In order to be deified and exist within the community of the Persons of the Trinity, the person must be absolutely pure of sin. Sin is a lack of the Good, a lack of God, and therefore it is not possible for a lack of Good to exist within God. They are incompatible. God is pure and perfect and so must be the beings who share with him his nature and existence.
Everyone is familiar with unleavened versus leavened bread. In the Old Testament, God establishes clear rules when the Jews can use one or the other. Leaven is yeast made from fermented dough that is mixed with fresh dough in order to make it rise. In the Bible, leaven is associated with corruption and sin. It is first mentioned in Exodus in preparation for the Passover and the flight from Egypt. Yahweh says, “Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven from your houses. For whoever eats leavened bread from the first day to the seventh day shall be cut off from Israel.” (Exodus 12:15). There are two practical reasons why God forbids leaven. Left unchecked, leaven will continue to grow and overwhelm the whole loaf. The second reason is haste — leaven takes time and warmth to rise and must be closely monitored. It is a bread of leisure and domesticity. In our flight from slavery to the Promised Land, we must be prepared to depart with no notice and leave no comfortable attachments behind. Foregoing leaven is a sign of commitment. God doesn’t only harshly condemn leaven as a symbol of sin, but because of the attachments it embodies.
The children of Israel said to them, “Would we had died, smitten by the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full” (Exodus 16:3).
In the desert, the Israelites longed for the comforts of Egypt — yes the fleshpots, but also leavened bread which was first invented in ancient Egypt and remained associated with it. Eating leavened bread cuts one off from Israel for the practical reason that the person is a pagan Egyptian at heart. Like all of God’s “punishments,” it isn’t arbitrary — rather, it is the inevitable consequence of a reality. God’s first commandment is “thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). No pagan “leaven” can coexist with the true God.
Ever since then, observant Jews carefully clean their homes before Passover to make sure that no pagan leaven remains. This is known as the Day of Preparation. Of course, if leaven represents sin and Israel is God’s chosen people, then God is demanding that all traces of sin be removed before they can be freed from the bonds of slavery/sin in Egypt/the fallen world and enter into the Promised Land/heaven. If traces of sin remain, then that person will be “cut off from Israel.” In other words, he will be excluded from the chosen people who are destined for the promised land of heaven.
Of course, the “valid matter” that must be used for hosts to be consecrated and transubstantiated into the body of our Lord at Mass is sinless, non-pagan, unleavened bread. It is the bread that Jesus used at the Last Supper when he performed the first consecration. It is also fitting, as Jesus is himself sinless, that the bread used for his body must also necessarily be “sinless” and not defiled, contaminated, and transformed by a saprophytic fungus.
The synoptic gospels explicitly record that the Last Supper and the first consecration occurred on the first day of the feast of Unleavened Bread.1 This feast actually lasts a full seven days. People forget that there was a second consecration performed by Jesus at the inn at Emmaus the day of his resurrection which would have been within the seven day feast of Unleavened Bread. The disciples saw him revealed “in the breaking of the bread” — the first Eucharistic miracle. There simply would have been no leavened bread available in Israel for either the Last Supper or for the meal at Emmaus for Jesus to use. Also, it is hard to fathom that faithful Jews like the disciples would not have been alarmed and questioned Jesus why he was violating a strict commandment by eating leavened bread or even allowing it in the house. Yet, there is no record in any of the Last Supper gospel accounts of a question being raised by anyone present why Yahweh was now violating his own Law. If as the Orthodox claim, unleavened bread is “dead bread” and the organisms within leavened bread make it “living bread” to better represent the living Christ in the Eucharist, then this would have been an ideal opportunity for a teaching moment. However, Scripture and Apostolic tradition are absolutely silent regarding any explanation or justification for a change.
In the Old Testament sacrificial system used at the Jerusalem Temple, blood sacrifices (prefiguring the bloody sacrifice of Christ on the Cross) could not be offered with leavened bread.
“When I cast out the nations from before your face and expand your borders, you shall not offer the blood of My sacrifice with leavened bread” (Exodus 23:18).
In the Mass, bread and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. Here, the blood sacrifices are the animal sacrifices of the Old Covenant that were sacrificed each morning and each afternoon (Exodus 29:38) for centuries until the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. In Exodus, the “my” in “My sacrifice” refers to the sin offering that the people make to God. In the New Covenant, the “my” in “My sacrifice” transforms into the sacrifice of Jesus in his Passion and in the re-presentation of this Passion in the Mass as the perfect sin offering of the Son back to the Father. The lambs of the Jerusalem Temple become the Lamb of Christ in the Mass. This Old Covenant precedent is why Jesus at the Last Supper and the Roman Catholic Church at the New Covenant sacrifice of the Mass do not use leavened bread as the matter for the sacrificial host.
However, various heretical and schismatic Christian sects do allow the use of leavened bread in their masses even though it is against the teaching of Scripture and the clear example of our Lord himself. This appears to be yet another example of “following your gut” to justify modifying and “improving upon” received Tradition. In addition to the lack of validity of their priesthoods, this practice casts immediate doubt on the validity of their Eucharistic offering and may be one of several possible reasons why Eucharistic miracles only occur at Catholic Masses. Prior to the Protestant “Reformation,” the Great Schism of 1054 between the Eastern and Western Churches was the major rupture in Christendom. It nominally occurred over three issues: the primacy of Peter, the filioque, and the use of leavened versus unleavened bread for the Eucharist.
The perpetual twice-daily offering of a lamb in the Jerusalem Temple was also a “burnt” offering.2 Unlike some offerings, such as the Passover offering, which was meant to be eaten, the Tamid lamb was not eaten. It had to be completely immolated by fire, because it was only meant for God (i.e., to be deified). The fire for the Tamid offering burnt day and night so that the smoke from the offering could rise continuously to God. The legs of the burnt offering had to be removed prior to immolation because the limbs are the instruments of sin through which we act. The inner organs of the animal also had to be removed, washed, and separately burnt (Leviticus 1: 10-13). The word used in Leviticus for “inner organs” is εγκοιλια or enkoilia. The word used by Paul for “belly” in the phrase “god of their belly” is κοιλια or koilia. These are essentially the same words, differing only by the additional of the preposition “en” in Deuteronomy which means “in” before the word koilia or “belly.”
It is now easy to relate the belly or guts of the man referred to by Paul in Philippians 3:18-9 with the guts of the sacrificial lamb in the Jerusalem Temple that represented the sinful inner being within us (the “god of the belly”).
The Tamid, as the highest atonement offering, needed to be both pure and total. The Tamid is a type of our deification since, in order for deification to occur, our sacrifice, our immolation in God, must also be pure and total. The Old Covenant Tamid lamb in the Jerusalem Temple pointed toward the New Covenant Lamb of God sacrificed in Jerusalem on the Cross. The Mass, as the perpetual re-presentation of the Passion, is therefore the Tamid offering of the New Covenant.
Matthew 26:17, Mark 14:12, Luke 22:7.
“Originally it was called the olat ha-tamid (Exodus 29:.42) and later simply ha-tamid (Daniel 8: 11-13). The Hebrew word “tamid” means "standing," as in "perpetual" or "continual," and the Hebrew word olat is from the Hebrew verb "l-h" (olah), meaning "to go up," or "to ascend." It is the distinguishing visible feature of all altar sacrifices in the ascending smoke rising up to Heaven” (Michal Hunt, Jesus and the Mystery of the Tamid Sacrifice (Fishers, IN: Agape Bible Study, 2016), location 634, Kindle).