Sermon

April 8, 2004
Maundy Thursday
Matthew 26:26-28
Pastor Joel Zank

COME COMMUNE WITH CHRIST

Matthew 26:26-28 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying "Take and eat; this is my body." 27Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them saying, "Drink from it, all of you. 28This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

In Christ Jesus, our Passover lamb who has been sacrificed, dear fellow redeemed,

We all know what it's like to face something unpleasant. From time to time we have those events scheduled on our calendars that we absolutely dread. Maybe it's a court date, or a tax audit or some surgery that we must undergo. We're fine as long as the dreaded appointment is months or even weeks away. But when we come within just a few days of the event, it becomes so hard to function, doesn't it? We become so preoccupied with what's about to happen that we find it hard to concentrate, especially on the little things. For example, if you knew that Friday would find your life hanging in the balance, you probably wouldn't be all that concerned about making dinner reservations for Thursday evening.

Now while this may be true of you and me, it certainly was not true of Jesus. Remember, as the all-knowing Son of God, Jesus was familiar with every detail of the hellish pain and agony waiting for him on Good Friday. His life would not simply hang in the balance; it would be sacrificed in the most horrible way imaginable. Jesus knew all this; and yet as we heard in our gospel reading, he was concerned about Thursday evening dinner reservations for himself and his disciples. This tells us something about the meal Jesus wanted to share with his followers then and now. It is the most important meal we can eat on earth. With that said, on behalf of your Savior, I extend to you an invitation tonight: COME COMMUNE WITH CHRIST; eat a miraculous meal and enjoy a clear conscience.

Jesus first extended the invitation to his very special supper on Maundy Thursday evening just hours before his crucifixion. That night Jesus and the Twelve were celebrating the Passover. As they ate this sacred meal, their minds transported them back fifteen hundred years, back to the first Passover when the children of Israel were still slaves in Egypt.

They recalled how God sent Moses to speak to Pharaoh, king of Egypt. "Let my people go," God demanded. Nine times Pharaoh refused, and each time there followed a terrible plague. Each was sent by God, announced by Moses, and experienced by Pharaoh and the entire land of Egypt. Finally, God decided to send a plague so devastating that Pharaoh would be forced to let Israel go free. God said, "About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well" (Exodus 11:4,5). Then God told his people, the Israelites, "This is what I want each of you to do: Take an unblemished lamb, a year?old male, and sacrifice it. Take the blood of that perfect lamb and paint it on the top and on the sides of the doorframe of your house, and when I see the blood of the lamb, I won't permit the destroyer to enter that house; no one there will be harmed." You see, the people were saved by the blood of the lamb.

Salvation through the blood of a sacrifice was a principle that God reinforced on his people throughout the entire Old Testament period. Again and again, many times a day, day after day, week after week, and year after year, animals were to be sacrificed as part of worship to God. Blood was to be spilled, gallons and gallons of blood every single day.

Why so much blood? Why all the sacrifices? This was God's way of teaching his people about the seriousness of sin. "Sin is such an offense to me," God said, "it is such a terrible thing, that nothing less than lifeblood can take it away. Blood is the price for sin; blood is the payment for sin." The writer to the Hebrews makes the point well, "Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness" (Hebrews 9:22).

It was with these images of sacrifice and blood in mind, that Jesus and his disciples gathered in the upper room. As they ate that evening their thoughts focused on the Passover lamb, whose blood freed and saved God's people of old. Then, "while they were eating," we are told, "Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, 'Take and eat; this is my body.' Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, 'Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.'"

You can almost feel the intensity of that moment can't you?. Jesus' words and actions must have taken his disciples by surprise as he held up a piece of bread and said, "This, is my body" and as he took that cup of wine and told them, "This, this is my blood." Maybe, for a second, his disciples wondered if they had heard him correctly. They had; and in the same instant they realized that he wasn't speaking in riddles or telling a parable. "Understand this!" he was saying. "A moment ago it was Egypt; now it is Jerusalem. A moment ago it was history; now it is the present. A moment ago it was the blood of an unblemished lamb; now it is the blood of God's own Son." "This bread is my body," Jesus said, "and this wine is my blood. Here is the payment for sin and the price of your freedom. All those sacrifices offered throughout all those centuries pointed to this. Here is the body and the blood of the true Lamb!"

That meal that Jesus established on Maundy Thursday was meant not just for those first disciples, but for all who follow in the footsteps of their faith, trusting, as they did, that Jesus is God's Son and the world's Savior from sin. By the faith God has given us, we believe these things. And so Christ invites us to commune with him, to share a wondrous meal with him. And as often as we do, aren't we filled with the same sense of awe that the disciples had when they first heard Jesus declare the bread and wine to be his body and blood? Think of it! A miracle is taking place before our eyes. The bread and wine are not merely symbols representing body and blood. Through the words that Christ spoke all those years ago, his body and blood are really present here today "in, with, and under the bread and wine." Now, God doesn't demand that you and I understand how this can be. He simply asks us to believe it, to believe that with God nothing is impossible. With our physical eyes and tongue we see and taste only bread and wine. But God wants our spiritual eyes and tongue to see and taste Jesus' body and blood as well. To this end he inspired St. Paul to write in 1 Corinthians: "Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation [or sharing] in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?" (1 Corinthians 10:16).

At Jesus' invitation you and I will come to his table tonight to commune with him. If you are like me, you will come with a lot of baggage. Dragging behind us like a ball and chain all the guilt that comes from having so many angry, hateful thoughts, all the guilt that comes from speaking so many careless, hurtful words, and all the guilt that comes from doing so many shameful, selfish things. In other words we will come with a life that is sinful from start to finish. But that is exactly why we should come. The bread looks so simple, the wine so ordinary. But in these humble wrappings come something more precious than all the riches of the world - our Lord's body and blood. Wrapped up in bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ and all that they mean to our salvation. Here at the Lord's table we come face to face with his humble birth and life; here are his sufferings in Gethsemane and Golgotha; here are the pain, the shame, the torments of hell, the very death that Jesus suffered in our place. Every time we commune Jesus' sacrifice for sin lies before us. He gives it to us. We can see it, touch it and taste it. It is our guarantee of the love and forgiveness God has for us every moment of every day. Have you ever thought of the Lord's Supper in this way?

Think about it! It is one thing when someone says to a college student, "I'd like to pay for your schooling." But it is quite another thing when the student actually holds that person's canceled check in his hand. Then he knows the payment has been made. As you and I look at the cross today, we know that our damning sins are forgiven. But when we are invited to the Lord's Table and receive the body that was given and the blood that was shed to win that forgiveness, what else is the Lord doing but taking our certainty one step further? Here is tangible proof that forgiveness is a sure thing. Here is the testimony that our sin and its guilt are wiped away! Here is a witness that our war with God is over and we have peace with him forever.

It is this peace with God that Jesus had in mind when he took the cup of wine in hand and announced, "this is my blood of the covenant." St. Paul spoke of the cup as being the blood of "the new covenant" (1 Corinthians 11:25). It was a new covenant because the old covenant had failed. The old covenant had been established when God gave his laws at Mt. Sinai. The old covenant said that God would bless his people and that there would be peace and fellowship between God and man as long as the people fulfilled their side of the agreement and obeyed God's commands, perfectly. The old covenant failed then and it fails today because people cannot hold up their end of the bargain. Our sinful nature does not want to keep God's commandments, nor is it able to. In fact, when people try to create a relationship with God through the old covenant, the result can only be frustration, failure and eternal separation from God.

But God rescued us from that. From a heart filled with such amazing love that we will never fully understand it, God established a new covenant, a covenant which is a promise from him to us, a covenant that does not depend on us and on our efforts. It is a covenant based solely on God's unchanging love. Jeremiah the prophet tells us that in this new covenant God simply says: "I will be their God, and they will be my people. I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more" (Jeremiah 31:33-34).

In this new covenant, a covenant signed in the blood of Christ, God does it all. Jesus, God's Son, sacrificed himself, his own flesh and blood, his own life, so that you and I might be forgiven and enjoy a clear conscience. He gave himself so that we might live in a restored relationship with our God, so that we might be the objects of his love and care and the recipients of all his blessings - temporal and eternal. To assure us of these things, to comfort us and to strengthen our trust, Christ invites us to come commune with him. He welcomes us to his table, to see and feel and taste his body and blood, to handle the canceled check, the price he paid to make us God's children for all eternity. So come, commune with Christ! Come in joy and peace and thanksgiving! And, by all means, come often to eat this miraculous meal and to enjoy a clear conscience thanks to Jesus, our Passover Lamb. Amen.

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