Not Yet And Already

“Throughout the New Testament the contrast is emphasized between our present and our final condition. Yet at the same time it is made equally clear that the powers of the age to come are already working in us. We are on the journey, it is true, but even now our citizenship is in heaven; we know only in part, but nevertheless we know; we see in a mirror, darkly, but nevertheless we see; our  future state is not yet manifest, yet we are children of God. And although we are on the journey and not yet in the fatherland, we are nevertheless no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God. We have here no abiding city and we seek the city which is to come; yet we have already come to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and God has made us to sit with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

E.L. Mascall, Grace and Glory

The Last Supper As Prophetic Action

“Jesus’ actions with the bread and the cup—which there is excellent warrant to regard as historical—must be seen in the same way as the symbolic actions of certain prophets in the Hebrew scriptures. Jeremiah smashes a pot; Ezekiel makes a model of Jerusalem under siege. The actions carry prophetic power, effecting the events (mostly acts of judgment) which are then to occur. They are at once explained in terms of those events, or rather of YHWH’s operating through them. In the same way, Jesus’ central actions during the meal seem to have been designed to reinforce the point of the whole meal: the kingdom-agenda to which he had been obedient throughout his ministry was now at last reaching its ultimate destination. Passover looked back to the exodus, and on to the coming of the kingdom. Jesus intended this meal to symbolize the new exodus, the arrival of the kingdom through his own fate. The meal, focused on Jesus’ actions with the bread and the cup, told the Passover story, and Jesus’ own story, and wove these two into one.”

-N.T. Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God.