Exodus 12:1-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-32; St John 13:1-15, 34-35
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
When God bound up the future of all nations in the history of Abraham and his Seed, He made the history prophetic. Each event and every rite of Israel became flower buds on a tree. Each bud, each law, each ceremony, as beautiful as it was, was temporary, destined to blossom as a flower and then to ripen into fruit.
That fruit is the Cross of Jesus Christ, the culmination and central pivot of all history, the gift of God to men as Man. And under the shade of that Cross all nations are gathered and made sons of God.
Of all those rites and in all that varied history of grace, in the great testament of the prophets, the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread are the most essential. They marked the miraculous deliverance from the angel of death who passed over those houses which were marked with the blood of the lamb. From those same houses, the next morning - really the same day according to Hebraic time - that blood marked release from bondage to Pharaoh as well.
That was beginning of Israel as a chosen people, a royal nation. In the Passover, the children of Israel, miraculously preserved and set free, became a people by the direct intervention of the YHWH, the God Who Is, and the blood of the Lamb.
The Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were kept in all the following years. God’s people marked those great and defining historical events and gifts. But that which they marked was in itself only a mark of something else. They were buds awaiting the light of the incarnation to shine in the darkness, warm the soil, and bring life to light.
The Passover and all the history of Israel opened as a flower at the nativity of our Lord. Angels sang and peace was declared. The earth bloomed in joy, but that bloom was not the end. That from Mary’s virgin womb matured. He was the loveliest of fruit: the Lord Himself in the flesh. And He ripened, because sweet and good for food, given for us upon the Tree of Life in the desolate garden of white-washed tombs, in the Place of the Skull, outside the City of Peace. There, strung up, hanging like that which once tempted Eve, now tempting Satan, is the fruit of God’s love and the fulfillment of Israel’s history and rites: our hope and salvation, Jesus the Christ.
It is because the Passover was the most essential and central of Old Testament events that our Lord lays down His life in the mist of its remembrance. He goes as a lamb to the slaughter; silent, but not without knowledge. He lays down His life as a sacrifice, of His own will, and He chooses the time. He is the Lamb whose blood shields us from the angel of death and delivers us from the slavery of that cruel pharaoh the devil. He is both the new Adam and the true Israel. He is YHWH, the God Who Is.
And if that simple, undefinable truth causes Caiaphas to rend his garments in mock piety, it ought o cause us to rend our hearts in humility and repentance. For the God Who Is and always has been, who set the continents into their places, carved out the oceans by His hand, and carries the sky upon His shoulders, has joined our cause, has been born of the Virgin, been sacrificed on the Cross. He has become one of us, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Our God is a man, come to be a sacrifice, a lamb, worthy of our sins, a holy and complete substitute. The life His veins carried through this dying world is poured out upon the earth and down our throats to cleanse our broken hearts. Indeed, we ought to rend out hearts and repent, that there be room for Him and His holy Blood.
For this He was born and for this He died: to have the Body and Blood that would be offered on our behalf, to give us that Body and that Blood as food and drink, sweet and satisfying to sinners desperately in need of forgiving food. We were once deceived and misled by food and then rescued through food. As it was for the Passover and Exodus, so for their fulfillment. First, our Lord Jesus on the night in which He was betrayed, on the eve - or rather the same day, according to Hebrew time - of His crucifixion and sacrifice, while in His humility, He gave His Body and His Blood to us, which He would then give that same day for us. For this He was born and for this He died.
He, His precious Body and His holy Blood, is the fruit of God’s love, the culmination of history and the distillation of the entirety of the old covenant in His Cup. This is the continuation of God’s own people. It was only a bud in Egypt, only a type in the lambs and bulls and goats, only a promise yet to be fulfilled in the prophetic word.
It flowered when the Lord preached on the mountainside. It flowered when He healed the sick and turned water into wine. But now it is mature. Not it is ripe. It has come to what it was intended for all along, to what was prophesied against the devil in the Garden: It is the very means and substance of our reconciliation with the Father. We have a new tree, a new fruit, and a new way back to God. Thus we are, by grace, back were we belong.
The woman has a Seed. That Seed has grown and is fruit. That fruit restores us to the garden’s fellowship and beyond. It undoes death and removes the curse. Here, in His Holy Supper, the Lord gives Himself to us, to eat and to drink, for the forgiveness of sins. This is what it is to be a Christian, not simply to be spared death, but to have fellowship with God and to be sundered forever from the power of the devil.
The fruit of the Tree is on the paten and in the chalice. The angel of death passes over. He has no claim on us. We belong to God. We bear His watery Name. We eat at His Table. We are His people and more. We are not merely guests, sojourners in His house for but an hour, but we are members of His royal family raised up from stones. We are not Gentile dogs hoping for crumbs, worshipping what we do not know. We, by grace, are the Lord’s own beloved and cherished children. We belong to God. We are baptized. We eat at His Table. We are gathered unto the protecting shade of His Cross.
This is the Church of the New Testament. Christ is Himself her Mediator and Lamb. Like the Church of the Old Testament, it is a testament of blood. Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us. His Boyd and Blood have been rent asunder in death and joined again in the resurrection. Let us celebrate the feast not with the old leaven, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, with faith, hope and love. For it is not merely the beauty of bud or flower that brings us joy tonight, but the full fruit of His love. And it is not merely our houses that are marked with the Blood of the Lamb, but our very hearts and souls.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
When God bound up the future of all nations in the history of Abraham and his Seed, He made the history prophetic. Each event and every rite of Israel became flower buds on a tree. Each bud, each law, each ceremony, as beautiful as it was, was temporary, destined to blossom as a flower and then to ripen into fruit.
That fruit is the Cross of Jesus Christ, the culmination and central pivot of all history, the gift of God to men as Man. And under the shade of that Cross all nations are gathered and made sons of God.
Of all those rites and in all that varied history of grace, in the great testament of the prophets, the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread are the most essential. They marked the miraculous deliverance from the angel of death who passed over those houses which were marked with the blood of the lamb. From those same houses, the next morning - really the same day according to Hebraic time - that blood marked release from bondage to Pharaoh as well.
That was beginning of Israel as a chosen people, a royal nation. In the Passover, the children of Israel, miraculously preserved and set free, became a people by the direct intervention of the YHWH, the God Who Is, and the blood of the Lamb.
The Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were kept in all the following years. God’s people marked those great and defining historical events and gifts. But that which they marked was in itself only a mark of something else. They were buds awaiting the light of the incarnation to shine in the darkness, warm the soil, and bring life to light.
The Passover and all the history of Israel opened as a flower at the nativity of our Lord. Angels sang and peace was declared. The earth bloomed in joy, but that bloom was not the end. That from Mary’s virgin womb matured. He was the loveliest of fruit: the Lord Himself in the flesh. And He ripened, because sweet and good for food, given for us upon the Tree of Life in the desolate garden of white-washed tombs, in the Place of the Skull, outside the City of Peace. There, strung up, hanging like that which once tempted Eve, now tempting Satan, is the fruit of God’s love and the fulfillment of Israel’s history and rites: our hope and salvation, Jesus the Christ.
It is because the Passover was the most essential and central of Old Testament events that our Lord lays down His life in the mist of its remembrance. He goes as a lamb to the slaughter; silent, but not without knowledge. He lays down His life as a sacrifice, of His own will, and He chooses the time. He is the Lamb whose blood shields us from the angel of death and delivers us from the slavery of that cruel pharaoh the devil. He is both the new Adam and the true Israel. He is YHWH, the God Who Is.
And if that simple, undefinable truth causes Caiaphas to rend his garments in mock piety, it ought o cause us to rend our hearts in humility and repentance. For the God Who Is and always has been, who set the continents into their places, carved out the oceans by His hand, and carries the sky upon His shoulders, has joined our cause, has been born of the Virgin, been sacrificed on the Cross. He has become one of us, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Our God is a man, come to be a sacrifice, a lamb, worthy of our sins, a holy and complete substitute. The life His veins carried through this dying world is poured out upon the earth and down our throats to cleanse our broken hearts. Indeed, we ought to rend out hearts and repent, that there be room for Him and His holy Blood.
For this He was born and for this He died: to have the Body and Blood that would be offered on our behalf, to give us that Body and that Blood as food and drink, sweet and satisfying to sinners desperately in need of forgiving food. We were once deceived and misled by food and then rescued through food. As it was for the Passover and Exodus, so for their fulfillment. First, our Lord Jesus on the night in which He was betrayed, on the eve - or rather the same day, according to Hebrew time - of His crucifixion and sacrifice, while in His humility, He gave His Body and His Blood to us, which He would then give that same day for us. For this He was born and for this He died.
He, His precious Body and His holy Blood, is the fruit of God’s love, the culmination of history and the distillation of the entirety of the old covenant in His Cup. This is the continuation of God’s own people. It was only a bud in Egypt, only a type in the lambs and bulls and goats, only a promise yet to be fulfilled in the prophetic word.
It flowered when the Lord preached on the mountainside. It flowered when He healed the sick and turned water into wine. But now it is mature. Not it is ripe. It has come to what it was intended for all along, to what was prophesied against the devil in the Garden: It is the very means and substance of our reconciliation with the Father. We have a new tree, a new fruit, and a new way back to God. Thus we are, by grace, back were we belong.
The woman has a Seed. That Seed has grown and is fruit. That fruit restores us to the garden’s fellowship and beyond. It undoes death and removes the curse. Here, in His Holy Supper, the Lord gives Himself to us, to eat and to drink, for the forgiveness of sins. This is what it is to be a Christian, not simply to be spared death, but to have fellowship with God and to be sundered forever from the power of the devil.
The fruit of the Tree is on the paten and in the chalice. The angel of death passes over. He has no claim on us. We belong to God. We bear His watery Name. We eat at His Table. We are His people and more. We are not merely guests, sojourners in His house for but an hour, but we are members of His royal family raised up from stones. We are not Gentile dogs hoping for crumbs, worshipping what we do not know. We, by grace, are the Lord’s own beloved and cherished children. We belong to God. We are baptized. We eat at His Table. We are gathered unto the protecting shade of His Cross.
This is the Church of the New Testament. Christ is Himself her Mediator and Lamb. Like the Church of the Old Testament, it is a testament of blood. Christ, our Passover, has been sacrificed for us. His Boyd and Blood have been rent asunder in death and joined again in the resurrection. Let us celebrate the feast not with the old leaven, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, with faith, hope and love. For it is not merely the beauty of bud or flower that brings us joy tonight, but the full fruit of His love. And it is not merely our houses that are marked with the Blood of the Lamb, but our very hearts and souls.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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