Maundy Thursday
Exodus
12:1-14
The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of
Egypt, 2 “This month shall be for you the beginning
of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. 3 Tell
all the congregation of Israel that on the tenth day of this month every man
shall take a lamb according to their fathers' houses, a lamb for a
household. 4 And if the household is too small for
a lamb, then he and his nearest neighbor shall take according to the number of
persons; according to what each can eat you shall make your count for the
lamb. 5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a
male a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, 6 and
you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, when the whole
assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill their lambs at twilight.
7 “Then they shall take some of the
blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in
which they eat it. 8 They shall eat the flesh that
night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they
shall eat it. 9 Do not eat any of it raw or boiled
in water, but roasted, its head with its legs and its inner parts. 10 And you
shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the
morning you shall burn. 11 In this manner you shall
eat it: with your belt fastened, your sandals on your feet, and your staff
in your hand. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord's
Passover. 12 For I will pass through the land
of Egypt that night, and I will strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt,
both man and beast; and on all the gods of Egypt I will execute
judgments: I am the Lord. 13 The blood
shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood,
I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I
strike the land of Egypt.
14 “This day shall be for you a
memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord; throughout
your generations, as a statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast.
1
Corinthians 11:23-32
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to
you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took
bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke
it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance
of me.” 25 In the same way also he took the cup,
after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this,
as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For
as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's
death until he comes.
27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread
or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty
concerning the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let
a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the
cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without
discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30 That
is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. 31 But
if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. 32 But
when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not
be condemned along with the world.
John
13:1-15, 34-35
Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus
knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the
Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to
the end. 2 During supper, when the devil had
already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray
him, 3 Jesus, knowing that the Father had
given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God
and was going back to God, 4 rose from supper.
He laid aside his outer garments, and taking a towel, tied it around his
waist. 5 Then he poured water into a basin and
began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was
wrapped around him. 6 He came to Simon Peter, who
said to him, “Lord, do you wash my feet?” 7 Jesus
answered him, “What I am doing you do not understand now, but
afterward you will understand.”8 Peter said to him, “You
shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “If I do not wash you, you
have no share with me.” 9 Simon Peter said to him,
“Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!” 10 Jesus
said to him, “The one who has bathed does not need to wash, except
for his feet, but is completely clean. And you are
clean, but not every one of you.” 11 For he
knew who was to betray him; that was why he said, “Not all of you are
clean.”
12 When he had washed their feet
and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to
them, “Do you understand what I have done to you? 13 You
call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. 14 If
I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to
wash one another's feet. 15 For I have given you an
example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.
“For I received
from the Lord what I also delivered to you.”
Thus Paul begins his teaching on the Lord’s Supper to a very divided and
struggling congregation in the Roman city of Corinth. And as Paul uses this words, he uses a very
technical greek phrase for the passing on of a tradition. Meaning the thing he is talking about didn’t
begin with him, or his fellow pastors or teachers in fact. Paul received it, Paul was taught it, and the
source of that teaching, he says, was the Lord Jesus Christ on the night he was
betrayed.
In other words,
the Lord’s Supper is just that, the teaching of the Lord. It’s the Lord’s Word that is involved. It’s the Lord’s Supper. It delivers the Lord’s promises, which Paul
says, the Lord is now passing on to you as well.
And what are those
promises? They are two-fold really. First as he take the bread and the wine he
promises that these are now – by His word – his body and blood. That means that Christ’s body and blood are
really present in the Lord’s Supper. Its
not for us to understand how this happens, we can’t explain it using philosophy
or science. We can’t see it, we can’t
prove or disprove it, all we can do is receive the teaching of the crucified
and risen Lord Jesus and believe Him. It
is His supper after all. It is His Word
that says so. We take him at his
word. The bread is his body. The wine is his blood. He is present.
Secondly, he
promises that this eating and drinking is for you. Specifically, he teaches in Matthews Gospel
that it forgives your sins. Yes,
yours. The body and blood, in the bread
and the wine deliver the forgiveness earned by Christ on the cross right into
our own mouths. By eating the body of
Christ in the bread, you have forgiveness of sins. By drinking the cup of wine which is his blood,
you have forgiveness of sins. And to be
clear it’s not that your action of taking, eating and drinking do this – it is
God’s Work. He gives you this great
gift, he comes into your presence to be eaten for your forgiveness.
That’s the message
that Paul received – ultimately from the Lord Jesus himself, and that he is
passing along to the Corinthians as is recorded in the words of Scripture.
And that same
message is passed along to us today as well.
It is what we believe teach and confess as Lutherans. We have these words from St. Paul, which we
hear tonight in remembrance of Christ’s first uttering them. What Paul received, he passed down to us
also. The Word of the Lord, spoken that
first Maundy Thursday comes to us here now as well.
And so, tonight,
will you let the Lord have his say? Will
you let him forgive your sins in the eating and drinking of His own body and
blood? Will you participate with angels
and archangels and all the company of heaven in the foretaste of the wedding
feast of the lamb in His kingdom? Or
will you ignore him? Will you change
what he says to better suit your own rationalism? Will you make the Lord’s Supper into your
supper?
Of course not,
you’ll take the Lord at his Word. You’ll
eat his body in the bread, and his blood in the wine, and be forgiven. You’ll participate in the heavenly wedding
feast of Jesus as it is hidden in the Divine Service.
The first part of
that is acknowledging you have sin that needs to be forgiven. You know that you do. We’ve already confessed it, haven’t we? I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess unto
You all my sins and iniquities with which I have ever offended You and justly
deserved Your temporal and eternal punishment.
But I am heartily sorry for them and sincerely repent of them, and I
pray You of Your boundless mercy and for the sake of the holy, innocent, bitter
sufferings and death of Your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to be gracious and
merciful to me, a poor, sinful being.
And what we spoke was true for all of us.
And we heard God’s
Word, and were forgiven. That too is
taught by Paul, in chapter 15 of 1st Corinthians. “For I delivered unto you as of first
importance what I also received: that
Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried,
that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” And thus the forgiveness for Christ’s sake
was announced by God’s word.
And now in that
forgiveness, we feast. We eat the body
in the bread. We drink the blood in the
wine. We relish the continued
forgiveness of sins. We participate in
that forgiveness boldly. And in so
doing, we remember the Lord Jesus Christ who remembered us upon the cross.
It is the Lord’s
Supper we receive tonight, on the night he was betrayed. It is a precious means of grace that delivers
the forgiveness of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus to us Christians to eat
and drink. It is a teaching we have
received as upmost importance. And as
often as we eat and drink – which we ought to often, we proclaim the Lord’s
death until he comes again.
In the name of
Jesus. Amen.
