Sermon for Maundy Thursday: April 1, 2021 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝

Imagine for a moment that you are an Israelite family. You are living in the time of the Old Testament, but it’s long after the time of Moses and the Exodus. Now you are in the Promised Land, living right near Jerusalem. Regularly you go up the hill to the Temple for the sacrifices, and as all those animals give their lives for your sake, you are constantly reminded of the One Sacrifice of the Messiah who is prophesied to come and offer His life to pay for your sins. Every year you celebrate the Passover, and every year this unique meal follows the same ritual order. The youngest member of the family would ask, “Why on this night do we eat this meal?” And the answer was always the same: “When we were in Egypt, the Lord Almighty led us out with a strong hand and brought us to this land.”

Now these actual historical events did not happen to you, or even to the oldest living members of your family. All this stuff you say happened to you, actually occurred hundreds of years ago, but that doesn’t matter. Even if you were not a first-hand witness, this is still your story. It is just as though you were there, as though you had danced out of a plagued and destroyed Egypt, walking on the dry Red Sea floor on that great night with a wall of water standing up on either side of you. By eating this meal of the Passover, God was saving you the very same way He saved your ancestors. You escaped the angel of death because on your ancestors’ door post there was the blood of a lamb that was killed in your place.

So when you and your Old-Testament-era Israelite family eat a lamb that was roasted over fire at your Passover meal, it was as though you were actually there when God miraculously saved your ancestors back in 1446 B.C. In reality, the benefits from the Lord’s great saving event in Old Testament history were brought forward in time to you in your time and place. And so, without being there yourself, you and your family participated in God’s salvation, so that you truthfully could say, “When we were in Egypt, the Lord Almighty led us out with a strong hand and brought us to this land.” This is what makes the Passover meal a family’s participation in the Exodus story.

OK, now imagine you’re a Gentile in the 1st century A.D., living in the Greek city of Corinth. You and your family became Christians when the Apostle Paul came through the city and preached God’s Word and the Holy Spirit turned your heart to believe in the message of Jesus your Savior. Remember, you have not one drop of Jewish blood in you, nor have you ever set foot in the Roman province of Palestine, much less the city of Jerusalem. And Paul writes a letter to your church so that the pastor who is there can read it in your little house-church. As he speaks concerning the Lord’s Supper he tells you some amazing words about your participation in another event that happened in the Holy Land and that is like the Exodus, but actually even greater than that. You hear these words:

“The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”

Now the deliverance of those Israelites from Egypt was merely a shadow of the great deliverance that God accomplished in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for all people of every time and every place. Now the shadow is past, the real thing has already happened. Christ, our Passover lamb, is sacrificed, and your true freedom is secured.

Now you’re back in 2021. And yet, you, too, were in bondage. You were born into the spiritual Egypt of sin and death—forced to labor under the crushing blows of the law. Just as it was impossible for the Israelites to make bricks for those cruel Egyptians without using any straw, it was also impossible for you to please God by anything you could do or offer. Yet your Lord sent you not another Moses, not someone to accuse you of your sin and oppress you with more bondage. Instead, He sent for you His own dear Son, Jesus Christ. He was a baby who escaped the sword of Herod, just as Moses was hidden from the Egyptian baby-killers in a basket, yet Jesus would not escape the roasting fire of God’s wrath. He would bear the complete burden of your sin all the way to the cross, and by Him, by the sacrificial Lamb of God, the full price of your freedom was paid.

The forgiving, freeing, life-giving benefits of this death are given to you, even though you live many centuries later than this most pivotal moment in the history of all creation. Whether or not you have actually been to the piece of ground where Jesus lived, walked, taught, died and rose to life again; were you there when they crucified my Lord? It doesn’t matter. These gifts are yours the very same way it was for those eleven faithful disciples who communed with the Lord just before He was betrayed and crucified. Though the forgiveness of all your sins already happened once and for all, at one time and place, never to happen again, yet you still participate in that death, you take part in that liberating walk out of your spiritual Egypt in a meal that is so much greater than the Passover.

For the cup of blessing which we bless is filled with that precious blood that flowed from the nail- and spear-pierced wounds of Jesus. The bread that you eat with your own mouth is the true body of Christ that bore all your sins. This isn’t merely the Passover anymore; you don’t commemorate just the Exodus. As you eat and drink this Body and Blood, you remember the holy death of Jesus, the true Passover lamb. But remember that you are involved in an activity that is much more than just mental, and it does more than give you an emotional experience. This is a participation. That means you become part of that death. It is just like the death of Christ had happened to you. And really, truly, it did. It is no longer you who live but Christ who lives within you. As that Body and Blood enters your flesh and mixes internally with your own blood, Jesus Himself becomes a part of you, and He nourishes you, not only in your soul, but in your body as well. He strengthens your faith and reminds you with the comforting news that your sins are forgiven, but He also gives you everlasting life, and true communion with the Holy Trinity, with the angels, archangels and the whole company of heaven, all in this simple, yet blessed Meal of Holy Communion.

Your Lord and Master Jesus chose ordinary bread and wine to be the holy means by which He feeds you with His Body and Blood because His entire ministry up to His ascension into heaven and ever since then has been a ministry hidden in humility. The grains of the field and grapes of the vine may be the fruits of our labors, yet God has blessed these things to be the food that endures to everlasting life. For centuries, Christian preachers have looked even to how these ordinary elements are made in order to instruct the church.

Think of this picture: even as bread is made up of many little scattered grains, and wine is made up of many individual grapes, the grains are crushed together and baked, and the grapes are mashed together and fermented, and all their former individual character is gone. The same is true about you as a gathering of God’s own baptized and redeemed people. You are no longer an individual in one sense, because you as an individual, who had the sinful desire to go your own way and be your own person, this individual has been crushed, you are buried with Christ. You are now one with your Lord, and you are all one with each other. As you gather as the body of Christ at this altar, you declare to each other and to God that you have publicly confessed the one doctrine, the one true hope of salvation that you have.

After you have been crushed like those grapes, you are combined with your fellow baptized believers, and the Lord invites you into His Holy presence as priests. Yours is the privilege to have God Himself touch your lips and tongue, not to sting you with the reminder of your sin, but to comfort you with the assurance that your sin is taken away. Your place at the heavenly banquet is reserved—you even have the first taste of that banquet right here! You as God’s Holy Church are truly one bread even as you eat the Bread of His Body and drink of the Cup of His blood. You are unified in that you have confessed the same doctrine. If someone should publicly confess a different doctrine from everyone else and still participate in Communion, then this unity is destroyed. This is called open communion; it deceives that person who is taking it and it will kill a church.

Holy Communion is a participation in the sufferings and death of Christ, and it proclaims this death in plain sight. This holy food gives you the forgiveness of sins in the most intimate way, and God Himself comes to live within your own body. Your kneeling at this altar may not transport you back to that night in the Upper Room or make you feel like you are at the cross of Calvary. But the meal you eat God uses to bring these events of your salvation to you. Jesus has said that this is so and He has promised it, whether it feels like it or not! And by eating this holy meal with fellow believers in Christ you say to each other something a little different from what the Hebrew fathers told their children; something like: “Why do we celebrate Holy Communion?” Answer: “When we were still in bondage in our sins, the Lord Almighty sent us His Son Jesus, and by His death on a cross He has brought us to eternal life.”

In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.