Showing posts with label Passover. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Passover. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

'Christ in the Passover'



Last night we welcomed Miriam, Daniel, and Francoise of Jews for Jesus to Living Water.

Miriam shared a fantastic presentation on Christ in the Passover.

Miriam and Daniel, Jewish believers in Jesus from Israel, are married and are involved in sharing the good news of new life through faith in Jesus with their fellow Israelis.

All who attended gained a deeper appreciation of Christ, “the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.”

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Maundy Thursday: Filled with Meaning and Mystery

[This was shared tonight during Maundy Thursday with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Mark 14:12-26
Maundy Thursday is a day heavy with meaning and mystery.

But on this Maundy Thursday, we consider the most meaningful and mysterious thing about this day. I want to talk with you about the is-ness of this day.

Tonight, you see, we do more than remember Christ, His death, and His resurrection. He will be with us. He will relive the crucifixion and resurrection in us. And He will welcome us to the heavenly banquet He eternally shares with all who believe in Him. The gospel writer Mark tells us about this meaningful and mysterious meal you and I are about to have once again.

First, some background. The Old Testament shows us that the central saving event of Israel’s history was God’s deliverance of His people, Israel, the Hebrews, from their slavery in Egypt.

This event was not just celebrated by the Jews. It was reiterated, re-lived, re-experienced in the Passover festival each year.

In the Passover, Jews don’t just go back to the events the day celebrates, they participate in the first Passover all over again. There is a present-tense is-ness in the Passover.

Above all, as you know, Passover is annually re-lived in the Seder meal.

It was while commemorating the Passover meal with the twelve apostles that Jesus chose to institute the most meaningful and mysterious meal there is, the most meaningful and mysterious thing about Maundy Thursday.

In this meal, which Jesus first shared with the twelve on the night before He would be crucified, four days before God the Father would raise Him from the dead, Jesus anticipates and gives us the means to regularly relive the central saving event not just of Israel’s history, but of world history.

That central event, of course, is Jesus’ death and resurrection.

In this meal, Jesus makes us not spectators of what He does for the sinners of the world.

He doesn’t hand us a souvenir of His death and resurrection.

In Holy Communion, Jesus makes us part of what He has done and is doing.

He gives us the forgiveness of sins He bled to buy for us on the cross.

He gives us the new life that He gains when, as the perfect sinless lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world, the Father raises Jesus from the dead.

Receiving Holy Communion for believers is a bit like this: While we’re watching a favorite movie, a character in the film turns to us and invites us to become part of the story, to come up onto the screen and to have a full share in the pains and the joys that they’re experiencing, to partake of their happy ending.

As we trust the words Jesus spoke on Maundy Thursday over the bread and wine, we receive His body and blood and become part of His story.

We go through the cross.

We rise from the tomb.

We reign with Jesus in the heavenlies.

The new life that only Jesus can give is taken into our very bodies.

Our focus tonight then, is on just the last few verses of our gospel lesson, beginning at verse 22: “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take it; this is my body.’”

These words would have been as strange to the apostles as they are today for people with no connection to God are apt to find them. “I’m giving myself to you and I’m giving myself for you,” Jesus is saying. “This is my body, sacrificed for you.”

Jesus asks us to take Him, the crucified and risen One, into ourselves, so that we become one with Him.

I can’t explain how this works. The sacrament of Holy Communion is a mystery. I only have Jesus’ word for it that when His words of institution--”This is my body”--meet the bread, the bread becomes not just bread, but also Jesus’ body. The same is true when He says in verse 24: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.” The wine is more than just wine; it’s also Christ’s blood.

But why? Why does Jesus want us to take His life into ours?

Let me suggest one of several partial, imperfect, human explanations: The ancient Jewish rabbis in the intertestamental period picked up on the prophecy of Isaiah and Ezekiel that once the Messiah had completed His work in the world, He would invite the faithful to a great banquet.

The rabbis said that the menu would include the leviathan. The leviathan represented the darkness of a life separated from God. This was the very separation into which Jesus entered when He cried from the cross, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46; Psalm 22:1)

Conquered and eaten leviathan represented the final conquest of God over evil. Jesus subtly alludes to these teachings when, after His resurrection, He invites the apostles to enjoy the broiled fish (what my mentor, the New Testament scholar Bruce Schein called “miniature leviathans”) He had prepared for them.

When we receive Jesus’ body and blood then, we not only ingest His life, we also physically receive a share in His conquest of sin and death.

Paul says that when Jesus died on the cross “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus, bearing our sins, when lifted up on the cross, became like the bronze serpent Moses lifted on a pole in the wilderness to bring healing to God’s people (Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21). So, in Holy Communion, Christ, as we trust in Him, graciously gives us a share in His conquest of evil.

With all that’s happening in Holy Communion, who can blame the apostles for being mystified on that first Maundy Thursday? Nobody can fully understand it.

But I have good news for you: We don’t need to fully understand it. We simply have to believe what Christ promises in this sacrament.

“This is my body.” “This is my blood.” Jesus gives us His body and His blood whenever we receive the sacrament. Jesus gives us His whole self when we gather at His table. Just as He gave His whole self on the cross on Good Friday. And it is this same whole self that rose again.

Listen: Every time we receive the sacrament, we live again Christ’s death and resurrection. We live it with Him. It happens to us and in us again. And we become beneficiaries again of what Christ has done for those who believe His words over the bread and wine, of God’s forgiveness and life with God.

Paul writes in Romans 10:9: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Similarly, if we trust Jesus in telling us that the bread is His body and the wine is His blood, we have all that the meal brings. Christ lives in us.

So tonight as we prepare to remember Christ’s death and resurrection this weekend, let us once more be re-membered to Christ. Let us relive in our bodies, minds, and souls, the passion and resurrection that Christ has won for all who believe and so, be empowered by God again today and tomorrow, to live, to die, and to rise again with Christ. Amen


[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Monday, March 26, 2018

Palm Sunday: A Different Kind of King

[This was shared yesterday during Palm Sunday worship services with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

John 12:12-19
Palm Sunday isn’t an altogether happy day. While Sundays are always good days to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection, there also is in Palm Sunday a foreshadowing of the suffering Jesus will undergo and die on a cross in the week that follows.


As Jesus prepares to enter Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the religious leaders are hatching a plot to kill Jesus. The event that finally convinced them that Jesus had to die came when Jesus brought His friend, Lazarus, back from the dead. (Never mind that it would seem to be foolish to think that Someone with the power to raise a man from the dead would stay dead even if you killed Him.)

The religious leaders plotting Jesus’ demise had no idea that they were playing into the plan of God for Jesus. They were clueless about the the fact that, Jesus, “the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world” was going to the holy city with the express intention, according to God’s plan, of sacrificing Himself on the cross in order to save the world from its sin and from eternal separation from God.

Ultimately, it would be neither Jewish leaders nor crowds nor the Romans who would take Jesus’ life, although their sins and ours made His cross necessary. As Jesus once said, foreshadowing both Good Friday and Easter Sunday, “I lay down my life--only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again..." (John 10:17-18)

And so, at the time appointed by God the Father and not because of the wounds inflicted on Him by the world, Jesus would say from the cross: “‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ When he had said this, he breathed his last.” (Luke 23:46)

In our lives, we often think that we’re in control or must be. But, whether we perceive it or not, God is still in control.

We may endure tragedies and heartbreaks, as well as loves and loved ones lost, but God is bound, eventually and eternally, to bring His good out of bad. God will use Good Fridays to bring Easters for those who place their hope in Jesus Christ alone!

All of this looms in the background as Jesus and His disciples enter Jerusalem at the beginning of our gospel lesson.

Please go to it, John 12:12-19. Verses 12-13: “The next day the great crowd that had come for the festival [the festival is Passover] heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem. They took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna!’ [meaning Save or rescue us, Savior] ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’ ‘Blessed is the king of Israel!’”

The words and the palm branches used to welcome Jesus help us to see that the people see Jesus as a king who would use military might to save them from the oppression of the Romans. Their welcome of Jesus echoes the welcome given to a Jewish priest who had led an armed revolt against foreign conquerors who had prohibited Jews from worshiping at the temple in Jerusalem back in 167 BC. These events are celebrated in the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

The Maccabean regime that came to power when the Jews through their foreign overlords out didn’t last long. No kingdom built on human force, human blood, or human logic can ever last. But the crowds who welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem forgot that lesson from their own history and were ready to take up arms to make Jesus their king.

Jesus is the King: the Messiah, Lord of heaven and earth. But He doesn’t conquer by force of arms or by using a democratic vote. Jesus' power isn't derived from any form of human power or manipulation. As Jesus told the Roman governor Pilate after He was arrested: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

Contrary to the dead-end thinking of this dying world, Jesus conquers by a servant love that compelled Him to die for us. And the enemies He conquers are the common enemies that live in every human soul: sin, death, darkness.

Jesus refuses to be our king on our terms.

We can’t come to Jesus and say, “Jesus, we’ll follow You if You do so and so.”

Nor can we say, “Jesus, we know that You believe in our preferred political philosophy. So, bless what we've already decided to do.”

We can’t approach him like the man profiled on 60 Minutes years ago, who ran a house of ill-repute in Las Vegas and told God that if God let him make a certain amount of money with his business, he would get out of it.

If we are to come to the God we know in Jesus, it will be on His terms or on no terms at all.

Jesus becomes our Lord when we daily yield control over our whole lives to Him, allowing Him to crucify our sinful selves so that our new selves, remade in Christ’s image, can rise.

We will never be fully remade in Christ’s image before our earthly lives come to an end; but Jesus’ disciples are those who willingly let Christ call them to repentance, trust, and renewal each and every day!

Verses 14 to 16: “Jesus found a young donkey and sat on it, as it is written: ‘Do not be afraid, Daughter Zion; see, your king is coming, seated on a donkey’s colt.’ At first his disciples didn’t understand all of this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about him and that these things had been done to him.”

Jesus isn’t shy about claiming His kingship or His deity. He says, for example, “The Father and I are one.” (John 10:30)

But more than anything He says, what Jesus did on the first Palm Sunday also tells us about Who He is. For one thing, as prophesied by Zechariah, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9). This was a sure sign that He is the Messiah-King long promised to God’s people and to the people of the world.

But, as John tells us, not even Jesus’ closest disciples, the apostles, understood what was happening on the first Palm Sunday.

We shouldn't be too hard on them though. Today, I often find Jesus' ways and will difficult to understand. There have been times in my years of following Jesus when it has seemed to me that Jesus has blocked from my life the very things that I thought would bring me happiness, instead doing those things for me that will bring me life. Only in heaven will we fully understand Jesus and His mysterious ways.

But anyone, Christian or not, who tries to understand Jesus apart from His death and resurrection or apart from Jesus’ call to follow Him because He is the only way to life with God--if they try to see Jesus only as a great teacher or a kind man, or only as a religious leader, they will miss out on all that Jesus wants to give to us.

Verses 17-18: “Now the crowd that was with [Jesus] when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. Many people, because they had heard that he had performed this sign, went out to meet him.”

By much of the crowd who had seen what happened, Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead was an interesting display of power. It proved Jesus had power that others didn't possess. The crowds hailed Jesus as king because of a sign, not because of what the sign pointed to, but because of how they thought that they could manipulate Jesus for their own purposes. Within days, many of these same people would demand Jesus’ execution.

People can turn on God on a dime.

A woman I knew years ago became bitter with God because, after her mother, in her late eighties, had suffered a long train of illnesses in the final few years of her life, had died. “I’m mad at God for taking my mom from me,” she said. I tried tactfully to ask the woman if she would like it if her mother, a believer now free from suffering and in the presence of God, would be brought back to this earthly life by God just to make her happy. I was unable to get my question across to her. But it’s questions like these we need to ask ourselves when we feel that God has disappointed us. We think in the short term; God has an eternal perspective.

In the midst of the Palm Sunday joys and celebrations, our gospel lesson ends on an ominous note: “So the Pharisees said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’”

The Pharisees see Jesus as a threat who had to be killed. And, in truth, Jesus is a threat to us whenever the things valued by this world--security, wealth, health, family, country, reputation, happiness--become more important to us than welcoming King Jesus to rule over our lives.

None of the things valued in this world can bring us what only Jesus can bring us: peace with God, the presence of God with us through all the times of this life, and life with God now and in eternity.

The call of Palm Sunday is to surrender to Jesus and to keep surrendering to Jesus every day, letting Him forgive us our sins, letting Him guard us from separation from God, and letting Him give us life everlasting.

I look forward to being with you on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter Sunday, so that, once again, we can celebrate Jesus, not as the king we want when sin has its way with us, but as the King we need when we let Him reign over us.

As we immerse ourselves deeply into the story of Christ's death and resurrection this Holy Week and remember that Christ did all of this for you and me and every other sinner in the world, God can incite us to sing the old Lenten hymn with a deeper sense of awe, gratitude, and faith: "Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble." Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Monday, April 14, 2014

Sad Beginning to Holy Week and Passover

How horrible that with Passover just two days away and Holy Week beginning yesterday, a white supremacist killed three people at a Jewish community center in Kansas City.

Jesus summarized Old Testament law when He said that the greatest commandment included loving God completely and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

May God teach us to love.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Passover and the Lamb of God, Who Takes Away the Sin of the World

Significant for Christians' upcoming celebrations of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter--and significant for us at Saint Matthew, where as part of our reading of the Old Testament book of Numbers for Read the Bible in a Year--is that, on the Jewish calendar, Passover, the feast Jesus and the disciples celebrated when He instituted Holy Communion, began at sundown this evening.

In Numbers 9:1-5, we're told:
The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the first month of the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying: Let the Israelites keep the passover at its appointed time. On the fourteenth day of this month, at twilight, you shall keep it at its appointed time; according to all its statutes and all its regulations you shall keep it. So Moses told the Israelites that they should keep the passover. They kept the passover in the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight, in the wilderness of Sinai. Just as the Lord had commanded Moses, so the Israelites did. 
Passover begins on the 14th day of Nisan. Nisan is the first month of the Jewish calendar. By the reckoning of this calendar, new days begin at sundown. Today is the 14th of Nisan, 5771. 

Passover, of course, remembers the events recorded in Exodus 12. There, we're told of what happened when God sent a tenth and final plague to Egypt designed to gain the freedom of His chosen people--the Hebrews or the Israelites--from slavery. They had been slaves in Egypt for 430 years. The tenth plague came when God sent the angel of death to bring the deaths of all the first-born in Egypt.

The Israelites were spared though because, as God instructed them through Moses, they had previously smeared the blood of unblemished lambs on the doorposts of their dwellings. The lambs were offered to God in place of the firstborn Israelites. When the angel of death encountered the blood of the lambs, it passed over, ensuring that the first-born in those dwellings didn't die.

Blood, of course, carries life. In the Bible's account of the first murder, when Cain killed his brother Abel, God said that the blood of Abel cried out.

On the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur on the Jewish calendar, in Temple times, an unblemished lamb was offered as sacrifice signaling repentance and bringing reconciliation (atonement) with God, on behalf of the people. Its blood covered the sins the people committed fin the preceding year. As part of the rite on this day, the priest sprinkled the blood of the sacrificed lamb on the people. The blood of the lamb, in effect, called out to God and God passed over their sins. The significance of this can be seen when we consider the statement of a devout Jew who came to follow Jesus as Messiah, Lord, and God, the apostle Paul writing in Romans 6:23, "The wages of sin is death." By God's gracious intervention, the ancient Israelites were spared the proper "wages" for sin; God allowed the unblemished lamb to take the place of His people.

We Christians believe that just as the blood of unblemished lambs on the doorposts of the Hebrew dwellings in Egypt caused the angel of death to pass over God's people, leading ultimately to the Hebrews' liberation from slavery, the blood of Christ, covering the sins of repentant believers in Him, brings freedom from sin and death. 

Jesus is, as John the Baptizer put it, "the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world." And this sacrifice needn't be made repeatedly, as was true of the lambs of Yom Kippur. Jesus' sacrifice is effective once and for all. As the New Testament book of Hebrews puts it, Christ, the highest of priests, sacrificed Himself, so that all who repent and believe in Him are forgiven their sins, ever reconciled to God, and given everlasting life with God.


Paul puts the connection between the Jewish Passover and the Christian commemorations of Good Friday and Easter succinctly when he says:
Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed...(1 Corinthians 5:7, TNIV)
[Please also read Ephesians 2:11-13. Without faith in Jesus Christ, we stand outside a relationship with God. But we are brought near "by the blood of Christ."]