Maundy Thursday (B)
“Meal to Meal: The
Passover to the Lord’s Supper”[1]
March 29, 2018
Text: Ex. 12:1-13; Mark 14:12-26
Unleavened
bread, the better to eat in haste.
Bitter herbs, the bitter suffering of the people. Wine, the promise of joy. The lamb, the sacrifice. The blood of the lamb is painted with a
hyssop branch on the doorposts and lintels of the Israelite dwellings. Seeing the blood, the angel of death passes
over. Those dwellings not marked by the
blood, the homes of the Egyptians, suffer the last and most terrible of the
plagues: The death of the firstborn. No
home is spared but those painted red.
From the lowest of slaves to the household of Pharaoh, man and beast
alike, the firstborn dies. For death is
the judgment. The wages of sin is
death. To be separated from God by
unbelief is to be dead. Death, temporal
and eternal enters the dwellings of the Egyptians. But to be in a house marked by the blood of
the lamb is to live. And this is the
night Israel will be freed from her bondage.
This is the night Egypt will send Israel out in haste. “Take our silver! Take our gold! Take our clothing! Just get out!” “Keep the Feast,” the LORD commands, “with
your belt fastened, sandals on your feet, your staff in hand, ready to depart
in haste. You are but a stranger here in
exile. I am bringing you out and
bringing you home.” The bread, the wine,
the bitter herbs, the lamb. It is the
LORD’s Passover, to be observed by all generations as a statute forever, that
in this way, God’s people of all times participate in His great salvation.
So it
is that our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night in which He was betrayed, celebrates
the Passover with His disciples in the upper room. There is the bread and the bitter herbs. There is the wine, the cup of blessing. But this night is different than all the
Passovers that have come before. On this
night, Jesus takes the bread, breaks it, gives it to His disciples, and says of
it, “this is my body” (Mark 14:22;
ESV). And in the same way, He takes the
cup, the wine, gives thanks, and gives it to His disciples, saying of it, “This is my blood of the [New Testament],
which is poured out for many” (v. 23).
We must not fail to understand what Jesus is saying here. He is the Lamb. He is the Lamb we are to consume to
participate in the LORD’s great salvation.
Have you noticed none of the Gospel writers talk about a lamb being on
the table when our Lord celebrates the Passover with His disciples? Jesus is the Lamb. We are to eat Him. He is the Host of the Feast, and the Feast
itself. We eat Him by eating the
bread. It is His body, because He says
it is. Faith does not ask how. It is enough that Jesus says it, and so we
believe it. We drink His blood by
drinking the wine. It is His blood
because He says it is. Faith does not
cast doubt on the Word of the Lord or His ability to deliver. It is enough that Jesus says it, and so we
believe it. And we receive it.
Now,
it is Jesus who gives it. We do not
offer the body and blood of Christ to God as some sort of bloodless
sacrifice. It is not our gift to God, it
is God’s gift to us. It is His work, not
ours, not some ordinance we must perform in order to check it off the list of
must-dos. And by this gift, He forgives
our sins, strengthens our faith, and grants us His Holy Spirit. Indeed, all the benefits of His cross and
death and resurrection are given us in the Supper. Because that’s what He says. Again, the power in all of this is His
Word. It isn’t the pastor or the priest. Although it is certainly true that not just
anybody should officiate at the
Lord’s Supper, for God has given us the pastoral office for that, nonetheless,
the power doesn’t reside in the pastor.
It resides in Jesus. It is Jesus
who first said these words, the Words of Institution, to the disciples on the
night in which He was betrayed. And it
is still Jesus who says these words as often as we eat it and drink it in
remembrance of Him.
Remembrance
of Him, ah, how those words are misunderstood and abused. Here to remember doesn’t mean simply to call
the thing to mind, like “Oh, that’s right!
I forgot! Jesus died for my
sins!” No, remembrance in the Scriptures
is what the yearly Passover meal was all about.
That is, by this meal, given and instituted by God Himself, the people
were to participate in the great salvation of the Exodus. And they didn’t just say, “Oh, this Passover
Seder represents that great
salvation.” No, they believed that in
partaking of the Seder they actually
participated with their fathers in the Passover and Exodus from Egypt. And it is no accident that they thought that
way. That is the theology of the
thing. And so it is the theology of the
fulfillment of the Passover, the Lord’s Supper, wherein we eat our Paschal
Lamb, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Yes,
we really mean it. The bread is Jesus’
body. Because He says so. It is the very body born of the Virgin Mary,
given into death on the cross, and raised from the dead on Easter. The wine is Jesus’ blood. Because He says so. It is the very blood poured out from His
sacred veins as the thorns sunk into His brow, the nails pierced His hands and
His feet, the spear His side. In fact,
both Baptism and the Supper pour from His side, the water giving birth to
Christ’s holy Bride, the Church, the blood nourishing her. Now, this is supernatural. That doesn’t
make it any less literal. You literally
eat and drink Jesus’ body and blood. But
this is beyond the normal course of nature.
Supernatural simply means “above nature.” That is to say, it’s a miracle! So if you steal some of the consecrated bread
and wine this evening (don’t get any ideas!) and you sneak over to one of the
labs at the University of Idaho and put the elements under the microscope, no,
you’re not going to find little bits of First Century, Middle Eastern male DNA
mixed in. This isn’t cannibalism (as the
early Christians were charged by the Romans).
We don’t say, “Look, I got a piece of His little finger,” or “I’m
gnawing on a foot.” We don’t eat pieces
of Jesus, but we get the whole Jesus in the Sacrament. And it’s not as though we run out of Him
because we ate Him all up. That would
only happen in a natural eating. The
real, bodily presence of Jesus in the Sacrament is not a natural presence, it
is a supernatural, miraculous, but nonetheless very real, bodily presence. The bread does not cease to be bread, but it
is His body. The wine does not cease to
be wine, but it is His blood. We don’t
use philosophical terms like transubstantiation or consubstantiation (thank
you, Aristotle) to explain the how of
it all. We just stick with Jesus’ simple
words. For that is always safe and
right, to stick with Jesus’ simple words.
“This is my body. This is my
blood. Do this in remembrance of
me. That is, participate in my great
salvation. Receive the benefits of my
cross and death and resurrection. For
these, my body and blood, which I give to you here in the Sacrament, are given
and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins, for your life, and eternal
salvation.”
Beloved,
you are Israel, and this is the night of release from your bondage to sin and
death. Christ Jesus is our true Passover
Lamb. We eat Him in the Supper. By the bitterness of His suffering and death,
the bitterness of our suffering and death is taken away. Our sins are forgiven. And here we are in the House marked by the
blood of the Lamb, the holy Christian Church.
And we eat the bread and drink the wine, and it is Christ we consume,
because that’s what He promises. The
Bread of Life. The Wine of
Gladness. Jesus, the Sacrifice of our
redemption. The Lord has set the Table
before us. Let us eat and drink and
rejoice. For death passes over. In Him, we live. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son
(+), and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] The theme and structure of
this sermon are from Jeffery Pulse, Return
from Exile: A Lenten Journey (St. Louis: Concordia, 2017).
Good Friday
“Sin-Bearer to
Sin-Bearer: The Day of Atonement to THE Atonement”[1]
March 30, 2018
Text: Is. 52:13-53:12; John 19
What
do you do with sin? What do you do with
the thing that kills you and separates you eternally from your God? It must be atoned for by blood and it must be
sent away. That is what the Day of
Atonement is all about. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was an
Old Testament day of repentance and sacrifice for sin. Sin separates sinners from our holy God. If God is to dwell with His people Israel,
something must be done about their sin, lest His holiness lash out against them
and kill them. You have to understand
something about holiness: It is serious business, and it is incompatible with
sin. Like magnets of the same polarity,
they repel one another, only the repellence is deadly to the sinner. That is why you cannot see God and live. But here God desires to dwell with His people
Israel, in the Tabernacle and the Temple, on the mercy seat between the
cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant. And
if that is to happen, something must be done about the people’s sin. Atonement must be made. There must be blood. And the sin must be sent away, outside the
camp, into the wilderness, back to its father, the devil. Furthermore, God must do it. God must provide the way. For His Old Testament people, there is the
Day of Atonement. And among the
sacrifices to be made on that day, there are the two goats. We talked about this in a previous
meditation. Lots are cast for the goats,
one for death, and one for Azazel, which is to say, Satan. One goat is slaughtered and sacrificed on the
altar as atonement for sin. The priest
confesses the sins of the people over the head of the second goat and sends it
out into the wilderness, to Azazel, to Satan.
This one is the scapegoat. It
bears the sins of the people and takes them away.
Our
Lord Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of both of these goats. Jesus, our High Priest, is the fulfillment of
the Day of Atonement. He both makes the
offering, and He is the offering. And He
alone is the sacrifice that can make atonement for our sins. He is the propitiation,
a word that refers to the mercy seat on the Ark. That seat was covered with the blood of
sacrifice, so that blood came between God and the Ten Commandments that were
stored inside the Ark. The blood comes
between God and the Law you have transgressed.
It makes atonement. Well, we know
the blood of bulls and goats cannot actually atone for sin. The blood of Jesus Christ, however, the Lamb
of God and God’s only-begotten Son, cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). “He is
the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of
the whole world” (2:2; ESV). So He
is the sacrifice offered unto death. He
sheds His holy, precious blood on the cross for the forgiveness of our
sins. That is what we commemorate this
night, this Good Friday: The death of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for you and
for the world. We remember His holy
injuries: His sacred Head now wounded, pierced by thorns, with grief and shame
weighed down; the beating and the flogging, the insults and the spittle; the
nails driven through hands and feet; His spear impaled side. And we know that as excruciating as was the
physical pain, the worst of it was the hell He suffered for us as He was lifted
up on the tree. His Father turned His
back on His beloved Son. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
(Matt. 27:46). That is our punishment He
took upon Himself. That is our suffering
and death. That is our condemnation. This is what we call the vicarious atonement: Jesus stands in for us and pays the price for
our redemption. And why does He do
it? That God be reconciled to us in the
forgiveness of sins, so that He can be our God and we can be His people, and He
can dwell with us, which is precisely what He does in our mercy seat, our
propitiation, the flesh of our crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ
is the sacrifice of atonement, but so also He is our scapegoat. For He not only covers our sins with His
blood, but He takes them away and buries them in the place of Azazel, in hell. When our Lord rises from the dead, our sins
stay buried, where they can never haunt us again. Jesus has removed them from us as far as the
east is from the west.
Have
you ever wondered why Jesus dies on Mt. Calvary, on Golgotha, not Mt.
Zion? The unclean business of execution
must happen outside the Holy City. It
cannot happen on the Temple mount. So
our Lord takes up His cross and bears it outside the city, up another hill, to
the Place of a Skull. But the cross is
not all He is bearing. He is bearing our
sin. He is quite literally fulfilling
the role of the scapegoat. That is what
the Prophet Isaiah is getting at in our Old Testament reading. “Surely
he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted. But he
was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him
was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed”
(Is. 53:4-5). He has borne. He has carried. Upon Him.
He is loaded up with all of our evil and He takes it away. It is gone.
It no longer belongs to us. It no
longer damns us. Jesus is the scapegoat.
So
what do you do with your sin, that which kills you and separates you eternally
from your God? There is nothing you can do. God must do it. And He does.
In the perfect, once for all sacrifice of atonement, Christ crucified,
the Lamb of God who takes away your sin and the sin of the whole world. That is why this Friday is good. Because our sin is covered by the blood of
Jesus and taken away. This day is the
true Yom Kippur, the true Day of
Atonement. Now reconciled to God by the
blood of Jesus Christ, we live and we belong to God and He dwells with us. And perhaps most marvelous of all, on account
of His Son Jesus Christ, God calls Himself our
Father. And He calls you His child. He loves you.
He loves you to the death of Jesus, His Son. He loves you to all eternity. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son
(+), and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] The theme and structure of
this sermon are from Jeffery Pulse, Return
from Exile: A Lenten Journey (St. Louis: Concordia, 2017).
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