Pastor Cofer
Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday was a Passover celebration like any other: the house had been swept clean of leaven, the table had been set, the food had been prepared. Thousands upon thousands of homes in Jerusalem would celebrate the festival in the same way that it had been done for thousands of years. But in one room, in one house in the holy city, Jesus would change the meal forever.
Passover was the remembrance of the liberation of the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt. Up until Jesus’ day, this was the defining moment in Jewish history. God stepped into the world with a mighty hand and toppled the world super-power in order to free his people – a people who had almost forgotten him.
It was a terrible and tremendous night as the angel of death went from house to house, killing the first-born son of every family, from the lowliest slaves all the way up to the son of Pharaoh himself. No family was to be spared unless they had slaughtered a lamb and smeared its blood on their doorframe. That same lamb was roasted, and eaten in its entirety. There were no leftovers. They ate with their sandals laced up, with their staff in hand, ready to go at a moments notice.
In that moment, their preparations were very sensible and pragmatic. They were preparing for the journey to freedom, one last meal to give them strength for the long road ahead. What they could not have known, and what remained secret for millennia is that the blood of the lamb, poured out and smeared upon the upright wooden posts were a foreshadowing, a symbol that pointed forward to a deliverance that far exceeds the exodus from Egypt.
So Jesus gathers his disciples in the upper room to share this meal of remembrance, a meal that most thought of as pointing backward to Moses, and he redefined it – or rather, brought a new clarity to what had been there all along.
The bread that they ate was flat, unleavened bread. True, it could be made quickly as there is no waiting for the dough to rise, but there was something deeper going on. It wasn’t sufficient to simply exclude leaven from the Passover bread. Part of the Passover tradition was to literally search and sweep the house clean of any traces of leaven. That’s because leaven was a traditional symbol for sin and impurity. So Jesus takes the bread, holds it up and blesses it and declares, “This is my body.” Perfect, and untainted. He held it up, and broke it. Of course this had been done for a long time, but never before had the action been so visceral. “This is my body.” Snap. Now concrete was Jesus’ assertion, “I am the bread of life.” Never before had it been offered literally or so simply.
In the same way he took the cup, as had been done so many times before. And yet this time he gave it new meaning, “This is my blood of the new covenant.” A covenant is much more than a promise or contract. It defines in an immutable way a relationship. The old covenant, to which Jesus is alluding, is the covenant that God made with his people on Mount Sinai. Moses was given a code by which Israel must live, and if they did so God would call them his own, and he would be their God.
The trouble is, Israel couldn’t hold up its end of the covenant. The history of Israel is the history of people running from God, until they were destitute and broken. Then they would call out to God, and He would restore them. And lest we judge the Israelites too harshly, let’s consider if our own histories with God are much different.
The failure of the old covenant wasn’t news to anyone. In fact, Jesus was bringing to fulfillment the promise God made to the prophet Jeremiah:
“The time is coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD.
“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
Covenants were sealed in blood, even as the covenant with Moses was. For the covenant to stand, a sacrifice must be made. And this new covenant would be sealed, not with the blood of bulls and oxen, but with the blood of the Lamb of God, with Jesus’ very blood. It is his blood that is the guarantee of the promise that God will forgive our wickedness and remember our sins no more.
Jesus was telling us that through his blood, the relationship between God and man was being radically and fundamentally changed. And so The Lamb offers to us his true body and blood for us to literally eat and drink. It is a meal that marks the end of our slavery to sin.
Not only that, but it also nourishes us for our journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Just like the first Passover meal gave the Israelites the strength to get up, and leave their old life behind and strain forward toward a better tomorrow, so the Lord’s Supper empowers us too.
The Christian journey is seldom an easy one, and although we know where we are ultimately going, there is a lot of struggle and uncertainty along the way. That’s why it is so important that we are fed by the Lamb of God. Without His Body and Blood, our own strength would give way long before we reach our destination.
So we join Jesus in the upper room, we draw near and take his very Body and Blood, and we remember the new covenant that God has made with us. We give thanks that He died in our place; that because of his blood shed for us death passes us over. We are brought out of our slavery to sin, and given the strength to face the wilderness of our world until we arrive at last in the Promised Land.
