfolds on and contestants up to the plates. Leader: Okay, one, two, three, eat! Allow contestants to eat Cadbury Easter Eggs. Leader: What food was that, and what does it represent? Contestant number one? Allow guess. Leader: Contestant number two? Allow guess. Leader: You were eating a Cadbury Easter Egg, and we eat those often at what time of the year? Easter of course! 4
Leader: We are coming up to an important holiday Easter and the very first Easter was all about Jesus. It s both a sad and a happy time for people who follow Jesus because we remember one of the most important weeks of Jesus life: the week he both died and came back to life! If you have never heard this story before, it sounds kind of crazy: most of us don t know anybody who s come back from the dead! In fact, it sounds a little like a zombie movie, doesn t it? But it wasn t like that Jesus actually, really and truly, came back to life. I know, not even his best friends believed it either, until they ate a meal with him, touched his skin, and then finally realized it was true! So even though we are going to be talking about some really sad, and even scary, times of Jesus life around Easter time, we also get to remember that Jesus really is God, because he did the absolutely impossible by coming back to life! But today s story isn t about the exciting resurrection that s a word we use to mean coming back to life it s about how it all began, and it began with a special meal. 5
Leader: Did you know that food can help us remember things? Did you know that if you eat chips when you are studying for a test, if you eat the same chips when you are writing that test, it will help you remember what you studied? Scientists are finding out all sorts of interesting things about our memories, but one thing Jesus knew even 2000 years ago, was that food can bring back powerful memories! Often when I smell popcorn, I think of a movie I saw at a theatre. If I drink a slushee, I think of summer time! If I see eat a candy cane, I think of Christmas time. Food can be a pretty powerful reminder for us! Jesus knew that, and so just before he knew he was going to die, he had a very, very special meal with all of his closest friends, and he used food to help his friends remember something very important about him. Let s find out what that was! Jesus was with his very best friends at the time: there were 13 of them having a party in the upstairs room of someone s house. The Bible says they were hanging out, lying on the ground, just eating and talking, and probably laughing and telling stories. And then Jesus got serious. As much as Jesus loved being with his friends, he knew what was going to happen that soon he would die, and he was feeling sad about it. Jesus took a piece of bread and he made an announcement. This bread is like my body, he said, and then he broke it up. It s going to be broken for you. This must have really worried his friends: they thought everything was going well! Why would Jesus think his body would get broken, and why would it be for us? But Jesus knew what they did not know: soon the religious police were going to try and kill him. He knew he would have a choice: to escape, since he was innocent and since he was powerful enough he could do that, or to let them kill him and in that way protect his friends and all of us from the power that sin has over us. He was already choosing that he would die so that we could be free from sin. That s why he told his friends that his body would be broken for us. Eat this bread, and remember me. Jesus told his friends. And they all ate the bread. They must have thought it was strange to remember someone who was standing right in front of them! But Jesus knew in only a few hours, he would be taken away, and he wanted his friends to remember him even then. 6
Just in case his friends missed what he was trying to say, Jesus lifted up his cup and said, This cup is like my blood, which I am going to pour out for you. Drink this and remember me. And they all drank. Jesus wanted his friends to know that what was about to happen, what he had already decided to do because of his love for them. He also didn t want them to ever forget it, so he gave them a meal that they could eat and always remember him: just bread & a drink. Most of us eat bread and drink something pretty often. That s lots of times to remember Jesus! Often, in churches, we have a special ceremony called communion where we eat little pieces of bread and drink tiny cups of juice to remember, just like Jesus told his friends to. Can you imagine, if every time we had a piece of toast, or a sandwich, or just a slice of bread, we remembered Jesus and how he was willing to die for us? Can you imagine if every time you drank some juice you remembered Jesus and how he bled for us? It would help us live for him, that s for sure! When you are always remembering Jesus and how much he loves us, it s easy to remember to do things that show him that we love him, too! Jesus wanted us to remember him every day, not just on special occasions. So it s good to eat a chocolate Easter egg and remember that Easter is to celebrate Jesus dying and coming back to life, but it s even better to remember every single day when we eat bread or drink juice that Jesus loves us and died for us so we could live for him! We all have foods that remind us of things: foods that remind us of good things, like maybe Easter egg chocolates at Easter time, and maybe even foods that remind us of sad things, like perhaps a food that was served at a funeral of someone you loved. Jesus asks us to use foods like bread and juice to remind us that he loved us so much that he chose to die so that we can be saved. That s a pretty powerful reminder! 7
Printout of Passover Activity Sheet for each child (pg 8) Pens/pencils Prayer journals (optional) Hand out Passover Activity Sheet and pens to each child. Leader: We re going to do this activity sheet and see if we can figure out which food helps us remember which event. Let s draw lines between the food & the event it represents. - how do we remember people/events (photo album, posters, music, food, journal, notes, letters, emails, facebook, webpages, etc.) - Jesus chose bread and drink as something he wanted his followers to remember him by: what do you think of that plan? Will you remember him when you eat bread & juice Use prayer journals to update prayer requests and answered prayers from prior weeks. Close with this prayer: Leader: Lord, thank you that you were willing to go to the cross and die for our freedom! Thank you that you love us that much! We learned today that eating bread and drinking juice is a good way for us to remember that love. We want to be reminded every day about how much you loved us, and we want to live for you. Amen. 8
Passover A ctivity She ets Draw a line connecting the food on the left-hand side of the page, to what it represents on the right-hand side of the page. Christmas Jesus Valentines Day Birthdays Going to th e movies 9
Monthly verse: 1 Corinthians 15: 3b-4 : [This is the good news: that] Christ died for our sins, just as Scripture said he would. He was buried. He was raised from the dead on the third day, just as Scripture said he would be. Weekly verse: 1 Corinthians 11:26 - When you eat the bread and drink the cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until he comes again. Write the verse out on a whiteboard. Recite it out loud with your group several times before beginning to erase words. Erase 2-3 words, then recite the verse again. Continue erasing words until the board is blank. See if your group can still recite the verse with no words at all! 10