Living Words

I Will Sing to the Lord

Exodus 15:1-21

by William Klock

Last Sunday we read about, we recalled the mighty saving acts of God that took place at the Red Sea.  The Lord could have delivered Israel from Egypt in all sorts of different ways.  He didn’t have to afflict Pharaoh and his people with those ten awful plagues.  But that’s how he chose to do it.  And when Pharaoh was seemingly broken and sent the Israelites packing, the Lord could have led them any way he wanted.  Remember, it was the Lord who led them: a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  He could, perhaps, have led them by a more direct route, bypassing Egyptian and Philistine outposts and garrisons.  He surely knew where these places were.  But, instead, he led them on a meandering route that led them to a place where they were boxed in by the sea.  No big deal, you might think.  But Pharaoh’s spies watch and sent word back.  That meandering route and that stop by the sea gave Pharaoh the impression that Israel would be easy pickings for his army.  And so—all because of the Lord’s orchestration of the events—Pharaoh marched out with his army.  The Israelites quaked in fear.  They whined and complained to Moses and to the Lord.  “We’re all going to die!”  And then the Lord did what no one expected.  He parted waters of the sea and led the Israelites through to the other side.  Not only that, but when the Egyptians followed, the Lord ensured their chariots become bogged down in the mud and then took his hands off the waters, ceased to hold them back, and the Egyptian army died in the flood.  And the Israelites stood watching on the far side as the bodies of the dead Egyptians washed onto the shore.  Exodus 14:31 says:

Israel saw the great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians, so the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.

But this was the Lord’s purpose all along.  He had said to Moses repeatedly that his purpose was to manifest his glory to the Egyptians and to the Israelites so that they would know that he is the Lord.  The plagues struck at the gods of Egypt, revealing them to be powerless before the Lord.  The plagues struck at Pharaoh and his claim of divinity and exposed him as a fraud.  Pharaoh was stripped of everything but his earthly power.  He might have been exposed as a mere mortal, but he still had the most powerful army on earth.  And now the Lord has taken that away.  The Israelites watched all of this—they were spectators to it all—and what other response could they have had than what we read: that they stood in awe of the Lord and believed?

But that’s not the end of the episode.  Exodus isn’t quite ready to move on with the story.  Before the Israelites continue on their journey they break out into song—the song we heard read just a few minutes ago.  Exodus 15 begins:

Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying,

          “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

                  the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.

         The Lord is my strength and my song,

                  and he has become my salvation;

          this is my God, and I will praise him,

                  my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

         The Lord is a man of war;

                  the Lord is his name.  (Exodus 15:1-4)

That’s the first stanza of the song.  The whole episode follows a pattern that we see over and over again throughout the Old Testament.  The people end up in some kind of trouble, they cry out to the Lord, the Lord hears and delivers them, and then the people worship the Lord with a song.

It’s interesting.  There were the Israelites on the shore, watching dead Egyptians soldiers wash up on the beach, standing in awe and wonder of the Lord and the most natural thing for them to do was to break out in a song of praise.  I think past generations would have thought this completely natural as well—or least not particularly surprising.  But it probably seems a little odd to us.  Maybe we’re so familiar with the story that we don’t stop to think about it, but if we do, I don’t think this is how most of us would respond.  And that’s because our culture doesn’t sing anymore.  Of course, we still have singing.  But there was a major cultural shift that began in the 50s and 60s.  There are number of massive cultural changes that have to do with music that have resulted from that shift, but the important one here is that music has been professionalised.  Musicians make music.  The rest of us just listen.  Even folk music has largely become professionalised.  And that means that as a people we don’t sing anymore.  We like to listen to professionals sing, but we don’t sing ourselves—or most of us rarely do.  In fact, church is one of the few places where public singing by non-professionals is still common.  But even in churches, the shift has been towards professionalisation.  Congregational singing is quickly being replaced by band and singer performances that the congregation listens to.  In fact, a lot of the music being sung in churches wasn’t even written for congregation singing and few churches anymore can even sing in four-part harmony.  (If you’re interested in this subject, media ecologist T. David Gordon wrote a very thought-provoking little book about ten years ago titled, Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns.)  But my point is that we—or least most of us—no longer respond the way God’s people throughout the Bible (and throughout history) have responded to God’s mighty and saving acts.  Even when we do sing, the trend is increasingly towards singing about how we feel about God and how we feel about what he’s done more than it’s actually about God and his mighty deeds.  We’re quickly becoming spiritual narcissists, which isn’t surprising considering the narcissistic culture in which we’re immersed.

But let’s look at this biblical response to God that we see in Exodus 15.  This first stanza does use words like “I” and “we”.  I will sing to the Lord.  The Lord is my strength and song.  The Lord is my salvation.  He is my God and I will praise him.  But notice that even when the Israelites say I and my, the focus is away from themselves and towards God.  They’re not singing about their feelings for God; they’re singing about what God has done and who he has revealed himself to be in those mighty deeds.  The sing to glorify the God who has shown himself to a might warrior, who threw the Egyptians into the sea.  He is the God who has saved his people.  More importantly, he is the God of their Father, Abraham, who has kept his covenant promises and shown himself to be faithful and righteous.

The second stanza, verses 4-10, recall the specifics of the Lord’s might act by which he saved his people:

“Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea,

                  and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.

         The floods covered them;

                  they went down into the depths like a stone.

         Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power,

                  your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.

         In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries;

                  you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble.

         At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up;

                  the floods stood up in a heap;

                  the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.

         The enemy said, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake,

                  I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.

                  I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.’

         You blew with your wind; the sea covered them;

                  they sank like lead in the mighty waters.

The Egyptians thought they had the upper hand.  Even after the ten plagues, Pharaoh thought he could claim God’s people as his own.  But in a show of glorious power, the Lord not only split the sea so that his people could pass through safely, he caused those same waters to destroy Pharaoh’s army.

The short third stanza then asks, “Who is there like the Lord?”

“Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?

                  Who is like you, majestic in holiness,

                  awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?

         You stretched out your right hand;

                  the earth swallowed them.

This is more praise.  Who had the mightiest king and the most powerful gods in the world?  Egypt did.  And the most the gods of Egypt could manage when challenged was to make the first few of the Lord’s plagues worse.  The Lord turned the water of the Nile to blood.  If the gods of Egypt had had any power, their priests should have changed the blood back into water, but the best they could do is make more blood.  The Lord stripped Pharaoh of his divine claims.  And when all he had left was his might army, the Lord proved himself even mightier.  There is no one, god or man, who can compare to the majesty of the Lord in his holiness.  There is no one, god or man, who can perform such glorious deeds.

The final stanza, verses 13-18, now takes us from the Red Sea to the conquest of Canaan and then to the building of the temple by Solomon on Mt. Zion.  The final stanza praises the Lord as he dwells on the mountain in the midst of his people as King.

“You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed;

                  you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

         The peoples have heard; they tremble;

                  pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.

         Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;

                  trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;

                  all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.

         Terror and dread fall upon them;

                  because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone,

          till your people, O Lord, pass by,

                  till the people pass by whom you have purchased.

         You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain,

                  the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode,

                  the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.

         The Lord will reign forever and ever.”

Almost every English translation shifts from the past tense—singing about the events at the Red Sea which had just happened—to the future tense with these verses.  From the standpoint of the Israelites at the sea, these things were to happen in the future.  The problem is that the tenses of the verbs are consistent throughout the song.  There’s no grammatical reason to witch to the future tense in this last stanza.  All of this was in the past.  And that strongly suggests that while the Israelites sang an earlier, probably shorter version of this song at the sea, the song in the form we now have it was expanded and revised through the centuries.  It was probably used as part of the Passover celebration and revised in the days after Canaan had been conquered and the temple built.  But it all flows naturally from Israel’s deliverance at the sea.  It highlights that Israel’s deliverance was part of a larger plan.  He delivered Israel to create a people for himself, who would live in his land and in his presence.  First the tabernacle and then the temple represented the Lord’s presence in the midst of his people.

And so the song goes on to praise the Lord not just for the initial act of deliverance, but also depicts the Philistines, the Edomites, the Moabites, and the Canaanites quaking in their boots in fear.  It depicts Israel entering the land and being planted there by the Lord.  His people in his place.  This is the place the Lord has made.  This is the place the Lord has called his own and made his habitation.  The people sing praises to him for all of this.  And they praise him, finally singing, “The Lord will reign forever.”  Why would he not?  There is no god or king more powerful.  There is no one like him.  There is no one so holy.  There is no one so powerful.  And, at the heart of why the Israelites sing their praises, there is no one more faithful to his promises.  And, notice, none of this is about the Israelites.  None of it is about how the Israelites feel towards the Lord.  Their praise is centred on him and on him alone.  And notice how specific it is.  I’ll come back to this in a bit, but there’s no “God is awesome” without a retelling and remembrance of the mighty acts and the specific acts of faithfulness that reveal the awesomeness of God.

Now, finally, in verses 19-21 there’s a summary of the events and another bit of song:

For when the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his horsemen went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them, but the people of Israel walked on dry ground in the midst of the sea.  Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing.  And Miriam sang to them:

          “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

          the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”

We’re not sure why the story is told this way.  Some think that Miriam’s version may have been the original version of the song that the Israelites sang spontaneously after these events.  Some think that this was an antiphonal response to the song that Moses sang.  This brings an end to the first section of Exodus and some think that recalling Miriam here sort of bookends the story that began with Moses mother.  Women play an important part in Exodus and this may highlight that.  It’s hard to say, but one thing that’s clear is that the biblical writers always have a purpose in what they tell us.  I think the repetition highlights what the author was getting at.  Moses’ song has already pointed to the future acts that the Lord will perform as he leads the Israelites into the land.  We’ve seen the importance of the Passover as a celebration through which future generations participate in the Exodus and make it their own.  Miriam’s repetition of the first part of Moses’ song is, I think, another element of the story aimed at future generations saying, “Repeat these words.  Sing these songs about the Lord’s saving acts.”  Brothers and Sisters, if we need anything, it’s to recall time and time again what the Lord has done.  His faithfulness is the reason we have faith and trust in him.  We need to be always recalling what he has done.  Not just singing about how great he is or how loving he is or how merciful he is, but actually singing about the specific acts he has done that reveal his greatness, his love, his mercy.

Friends, this is the biblical pattern of worship.  It’s not that there aren’t times and places for songs that make short or general statements about God and praise him for that, but if we follow the biblical patter of worship, the staple of our worship should be the recalling of his acts of faithfulness.  Our worship should recall what God has done and in that it not only draws us into those acts, it nourishes our faith and our hope.  The Psalms are full of these sorts of songs that recall what God had done in the past.  The recollection is an act of praise and worship that gives hope.  So often the psalmist was facing enemies or trials of his own.  Sometimes it was the nation itself facing some sort of difficulty.  But recalling what the Lord had done in the past gave hope for the future.  The other thing we don’t thin much about in terms of worship is that it was often the recollection of how God had acted in the past, disciplining his disobedient people, that moved the worshippers to repentance.

The same pattern continues in the New Testament.  Think of the song that Mary sang when she realised that her child was going to be the long-awaited Messiah.  Note how it’s not about her; it’s about what the Lord is about to do and note how the whole thing hinges on the past faithfulness of God.  Mary was confident these things would happen because God has always been faithful to his promises.  Luke 1:46-55.

“My soul magnifies the Lord,

         and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

         for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.

                  For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

         for he who is mighty has done great things for me,

                  and holy is his name.

         And his mercy is for those who fear him

                  from generation to generation.

         He has shown strength with his arm;

                  he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;

         he has brought down the mighty from their thrones

                  and exalted those of humble estate;

         he has filled the hungry with good things,

                  and the rich he has sent away empty.

         He has helped his servant Israel,

                  in remembrance of his mercy,

         as he spoke to our fathers,

                  to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”

And then jump to the last book of the Bible, to Revelation 5:12-13 and to the song that John heard sung by the heavenly host:

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,

         to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might

         and honor and glory and blessing!”

         “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb

         be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”

It’s much shorter, it lacks as many details, but it’s praises are still centred in what God has done.  Jesus is the lamb who was slain.  Jesus is the King who gave his life for the sake of his people, who was raised from death, and who, having been vindicated by his Father, now sits on the throne as Lord.  The song of Revelation 12 brings us full circle from the song of Moses and the Israelites.  The Lord has performed mighty and saving deeds and established his reign forever and ever.

One thing that strikes me is that, again, even in singing about God’s salvation, these songs are not focused on the singers, but on God.  The song isn’t narrowly focused on what God has done for me, but on the bigger picture.  Particularly in Exodus the people sing of the day when the nations bow before the Lord.  It’s not just about saving one people from a bad situation, but about the Lord extending his good rule over all the earth and, as the story progresses through the Bible, we see the songs moving even further towards an all-encompassing image of the Lord setting all creation to rights.  There are appropriate times and places to sing about the little bits and pieces of that big picture and about what the Lord has done for me, but the staple of Biblical worship—especially our corporate worship—is the big picture that focuses our attention on what God has done and what it’s leading towards.

Our natural tendency is to always be thinking about ourselves.  As I said earlier, we live in a narcissistic culture and that narcissism often infects our worship.  We need to be conscious of how we worship.  It’s essential that our worship turn us from ourselves to the one who is truly worthy of our love, praise, and worship.  Paul wrote to the Colossians, saying, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).  The word of Christ—the Scriptures—should be dwelling in us, filling our minds and shaping the affections of our hearts.  That happens as we hear the word of Christ preached and as we share it with each other, but Paul emphasises the important place singing has in filling our hearts and minds with the word.  If it was true in the Old Testament, how much more important is it for us?  You and I are participants in an exodus far greater than the exodus experienced by the Israelites.  We’ve been led by Jesus from the bondage of sin and death and he leads us as we march in hopeful expectation into his new world.

Let us pray: Almighty God, you have revealed yourself in mighty saving deeds that show us your power, your sovereignty, your love, your mercy, and ultimately your worthiness of our worship.  Remind us, we pray, to keep your word in our hearts, that our faith and hope be always shaped and strengthened by your faithfulness.  As we steep ourselves in your word, put a song in our hearts that overflows into our public worship, that in our times together we would set aside ourselves and focus give you the glory you deserve.  We ask this through Jesus Christ our Lord, by whose death and resurrection we are your people.  Amen.

The Red Sea

Exodus 13:17-14:31

by William Klock

When I was a teenager we visited Universal Studio.  Today there’s an amusement park there, but back then it was much simpler.  The highlight of the visit was riding the tram that wound its way through the backlot.  It drove us through the town square where they were filming the Back to the Future sequels.  Then it twisted back on itself and took us to the lagoon and another little town that had been built for Jaws, but was currently the setting for Murder, She Wrote.  The tram wound its way around from there until we were back at the lagoon, where it stopped.  The tour guide stood up in the front and raised his hands out over the water and commanded them to part in his best Charlton Heston impression.  The waters parted and the tram drove through.  It wasn’t the spot where they had filmed The Ten Commandments back in the 50s, but they’d made an attempt at duplicating the special effect from that movie.  This was the highlight of the tour—or at least it’s clear that’s what they’d intended years before when the park opened.  By the late 1980s it wasn’t very impressive compared to many of the other things they showed us and it didn’t help that the tram stopped mid-way through the water so that the mechanical shark from Jaws could swim up and attack.  But in the early 70s, I’m sure that parting of the waters had been quite the thing to see and the whole tour, as it wound its way through the backlot, was headed towards that Red Sea climax.

Maybe the designers of the tour read had read the Bible.  As we pick up with verse 17 or Exodus 3, we see that the Lord did something similar with the Israelite.  After the final plague, the death of the firstborn, Pharaoh summoned Moses and commanded the Israelites to get out of Egypt.  And so they left.  But they didn’t make a beeline for Canaan.  Here’s what the text says:

When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near.  For God said, “Lest the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt.”  But God led the people around by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea. And the people of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt equipped for battle. (Exodus 3:17-18)

The Israelite marched out of Egypt in formation with the warriors in the lead.  The fastest route would have been the road along the Mediterranean Sea, but it was fortified by the Egyptians and led straight into Philistine territory.  The Israelites weren’t ready for that.  But, more important, the Lord wasn’t finished revealing himself to either the Israelites or the Egyptians.

And where is it that the Lord is leading them?  Translators since the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, have translated the Hebrew as “Red Sea”, but the Hebrew is actually “Sea of Reeds”.  What does that mean?  Well, later in the Old Testament “Sea of Reeds” is the name used for both the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez.  The Red Sea as we call it today, extends northwest from the Indian Ocean and separates Africa from the Arabian Peninsula.  Sinai is at the northern end of the Red Sea with the Gulf of Suez on the west and the Gulf of Aqaba on the east.  But these are saltwater bodies and reeds don’t grow in them.  Reeds do grow throughout the marshes and lakes north of the Gulf of Suez, which may have been where the name originated.  Again, we really have no way to be certain about these geographical locations in Exodus.  I think the two best options are that the text here is referring to the Gulf of Suez or the Bitter Lakes, which are just north of the Gulf of Suez.  The traditional location of Mt. Sinai—another location we can’t know with certainty—is opposite these bodies of water in the Sinai Peninsula.

So the Lord leads Israel not straight to Canaan, but into the wilderness and to the sea, but before the story continues, there’s a little insertion that might not seem significant at first glance.  Look at verse 19:

Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for Joseph had made the sons of Israel solemnly swear, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones with you from here.”

Before it goes on, the story looks back to Genesis.  In fact, the verbiage here is copied straight from Joseph’s instructions in Genesis 50.  This is a reminder that the Lord isn’t rescuing Israel because Israel is somehow deserving of being rescued.  The Lord is rescuing Israel in order to make good on the covenant promises he made with Abraham.  It’s a reminder that all of this—even the enslavement of Israel—is part of a bigger plan and that the Lord is sovereign behind it all.

We’re given a few more place names that meant something twenty-five hundred years ago, but that we can only speculate about now, but the key point is that the Lord is leading them as they follow this meandering path.

And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, that they might travel by day and by night.  The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night did not depart from before the people.  (Exodus 3:21-22)

The same God who met Moses in the burning bush and sent him back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh now leads the people.  I’d never thought to ask why the Lord manifested himself in a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire, but the Jewish commentator Umberto Cassuto points out that large caravans were typically led and directed by a smoke signal in the day and a great torch in the night.  The Lord manifests himself similarly here, although in a much more impressive way.  As we see later, after the Tabernacle is built and the cloud descends into the holy of holies to rest on the ark, the cloud and the fire aren’t just the Lord’s means of guiding his people.  They’re emblematic of his presence in the midst of his people and, in a sense, reveal or manifest his glory.

As we begin Chapter 14, the Lord leads the Israelites further down this meandering route into the wilderness until they find themselves camped facing the sea.  The Lord explains the reason for all of this to Moses:

For Pharaoh will say of the people of Israel, ‘They are wandering in the land; the wilderness has shut them in.’  And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, and the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord.” (Exodus 4:3-4)

The Lord isn’t finished with Pharaoh.  As we’ll see, Pharaoh’s people report back to him about Israel.  They were only supposed to travel three days into the wilderness to worship, but they haven’t yet returned.  Pharaoh’s going to realise that the bit about three days was  a ruse.  They never planned to come back.  But Pharaoh’s also going to hear about their meandering route and think that they’ve lost themselves in the wilderness and, that camped at the edge of the sea, they’ll be easy prey for his army.  Again, the Lord is setting all of this up.  He’s luring Pharaoh and his army into a trap.  In one final showdown, the Lord will show to his people that he is the Lord of heaven and earth, that he is with them, and that he is truly their God and that they are truly his people.

We see in verses 5-9 that this is exactly what happens.  Pharaoh plays right into the Lord’s hands.

When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, the mind of Pharaoh and his servants was changed toward the people, and they said, “What is this we have done, that we have let Israel go from serving us?”  So he made ready his chariot and took his army with him, and took six hundred chosen chariots and all the other chariots of Egypt with officers over all of them.  And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he pursued the people of Israel while the people of Israel were going out defiantly.  The Egyptians pursued them, all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots and his horsemen and his army, and overtook them encamped at the sea, by Pi-hahiroth, in front of Baal-zephon.

At the realization that the Israelites aren’t going to return to Egypt, Pharaoh’s heart is again hardened.  He musters his army.  The Egyptians used a hexadecimal numbering system, so “600” is a round number suggesting that he’s sent the entire or almost the entire army after the Israelite.  The chariots were the pride of Egypt.  They were the strength of Pharaoh’s army.  And they rode out to recapture Israel as they camped by the sea.

Now, the way the story is told, we the audience know that this isn’t going to end well for Pharaoh.  He should know better, but he still thinks that despite all that the Lord has done to show his might and his power over Egypt, he can just send his crack troops out to recapture Israel.  Pharaoh should be afraid, but he’s not.  On other hand, the Israelite shouldn’t be afraid, but they are.  Look at verses 10-12:

When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them, and they feared greatly. And the people of Israel cried out to the Lord.  They said to Moses, “Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt?  Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”

This foreshadows Israel’s future relationship with the Lord and sums up much of the journey to the promised land.  Despite everything the Lord has done to show, to demonstrate, and to prove his faithfulness, every time the going is difficult, Israel complains or becomes afraid.  Now they see the dust of Pharaoh’s approaching army and they cry out to the Lord.  The same word is used here that was used back at the beginning of Exodus when they cried out to the Lord in their oppression.  The whole story of Exodus so far, these last thirteen chapters, is the revelation of how the Lord heard their cry and came to their aid.  Again, it’s the proof of his faithfulness.  But their circumstances overwhelm them.  They forget the faithfulness of God in light of the appearance of their immediate circumstances.  It’s bad.  The author of the story isn’t at all sympathetic.  I think our first reaction is to shake our heads and wonder what’s wrong with them.  But then, Brothers and Sisters, how often do we allow the appearance of our immediate circumstances to override what we know of the faithfulness of God?  How often do we allow our faith to shrivel up to nothing when we’re faced with the trials of life?  How often do we compromise out of fear?  We do it politically.  We do it economically.  We do it practically.  We compromise what we know is right when it might cost us our job.  We compromise what we know is right because it isn’t politically expedient.  We compromise what we know is right, because it’s easier than taking the high road.  In amongst all the talk of abortion coming from the States this week, I noted some statistics showing that the abortion rate amongst evangelicals is almost as high as it is outside the Church.  How is that possible?  It’s possible because we compromise when faced with difficult situations—especially in situations where we think we can get away without anyone noticing.  We take the easier way out of our problems, rather than walking in faith with the God who has proved his faithfulness to us by doing no less than giving his own son as a sacrifice for our sins.  Brothers and Sisters, don’t be afraid.  Don’t compromise.  Trust in God and if you doubt, immerse yourself in the Scripturesd that you might know his faithfulness.  Mediate on the Supper here at his Table that you might know his faithfulness.  The God who gave his life for you will not abandon you to your trials.

Moses reassures the people, but we also get a sense of his impatience with them.  In verses 13 and 14 he says to them:

“Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again.  The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.”

The Hebrew reveals Moses frustration better than the ESV.  Moses isn’t saying, “There, there.  Don’t worry.  Just be still and God will take care of you.”  This is a rebuke.  They’re afraid when they have no reason to be afraid.  They should be standing firm in faith, but they aren’t.  “The Lord will fight for you,” Moses says, “Now, shut up!”  The Lord speaks as well, in verses 15-18:

“Why do you cry to me?  Tell the people of Israel to go forward.  Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground.  And I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they shall go in after them, and I will get glory over Pharaoh and all his host, his chariots, and his horsemen.  And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I have gotten glory over Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen.”

In response to Moses rebuking the Israelite’s fear, the Lord now acts, telling the people to start moving towards the sea and giving instructions to Moses to raise his staff and divide the waters.  The Lord explains exactly what he’s going to do and, once again, it’s so that the Egyptians will know who is truly Lord of heaven and earth.  The Lord will reveal his glory.  And in this we get a look ahead to what the Exodus will mean for Israel.  In calling, naming, and rescuing Israel, the Lord is making the people his own.  As Adam was in the beginning, Israel will be the Lord’s representatives, his agents, the bearers of his image in the world.  Israel will be called to reveal God’s glory in her national life.  This is where it begins.  And so Moses and the people obeyed.  So did the sea.  And the Lord, manifest in the cloud and in the fire, moved to the rear of the Israelite’s line.  The fire lit up the night for the Israelites while the cloud cast darkness over the Egyptians, keeping Israel safe as the Lord opened the sea.  Then in verse 21 comes the great act everyone’s been waiting for:

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.  And the people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.  The Egyptians pursued and went in after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen.  And in the morning watch the Lord in the pillar of fire and of cloud looked down on the Egyptian forces and threw the Egyptian forces into a panic, clogging their chariot wheels so that they drove heavily. And the Egyptians said, “Let us flee from before Israel, for the Lord fights for them against the Egyptians.” (Exodus 14:21-25)

The Lord watched over his people through the night, holding the Egyptians at bay while dividing the waters of the sea.  At dawn a dry pathway through the waters appeared and the Israelite began their trek to the far side.  As they did so, the Lord released the Egyptians—not only releasing them but somehow throwing them into confusion.  They should have known better than to chase the Israelites into the sea, but they do so anyway.  Their chariot wheels are quickly bogged down in the mud.  And only then do they realise that they’ve been played by the Lord, that it is he who fights for Israel and he who has orchestrated their destruction.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the water may come back upon the Egyptians, upon their chariots, and upon their horsemen.”  So Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the sea returned to its normal course when the morning appeared.  And as the Egyptians fled into it, the Lord threw the Egyptians into the midst of the sea.  The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen; of all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea, not one of them remained.  But the people of Israel walked on dry ground through the sea, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left. (Exodus 14:26-29)

The Lord led his people through the waters on dry ground.  It’s a scene that deliberately calls back to creation, the Lord calling forth dry land from the waters—land suitable for human life.  And the Lord just as deliberately undoes the sea, removing his restraining hand and allowing it to drown the Egyptians.  The Lord orchestrated all of this to occur in broad daylight so that Israel would know once again that he was present with them—and the Egyptians knew too, their last thoughts before they drowned, acknowledging the sovereignty of the Lord.

Now, what happened at the sea?  There have been a number of explanations.  To some extent, trying to give a naturalistic explanation defeats the purpose.  But our drawing a distinction between the natural and the supernatural would have been a totally foreign way of thinking as far as the Israelites were concerned.  This is a post-Enlightenment way of thinking about the world and about God.  For the Israelites, God’s hand was at work everywhere and in everything.  He was engaged with and sustaining his Creation in every way.  One of the reasons Umberto Cassuto argues for the Bitter Lakes as the location here is that their water levels are known to go up and down with the tide in the nearby Gulf of Suez.  One lake, in particular, has a high spot across its middle that is sometime exposed at very low tides as the water recedes down into the sand.  Napoleon once crossed and found himself stranded on the other side and having to call for boats when the tide in the Gulf rose.  A strong wind, as reported here, could make the phenomenon even more dramatic.  And the swirling water and strong currents that come with the rising tide, particularly with a higher than usual tide, could easily sweep away the Egyptian chariots.  That’s not to say it had to happen this way or in that precise location, but it’s easy to envision, the Lord working through what we might call both natural and supernatural phenomena and providentially timing everything just right.

Regardless of the exact means, the last verses of the chapter remind us of the key point: this was the Lord’s doing and it was an act of covenant faithfulness to his people.

Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.  Israel saw the great power that the Lord used against the Egyptians, so the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses.  (Exodus 14:30-31)

The people saw the saving hand of the Lord.  They stood on the far side of the sea in awe and wonder.  And they believed.  Brothers and Sisters, we ought to be moved the same way.  In the Exodus we see the faithfulness of God to his promise and to his people.  That doesn’t mean that God is going to lead each of us through our own personal exodus when times are tough or when we face enemies, but it does add to the big picture of the faithfulness of God.  And that ought to strengthen our faith in times of trial and when the pressure is on.  It’s a reminder that God is with us.  It’s a reminder that he is our God and we are his people.

But our picture of the faithfulness of God doesn’t end with Israel’s deliverance at the sea.  There were still many battles to fight.  You and I have known something far, far greater.  In the font—despite there being so little water there—the Lord has led us from bondage to sin and death into life—life in his presence, enlivened by his very Spirit living within us, life with an eternal hope.  The stories of the Passover and of the Red Sea lead us into Easter, the greatest triumph of all and the great Exodus to which the first was merely a type and shadow.  In his death and resurrection Jesus has broken the chains of sin and death.  He has split the waters and this time they remain open for any and all who will follow him in faith, trusting in the Lord’s promise of the life of the age to come.  I can’t help but think of that great Easter hymn attributed to St. John of Damascus:

Come, ye faithful rise the strain

Of triumphant gladness;

God has brought his Israel

Into joy from sadness;

Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke

Jacob’s sons and daughter;

Led them with unmoistened foot

Through the Red Sea waters.

Tis the spring of souls today;

Christ hath burst his prison,

And from three days’ sleep in death

As a sun has risen;

All the winter of our sins,

Long and dark, is flying

From his light, to whom we give

Laud and praise undying.

Amen.

Firstborn

Exodus 12:29-13:16

by William Klock

Last week we looked at the first half of this rather long passage of Exodus, 11:1-13:16.  It weaves together the account of the Lord’s tenth great sign—the death of the firstborn of Egypt—and the instructions for the Passover.  Even the instructions for the Passover weave back and forth between the instructions given to the Israelite slaves who were about to be delivered to instructions for the future generations who would live in the freedom of the Lord’s land and presence.  History runs into liturgy and liturgy runs back into history.  And as I said last week, there’s a reason for that.  The Passover was the Lord’s means of drawing in future generations of his people so that they could go beyond merely recalling those historical events and actually participate in them in a sort of sacramental fashion.  The Lord created a people for himself in the Exodus and the Passover reminded them in ways they could see, touch, taste, smell, and hear what the Lord had done for them and that the Lord had claimed them as his own.  The Lord’s Supper does the same thing for us and this is highlighted by the fact that when Jesus introduced it, he was celebrating the Passover with his disciples.  He took the bread and he took the wine and he gave it new meaning as he himself became the lamb, God’s Son, who died to make a people for himself.

And that leads us into the second half of this long passage.  Last Sunday I stressed the participatory aspect of the Passover, these rituals that made even future generations participants in the Lord’s deliverance and formation of a people.  Today I want to focus our attention mainly on this idea of the firstborn and of death as the cost of life.  Look with me at Chapter 12.  We’ll pick up right where we left off last week, with verse 29.  The Lord’s decree has been communicated to Pharaoh and the Israelites have prepared.  They’ve sacrificed their lambs.  They’ve painted the blood on their doorposts.

At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock.  And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians.  And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.  Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, “Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as you have said.  Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also!”  (Exodus 12:29-32)

It’s an awful scene.  Lutheran commentator Terrence Fretheim describes it this way, “It happened in the middle of the night, when all of that world was dark.  The darkness of the night matched the darkness of the deed.  No household was spared, not one.  Indeed, no barnyard escaped.  It was a deed done while all were asleep; it was not a public execution, though the effects were public indeed.  As hard as it is to say, the victims were primarily children: both boys and girls—whoever happened to be the firstborn in the family.  It helps but little to say that there was no suffering; to use a modern image, it was sudden (infant) death syndrome throughout Egypt that night.  One can appreciate the great cry that went up, from parents in particular, including Pharaoh himself.  However much it is appropriate to speak of judgement, and Pharaoh’s genocidal decision to kill all Hebrew baby boys was made not long ago, no reader can rejoice at the deaths of children.”   One does not get the sense that the Israelite rejoiced.  As the Egyptians mourned, the Israelites stood in awe of their God.  It was not an angry tantrum by an unstable deity as we read in so many myths.  It was an act of deliberation and one aimed at a man who claimed divinity and ownership over God’s own people.  It was an act recalling that not long before, this supposed god-king had ordered the death of the Israelite’s baby boys.    It was a great sign aimed straight at a man who represented his people as he shook his fist at the Creator of heaven and earth, a man who took credit for the prosperity the Lord had bestowed on his people and nation, and a man who enslaved and murdered the people the Lord had claimed for himself.

This, the tenth of the Lord’s might signs, finally undid Pharaoh.  His priests and magicians, his nobles and advisors had been undone already by the previous plagues, but Pharaoh had continued to stand in defiance.  But this last sign stripped him bare, personally, politically, and religiously.  And he summoned Moses and Aaron and, just as the Lord had said he would, he ordered them to get up and go—actually demanding they worship the Lord.  The Lord has bent Pharaoh’s iron will to his own.

But it’s not just Pharaoh.  Again, just as the Lord had said, the Egyptian people pleaded with the Israelites to go and loaded them down with their gold and silver.  Look at verses 33-36.

The Egyptians were urgent with the people to send them out of the land in haste. For they said, “We shall all be dead.”  So the people took their dough before it was leavened, their kneading bowls being bound up in their cloaks on their shoulders.  The people of Israel had also done as Moses told them, for they had asked the Egyptians for silver and gold jewelry and for clothing.  And the Lord had given the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked.  Thus they plundered the Egyptians.

What the Lord says he will do, he does.  This is the righteousness of God that St. Paul so often appeals to in his epistles.  God is faithful to his promises and faithful to his people.

Now the story shifts to some details, some of which are difficult.

And the people of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children.  A mixed multitude also went up with them, and very much livestock, both flocks and herds.  And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough that they had brought out of Egypt, for it was not leavened, because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not wait, nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves.

  The time that the people of Israel lived in Egypt was 430 years.  (Exodus 12:37-40)

The easy part: They left on foot: men, women, and children.  They had their livestock with them.  They even had their unbaked bread with them, which probably didn’t seem very important at the time, but that bread in which the leavening had failed was to become an important symbol of the Exodus for later generations.  We’re also told that they left Egypt with a mixed multitude—with other people, presumably other slaves, who took this opportunity to escape from Egypt as well.  They would eventually be circumcised and incorporated in the Lord’s people.  And we’re reminded again that as much as they left in haste, they didn’t skulk away in the night nor did they run away from Egypt in panic.  That’s not how the Lord works.  No, the Lord had revealed himself to the Egyptians and in their awe, they opened Egypt’s front door, so to speak, and ushered the Israelites out while giving them their riches.  Perhaps reparations for all those years of slavery.

Now, the other details aren’t as easy.  Twenty-five hundred or three thousand years ago saying that they travelled from Rameses to Succoth meant something, as did the other later geographical markers of their journey.  Today we can only make educated guesses at the exact locations.  We know they started in the Nile delta.  We know they avoided the main road to Canaan that ran along the coast.  And we know they travelled east through the land of marshes and lakes that lie between Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula.  But beyond that, no one’s sure.  You can look at the maps in the back of your Bible to see some of the educated guesses that have been made.

The other difficult detail is this number: 600,000.  If there were 600,000 men, the total population would have been between two and three million.  And that tells us we can’t take the number at face value.  If there had been 600,000 Israelite men, they could have fought their way out of Egypt any time they wanted.  If there had been 600,000 Israelite men, they never would have feared entering Canaan, where even the larger cities had populations of only around 10,000 people.  600,000 men wouldn’t have been able to assemble in the court of the tabernacle as we’re later told they did.  And two or three million people—think the whole population of Greater Vancouver—could not have travelled as Exodus describes.  Even at the time of the monarchy, archaeologists estimate that the whole population of Israel was about 300,000.  So what’s the deal with this enormous number and the corresponding numbers in Exodus and Numbers?  It’s hard to say.  The two best options I’ve come across as I’ve studied are, first, that the Hebrew word for “thousand” was also used in these earlier times for family or military units.  If we’re talking about 600 family or fighting units, that would bring the population down to roughly 20,000 people, which is a very realistic number that fits with most—but not all—of what we read in Exodus and Numbers.  The other solution, floated by one of my Hebrew professors, Ron Allen, after many years of trying to sort this out, is that the Old Testament writers routinely inflated their numbers by a factor of ten, so 600,000 was really 60,000.  It seems dishonest to us and at odds with our ideas of the truthfulness of the Bible, but it’s important to remember that people in the Ancient Near East had a very different idea of what it meant to report on historical events than we do.  We want just the facts with no bias (and we almost always have bias despite that).  That’s not how ancient people did things.  Inflation of numbers like these was the normal practice in the Ancient Near East and, Dr. Allen, argues, it makes perfect sense that the ancient Israelites would do the same thing.  It doesn’t make the Bible wrong or untruthful; it’s just a matter of understanding the cultural context in which it was written.  All that said, none of these solutions—and there are a few others—solve all the problems.  At the end of the day we have to admit that some things may have been lost to history, we have to be humble about our ignorance, and we have to be patient.  Someday the Lord will answer our questions.

Verse 42 highlights the most important part of all this:

It was a night of watching by the Lord, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Lord by all the people of Israel throughout their generations.

Again, history leads us into liturgy and that liturgy leads future generations back into history and makes it theirs.  The deliverance of Israel from Egypt was the Lord’s doing and when future generations of Israelites celebrated the Passover and asked what this night of watching is all about, through their participation they would be reminded of that night long ago when the Lord watched out for his people.  I’d love to talk more about that and how we do the same when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, but that was last week’s sermon and we don’t have time to cover it again today.

The rest of Chapter 12 involves more liturgy—more instructions for the Passover in the future.  It was for Israel and Israel alone.  No foreigner was to partake of it unless he was first circumcised and incorporated into the people of God.  And, again, we’re told that the Israelites did just as the Lord had commanded.  But then as we move into Chapter 13 the focus shifts back to this concept of the firstborn and the importance of the firstborn.  Look at 13:1-2.

The Lord said to Moses, “Consecrate to me all the firstborn. Whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of Israel, both of man and of beast, is mine.”

This may seem out of place, especially since the next paragraph goes on to explain the feast of unleavened bread that went along with Passover, but it’s here because it explains the significance of the lamb and of the death of the firstborn children of Egypt.  The Passover was, for Israel, a reminder that their life came from death.  The lambs sacrificed every year at Passover were a reminder that it was only by that shed blood that the destroyer passed over their houses in Egypt, sparing their children.  But the feast of unleavened bread, which particularly reminded them of their flight from Egypt, was also a reminder that God purchased their lives with the lives of the firstborn of Egypt.  As I said before, this tenth sign or plague wasn’t an angry God lashing out in his rage.  The tenth plague was in response to Pharaoh’s decree to kill the Israelites’ children, but it was also the Lord exercising his right over the firstborn.  The Passover isn’t just about the lamb dying in place of the firstborn of Israel.  It’s also about the Lord purchasing Israel—whom he called his firstborn son—through the death of the firstborn of Egypt.  It was this final plague, this final catastrophe, that caused Pharaoh to release the Lord’s people.

Pharaoh had tried to claim ownership over the firstborn of Israel, but in this last act, the Lord show that he really does have a claim on the firstborn—and not just of Egypt, but Israel as well.  The destroyer did not distinguish between Egyptian and Israelite.  The destroyer distinguished between the home marked with the blood of the lamb and the unmarked home.  The firstborn belongs to the Lord.  That’s what’s going on in verses 1 and 2.  Verses 11-13 pick it up as well.  Look at them:

“When the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, as he swore to you and your fathers, and shall give it to you, you shall set apart to the Lord all that first opens the womb.  All the firstborn of your animals that are males shall be the Lord’s.  Every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb, or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck.  Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.

Passover becomes a reminder of the Lord’s ownership of the firstborn and the firstborn are a reminder of the Lord’s ownership of Israel—again, the people he calls his firstborn son.  The blood of the Passover lambs painted on the doorposts is a reminder of god’s ownership of the firstborn son and also a reminder that the Lord provides for and protects his firstborn son.  The redemption of the donkey with the lamb becomes yet another symbol reminding the people that they belong to the Lord and that the Lord has redeemed them to live in his presence and will continue to provide for them.

If this idea of the firstborn bought from death by the blood of another sounds familiar, it should.  This isn’t the first time we’ve read about this idea in the Bible.  Think of Abraham and the Lord’s command to sacrifice Isaac.  God could issue this command to Abraham because Isaac, as Abraham’s firstborn son by Sarah, belonged to the Lord.  He had every right to claim Isaac for himself and Abraham knew that.  But what happened?  The Lord redeemed Isaac from death by providing a ram to be sacrificed in his place.

The firstborn belonged to God.  The firstborn were his by right.  In Exodus 22:29 he commands, “The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me.”  And it’s not just the humans.  He also commands, “You shall do the same with your oxen and with your sheep: seven days it shall be with its mother; on the eighth day you shall give it to me.”  It even goes beyond humans and livestock.  The firstfruits of all the produce of the promised land belonged to the Lord, which is why the people celebrated the feast of firstfruits.  Everything firstborn belonged to him.

As we begin to understand this—and I think it’s a part of the Old Testament we tend to overlook—but as we come to understand it, we get a sense of just why what Pharaoh did was so wrong.  It wasn’t just a sin against the Israelites.  By killing the sons of the Israelites, he was killing those who were special to the Lord.  By enslaving the Israelite people, he was claiming ownership over the Lord’s firstborn son.  Pharaoh was grasping at divinity and trying to usurp the Lord’s place.

And so the Lord delivers his firstborn son, not by simply taking him out of Egypt.  He follows the pattern already established as we see going back to Abraham.  The Lord delivers his people from death through the death of another.  The Passover lamb becomes a symbol of that life bought by blood.  Life is not cheap; life is very costly.

We see this theme carried on later in Numbers.  The firstborn of Israel belong to God and are to be devoted to him, but God then chooses the tribe of Levi to take their place.  Rather than dying themselves, they forfeit a share in the promised land and become the ones who serve the Lord in his tabernacle and who offer him sacrifices for the people of Israel.

Passover drew all these things together as it became a means not just of reminding the Israelites of their deliverance from Egypt, but a way for them to actually participate in and to own those events.  This is why Jesus used the Passover as the foundation for the Lord’s Supper.  It is a reminder forever of our deliverance from our bondage to sin and death.  It was his last act before he gave his life for ours.  He is the lamb of the new Passover and the bread and wine represent his body and blood.  As we come to his Table, we not only recall his death for us, but we participate in it.

But the Lord’s Supper also reminds of the importance of the firstborn son and his consecration to the Lord.  Israel was God’s firstborn son.  Jesus is the Son of God.  Because of the trinitarian controversies that took place in the Third and Fourth Centuries and all the emphasis that has been placed on Jesus’ title “Son of God” as representing his divinity, we’ve often forgotten that this was language drawn from the Old Testament and that first pointed to Jesus as Israel’s representative.  Jesus was the beloved Son of the Father, representing his people.  In Jesus, God claims fully his right to the firstborn son and in sacrificing Jesus, the firstborn of all creation (as St. John puts it), God’s redemption of Israel is finally complete.  Three days after his death, Jesus rose from the grave.  Jesus was exalted and with him his people.

But it’s not just Israel the firstborn that was delivered by Jesus’ death and resurrection.  It was also, as Old Testament scholar Jon Levenson puts it, Israel the “lateborn” that was redeemed as well.  In light of the cross and the empty tomb of Jesus, we realise who God’s people really are.  As it turns out, they are not really the firstborn, but they become the firstborn through their—through our—union with Jesus, the true firstborn Son of God.

And then we see that we stand in line with a whole host of lateborn sons.  We stand in line with Abel, with Isaac, with Jacob, with Joseph, with David—lateborn sons with no status, chosen by God to be his firstborn.  They all point to us and to the way in which God graciously raises us, the lateborn, the Gentiles, the outsiders, to the status of firstborn sons (and daughters) of God—making those of us who once bore the name “Not my people” to be his beloved children.  Jesus is the firstborn among many brothers.  Through the death of Jesus, the Passover lamb, the Passover blessing of Israel has been extended to us.

Think on that today as you come to the Lord’s Table.  Think on the costliness of Jesus sacrifice.  To purchase our redemption cost him his blood.  That says something about our unworthiness, but it also communicates something amazing about the love of God for sinners.  But, Brothers and Sisters, it also says something profound about grace.  We were not only rebels, idolaters, and sinners, but we were also the outsiders and the lateborn with no claim on God’s mercy.  Despite all of that, he gave his firstborn Son for our sake that we might, through him, be his people—his sons and daughters.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, we were not only sinners in open rebellion against you, we were also outsiders.  We were, as Hosea put it, “Not your people”.  But in your love for us, you gave your Son, the firstborn of all creation, to die that we might, through faith and our union with him, truly be your sons and daughters.  Keep us mindful of your grace, we pray, that we might never take it for granted, but always remember the great cost of our redemption and love you in return in our worship and obedience.  We ask this through Jesus, our firstborn brother and redeeming lamb.  Amen.

Exodus (Louisville: Westminster-John Knox, 2010), page 140.

This Day Shall be a Memorial Day

Exodus 11:1-12:28

by William Klock

We took a break from Exodus over Passiontide, Holy Week, and Easter, but this morning we’re returning.  If you remember, the last time we were in Exodus, we read about the first of the nine “great signs” that the Lord performed in Egypt.  We finished with Chapter 10 and this morning we’ll pick up our study with Chapter 11 and the tenth great sign.

The Lord had commanded Pharaoh, “Let my people go that they may worship me.”  When Pharaoh refused, the Lord followed it up with nine signs: blood, frogs, gnats, flies, dead livestock, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness.  Each time Pharaoh refused.  The tenth sign is introduced as we begin Chapter 11.  Now, this section of Exodus is a relatively long one.  It runs from Chapter 11 through to the middle of Chapter 13.  It’s not just about the tenth sign.  It’s also about the Passover and goes back and forth between the warning of the coming sign, instructions for the Passover, then liturgical instructions for later generations, then the sign itself and Israel’s flight from Egypt, and then back to more instructions for future generations.  Ideally, we’d look at it all at once to do it justice, but we don’t have time for that this morning.  (Avengers: Endgame is three hours and that’s fine, but a sermon?  For some reason that’s different.)  So this morning I’d like to look at Chapter 11 and the first half of Chapter 12.  Next week we’ll look at the rest.  There will be a bit of overlap, but today I want to focus on the Passover as a participatory act of the people—and especially future generations—and think about what that means for us.  Next week I plan to look at the relationship between the death of the firstborn, the Passover lamb, and what that means for us.

So the first part of the passage: Look at 11:1-3.

The Lord said to Moses, “Yet one plague more I will bring upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt. Afterward he will let you go from here. When he lets you go, he will drive you away completely.  Speak now in the hearing of the people, that they ask, every man of his neighbor and every woman of her neighbor, for silver and gold jewelry.”  And the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians.

So there will be one last sign, one last plague on the Egyptians.  The Lord has hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that these mighty acts will be seen by Israel, by Egypt, and by the watching world.  Everyone will know the might and sovereignty of the God of Israel.  But this final act will be the tipping point.  Finally, Pharaoh will agree to let the Israelites go.  In fact, he won’t just let them go, he will drive them out.  Even more, through this final act, the Lord will cause the Egyptians to load down the Israelites with their wealth as they depart.  It’s not clear exactly what’s going on with this last part.  Will the Egyptians be so afraid of the Israelites after this last act that they’ll give them whatever they ask for?  Will it be a sort of awe because of what their God has done for them?  Is it a kind of reparations for their time as slaves?  It’s hard to say from the little the text tells us, but what’s clear is that this is the Lord’s doing.  The Israelites don’t just sneak away from Egypt in the night.  They don’t leave Egypt because of anything they’ve done.  Pharaoh, who for so long as refused to let them go, will actually command them to depart and as they leave, they will despoil the Egyptians.  There’s a two-fold emphasis: First this reveals the power of the Lord and, second, by it he not only frees, but he also blesses his people.

The nature of this final sign is revealed in verse 4 as we jump back to Moses’ last audience with Pharaoh:

So Moses said, “Thus says the Lord: ‘About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle.  There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again.  But not a dog shall growl against any of the people of Israel, either man or beast, that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.’  And all these your servants shall come down to me and bow down to me, saying, ‘Get out, you and all the people who follow you.’  And after that I will go out.” And he went out from Pharaoh in hot anger.  Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh will not listen to you, that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.”  (Exodus 11:4-9)

At midnight the Lord will pass through Egypt.  In 12:23 Moses tells the Israelite elders about one he simply refers to as “the destroyer”, who will do this.  We often hear of an “angel of death”, but the text just refers to the “destroyer” and here the Lord says that he will go out into Egypt to do this.  The sense is that this destroyer is the Lord’s representative, his agent—much like the “angel of the Lord” who met Moses in the burning bush.  He or it acts on the Lord’s behalf, at his command, and with his power and authority.  And here he will take the life of every firstborn in the land of Egypt.  There is no respecting of person, of class, of status, or even of people.  Pharaoh’s firstborn will die and so will the firstborn of the lowliest slave.  As we’ll see in a bit, even the Israelites are not exempt, although Moses doesn’t reveal that to Pharaoh.  From the highest to the lowest, from the palace to the slave hut, even in the livestock pastures, the firstborn of all of Egypt will die.

But Israel will be spared—not because the Israelites will be exempt from this sentence of death, but because the Lord will give them a means of deliverance—but through this distinction between Egypt and Israel, everyone will know that this is the Lord and, most importantly, that he means business.  The plagues have been revealing this all along.  At first Pharaoh’s magicians were able to copy what the Lord did, but pretty quickly they dropped out of the picture.  They only returned after the ninth plague, when the sun was blotted out.  Everyone, including the magicians and the priests and the nobles of Egypt, knew that this was the doing of the God of Israel.  They all pleaded with Pharaoh to leave off and to give this God what he demanded.  But still Pharaoh held out.  Still Pharaoh refused to acknowledge the Lord.  But in this final act, with the death of the firstborn of all of Egypt, there will be no doubt, even for Pharaoh.

This last act was directed right at him.  In Egypt, Pharaoh had the power of life and death.  Everyone, even his noblemen, belonged to him and were subject to his decrees.  If Pharaoh said you were to die, you died.  We saw this when the last Pharaoh issued his decree that the baby boys of the Israelites be cast into the Nile and murdered.  And so the Lord is now showing that he is the one with the power of life and death—power Pharaoh can only pretend at.  And, this last act too, is directed straight at Pharaoh’s decree to murder the Israelite’s children.  This isn’t the act of an angry, irrational, and sadistic god, lashing out at Egypt.  This last act, this last plague is the Lord’s deliberate vindication of his people.  Israel, the Lord said back in Exodus 4, was his firstborn son.  Those baby boys cast into the Nile were the Lord’s sons, murdered by Pharaoh.  And now the Lord makes good on his promise to Pharaoh: You killed my firstborn sons and now I will kill yours.  The Lord always does what he says he will do.  Again, this last act was aimed straight at Pharaoh.  When it was done, Pharaoh could no longer deny the power and authority of the God of Israel.  He had no choice but to let the Lord’s people go, commanding them with all his shaken authority to get out.

That’s the Lord’s warning to Pharaoh, but in preparation for this final act he also has important instructions for the Israelites.  As he said to Pharaoh, while the Egyptians wail at the destroyer’s passing, not so much as a dog would be disturbed amongst the Israelites this night.  But that’s not because the Israelites are different or exempt from the decree of death.  Here’s what the Lord instructs Moses on behalf of the Israelites:

“This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you.  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…Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male a year old.  You may take it from the sheep or from the goats, 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. (Exodus 12:2-3, 5-6)

Right up front, the Lord stresses how important this act is going to be for Israel.  The Lord is about to reboot history, if you will.  Think of the way in which the life of Jesus has split time in half for the Christian world, BC on one side and AD on the other.  The Exodus and the Passover are going to do something like that for Israel.  The Lord is birthing a nation, a people, his firstborn in this mighty act and so, for them, the calendar resets with the Passover.  This becomes their new year as a way to remember it in perpetuity.

And, notice, death touches Israel too, but not at the hands of the destroyer.  Each household is to kill a lamb or a kid, a male, and one without blemish—the best of the flock.  This sacrifice is meant to be costly and so the Lord gives these specific instructions lest the people offer him the lambs that were sick or of little value.  Deliverance is costly.  In verse 7 the instructions continue:

  “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.  They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted on the fire; with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat it…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.  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.  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. (Exodus 12:7-8, 11-13)

So the lamb is not only slaughtered, but the blood is to be painted on the doorframe of the house as a sign to the destroyer to literally “pass over”.  The blood is the sign that a death has already taken place in this house, a death in place of the firstborn son.  And as if to drive home the point that this family has been spared by the death of the lamb, they’re not only to display the blood on their door, but as a family they are to eat this sacrificial lamb—all of it—and if the family is too small to eat it all, they are to join with a neighbouring family or families in this act.

And, tying this deliverance of the firstborn from death with Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, they are to eat this meal in haste, ready to leave at any moment: shoes on their feet and walking stick in hand.  At this point, the instructions seem to be for the benefit of future generations so that they would understand the significance of the night of deliverance and—most importantly—so that they could take part in it in a very tangible way, not just remembering, but living it.  This becomes more apparent as we continue.  In verses 14-20 the Lord gives instructions about the feast of unleavened bread—an older pre-existing springtime feast that is now given new meaning:

“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.  Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread.  On the first day you shall remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel… And you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt.  Therefore you shall observe this day, throughout your generations, as a statute forever.  In the first month, from the fourteenth day of the month at evening, you shall eat unleavened bread until the twenty-first day of the month at evening.  For seven days no leaven is to be found in your houses. If anyone eats what is leavened, that person will be cut off from the congregation of Israel, whether he is a sojourner or a native of the land. (Exodus 12:14-15, 17-19)

This is for the benefit of future generations.  Along with the Passover, they are also to observe the feast of unleavened bread.  As far as we know, this was a pre-existing feast, but the Lord gives it new meaning here as it becomes a reminder of the Exodus and the rush the Israelites were in to leave.  Ordinarily, dough would be prepared the day before it was to be baked, in order for it to rise.  As we’ll find out, this is just what the Israelite women did, but they had to leave in such a hurry the next morning, that they never had a chance to bake their bread.  They had to scoop it up and carry it with them.  When they did eventually bake it, the leavening had stopped and the bread never rose.  The feast became a reminder of this.  But the leavening—or lack of it—became another significant reminder.  In the Exodus, God created a new people for himself.  And this mission of this new people was to witness and to represent the Lord to the nations.  The Lord chose them and in doing so he made them holy.  Holy, in Old Testament terms, is not a status you can earn or make for yourself.  God is holy and what he declares to be holy becomes holy.  What is holy belongs to him.  What is holy represents him.  And this is why purity was so important for Israel.  This was the point of the law and of the sacrificial system.  The law defined purity, it instructed the people in purity, and the sacrificial system gave a means of restoring purity when it was lost.  The feast of unleavened bread became a symbol of this purity.  By the blood of the Passover lambs, the Lord delivered his people from slavery into a new life.  And in the feast of unleavened bread they were reminded of the kind of life they were brought into, a life of purity in which they displayed to the nations the character of the living God.

In verses 21-28 we read that Moses went to the elders of Israel with these instructions and that they “did just as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron” (Exodus 12:28).  But what I want to bring to your attention is what’s written in verses 24-27:

You shall observe this rite as a statute for you and for your sons forever.  And when you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this service.  And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.’”

The Lord was making a people for himself.  He was taking them to the land he had claimed for himself, a place where they would live in his presence and represent him before the eyes of the world.  At Mt. Sinai he would say to them, “Be holy, for I am holy” and he would give them the torah as a way of life for holy people.  But they needed to know this.  As we’ll see, even the people who fled from Egypt in Exodus, who passed through the Red Sea, who saw Pharaoh’s army drowned, who were led by the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, and who ate manna in the wilderness, even they struggled to remember whose people they were.  How much harder would it be for future generations, living in the goodness of the Lord’s land, and with no experience of those miraculous events?  Telling the stories of the Lord’s mighty acts would certainly help.  But human beings need more than that.  As Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith often says, human beings are more than just brains on sticks.  We’re shaped by what we know in our heads, but we can be shaped even more profoundly by what we do.  And so faith in the Lord has never been just about doctrines, it’s about history, and it’s not just about the knowledge of that history of his mighty deeds, but about his people’s experience of them, their—our—participation in them.  Faith is shaped by our participation in ritual.

And so the future generations of Israelites weren’t merely to recount the story of the Exodus to their children.  As families, the Lord gave them specific instructions to re-enact his mighty deeds in a way that made those future generations participants in the Exodus.  As Christians we talk about “sacraments”—baptism and the Lord’s supper—as outward signs and seals of inward and spiritual graces.  Things we can touch with our hands, smell with our noses, see with our eyes, and even taste with our mouths, things we do that allow us to be participants in God’s mighty acts that happened long, long ago.

The Israelite children—the boys at least—bore in their flesh the physical sign of God’s covenant: their circumcision.  And every year those children participated with their family in the ritual of the Passover, not just recalling the events of the Exodus when God made those who were circumcised his people, but becoming participants in those events.  The Exodus was theirs because of Passover.

Ritual.  Repetition.  Participation.  They do something.  They drive the reality of who we are into our being.  They shape us.  And they shape our faith.  The Israelites were shaped as God’s people as they participated in these Old Testament “sacraments”, just as we are by the sacraments of the New Testament.  Each of us, at one point, passed through the waters of baptism.  It may not be as tangible as circumcision, but it unites us with Jesus nevertheless.  Some of you passed through those waters as adults and can remember them very vividly.  Others of us passed through them as infants.  We can’t remember—although my baptismal certificate hangs on my wall as a reminder.  Some of you have candles, given to you at your baptism, to light each year on the anniversary.  The font, even if it wasn’t the font where we were baptised, but the font placed prominently in the church serves as a reminder to us of our union with Jesus: that we are God’s people.

But even more powerfully—just as with the Passover—the weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper allows us not only to recall, but to participate in the mighty acts of God—the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and our deliverance from sin and death.  We gather each week on Sunday—and by that very choice to worship not on Saturday as the Jews did, but on Sunday—we participate in his Resurrection.  But when we follow Jesus’ instructions, to re-enact this meal of bread and wine, we participate in those events.  The Israelites ate the lamb that had died in place of their firstborn, and now the risen lamb comes to us and offers his body and his blood in the bread and the wine.  At his Table we participate in his death and resurrection.  As we gather we participate in being the people of God—not just coming as individuals, but coming together.  Jesus died and rose again two thousand years ago, but here at his Table we become participants in those mighty acts of God.  Here at his Table we are reminded in a tangible way—by sight, by smell, by hearing, by touch, by taste—that we are God’s people.  Here at his Table, the living word of God which we’ve have heard read and preached, now becomes flesh that we might meet him in the bread and wine.

As we acknowledged in the Collect, God gave his Son as a sacrifice for sins.  As we come to his Table this morning to recall that sacrifice, let us also be encouraged to follow in his blessed steps as we walk in the new life he has given.  As St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened.  For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.  Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:7-8).

Let us pray: Almighty God, who gave your only Son to be for us both a sacrifice for sin and an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always receive with thankfulness the immeasurable benefit of his sacrifice, and daily endeavour to follow in the blessed steps of his most holy life, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for evermore.  Amen.

Peace

St. John 20:10-23

by William Klock

In the Easter acclamation we announce, “He is risen!”  Jesus has risen from the dead.  That’s good news, but what does it mean for us?  What’s the application?  What does it have to do with who we are as Christians?  How does it change things for us?  What do we do with it?  Our Gospel today has something to say about all this in that odd scene where Jesus breathed on his friends.  Look again at John 20:22-23:

[Jesus] breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.”

What does that mean?  Jesus breathes out the Holy Spirit on his friends—which is kind of an odd thing in itself—and he tells them that if they forgive sins those sins are forgiven and that if they withhold forgiveness, forgiveness is withheld.  Did he actually?  Or was it a symbolic act?  A sacramental act?  What do we do with that?

Some Christians see Jesus imparting a gift of the Spirit specifically to the apostles—a gift that would empower them literally to forgive sins and to pass that gift on to the bishops and the priests who would succeed them.  This was one of the ideas that the Reformers objected to in the 16th Century and our liturgy reflects it.  The Church’s ministers do not give forgiveness.  They announce the forgiveness of sins that God offers through Jesus to those who are repentant and believe.  The Church’s ministers are ministers of grace—God’s grace.  And when I say that about the Church’s ministers, that means all of us, not just the clergy.  Brothers and Sisters, grace belongs to God.  We do not control it.  Forgiveness does not depend on the willingness of a priest to “give” it.

But if this isn’t Jesus giving special powers to his apostles and their successors, what is this about?  To understand that, we need to take a step back in the story.  In verse 19 John says that the disciples were hiding.  They gathered together, locked the doors, and barred the windoes.  I expect they were being very quiet lest anyone hear them.  They hoped that if anyone passed by it would look like no one was home.  They hoped that if the authorities came knocking, they’d quickly move on in their search.  Jesus’ friends had been hiding since Friday, since he was crucified.  And they were hiding because, when the Romans crucified a revolutionary or someone who claimed to be the Messiah, they didn’t typically leave it at the leader of the movement.  They usually crucified the other leaders and close followers of whomever they had convicted of treason.  In the great revolt that would take place a generation later, the Romans didn’t just crucify a handful of leaders.  They crucified everyone.  They couldn’t make crosses fast enough and ran out.  So Jesus had been nailed to a cross and his friends thought they were likely to be next.  It’s not hard to imagine how afraid they were.

John also tells us that it was the first day of the week.  It was Sunday.  Mary had gone to the tomb just that morning and found it empty.  She had gone to tell the others.  As we read last Sunday, Peter and John went to see the empty tomb for themselves.  But that didn’t mean they weren’t still afraid.  The tomb was empty.  Mary and John insisted Jesus had been raised from the dead.  The others were sceptical.  As I said last Sunday, this wasn’t how resurrection was supposed to happen.  Imagine them arguing in that shut-up dark house.  Voices started rise.  And then a big “Shhhh!” from one of them.  “Whatever happened to Jesus happened to Jesus, but the Romans or Herod’s soldiers are probably out there right now combing the city and looking for us!  John thinks Jesus rose from the dead, but I’m not ready to test that theory myself!  Keep your voices down!”

But then John says that Jesus suddenly appeared in the room.  The doors were locked, but somehow Jesus got inside and to these men who were already afraid and who were now probably really afraid of this man who suddenly appeared in their midst, Jesus says the one thing they most needed to hear: “Peace be with you!”  There’s something very practical in that.  But it’s full of kingdom reality too.  Jesus came to bring peace—to his friends and to the whole world—and so it’s natural that the very first thing he says to his friends as they sit there cowering in fear and thinking that all the hopes they had put in Jesus had come crashing down on Friday—it’s natural that the first thing he would say to them is “Peace be with you”.  Don’t be afraid.  That was the first Easter message.  But, also, don’t lose hope.  Jesus is saying in those few words, “I’m alive.  You’re hopes weren’t misplaced.  When they killed me they declared that I’m not the Messiah, not the King, but God has overturned their verdict and here I am.  Peace be with you.  I really am the Messiah and I really am making all things new.”

Remember what Jesus was all about.  The Messiah was to set God’s world to rights.  Because it was wrong—because of our rebellion and idolatry—God and human beings had been separated.  In his graciousness, the Lord had established the temple as a place where heaven and earth overlapped and human beings could enter his presence—only, of course, after having purified themselves and offered sacrifices for their sins.  And remember that Jesus had hinted that God was about to do something new and much bigger.  Jesus declared that the temple’s days were over.  He would tear it down and in three days build a new one.  Think about that again.  The temple was the place of God’s presence.  It was the place where humans could meet God.  And it was the place where humans could find forgiveness of sins.  It was the greatest place on earth.  It was a beacon of light in a dark world.  And Jesus was going to tear it down and build something new and better.

And now, on the third day after his crucifixion, the risen Jesus—vindicated by God and declared to truly be the Messiah, to truly be the King—appears to his disciples.  John says they spent some time marvelling as he showed them the wounds in his hands and in his side.  There was no doubting that it was him.  John says they were glad—which is, no doubt, an understatement.  And then Jesus says to them in verse 21:

“Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.”

“Peace be with you,” again.  This time there’s more to it than just, “Don’t be afraid.”  This is a commissioning.  Jesus came to bring peace and now he’s giving his friends a mission to carry his peace to the world.  There’s to be no more hiding.  “As the Father sent me, even so I am sending you.”  Jesus had sent them out to the towns and villages of Galilee to prepare the way for him.  Now he’s sending them out again, but this is an even bigger mission.  As we go on, keep the temple in the back of your mind.  Again, it was the place where human beings and God came together.  It was the place of forgiveness.  So Jesus sends them out to carry on his mission and he now equips them:

And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Brothers and Sisters, when Jesus rose from the grave he set the power of God’s new creation in motion and here, Jesus breathes on them—yet another one of his powerful visual object lessons he was so fond of—to say that because of his resurrection, new creation has now been imparted to them.  In both Hebrew and Greek the words for wind and breath and spirit are all the same.  As God breathed life into Adam, now Jesus, the second Adam, breathes new life into the disciples.  I suspect C. S. Lewis had this scene in mind when, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he wrote about the great lion, Aslan, breathing life back into the people the White Witch had turned to stone.  Aslan, the Christ-figure of Narnia, breathed on these dead stone statues and, like flame licking its way across paper, their colour returned and in moments they were moving again—and soon after they were running through the witch’s palace looking for others so that Aslan could breathe on them and restore them to life.  That’s something of the visual Jesus offers here.  He breathes on the disciples, recalling God’s breathing on Adam, as if to say, “Because of my resurrection, you have received God’s Holy Spirit.  Because of my resurrection, the life of God that Adam rejected has been given back to you.  Now go out to find others, proclaim the good news about me, so that they can share in this gift of life.

People often think that the purpose of the Holy Spirit is to give us some kind of spiritual experience or to make us holy.  The Spirit certainly can and does do those things, but first and foremost, Jesus has given us the Spirit to equip and to empower us to go into the world in the same way that the Father sent Jesus into the world.  Jesus gives us the Spirit—he breathes the very life of God into us—and makes us the new temple, the new place where God meets human beings.  Think on that this week.  We Christians are the place where earth and heaven meet, because God’s spirit indwells us.  We, the Church, are his temple.  And as he gave Adam the task of expanding the garden of Eden, he gives his disciples the task of expanding the temple—of taking it to the world and of inviting the world to become a part of it.

Jesus died on Good Friday.  He rose on Easter.  He accomplished the forgiveness of sins.  He began the process of making all things new.  But how does what he did two thousand years ago in that time and place, how does it impact the rest of the world?  How does it come to peoples and cultures with no thought for God’s kingdom?  How does it speak to people halfway around the world who had no knowledge of God’s Messiah and had never even thought of putting their hope in his coming?  How does it speak to people two thousand years after it happened?

Back in John 4, Jesus said to the Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews.”  Salvation is from Israel, for the whole world.  The story of God and Israel reached its climax in Jesus.  He embodied Israel himself and died for Israel’s sins.  But now these Jewish disciples, empowered by Jesus himself, are called to take this message of God’s faithfulness out to the nations and anyone who believes, anyone who acknowledges that Jesus is Lord—the King sent to set this fallen world to rights—can take part in this salvation and, in finding new life in Jesus, can become part of this new Israel, this new temple, this new creation.

Notice that John tells us that this was the first day of the week.  His point is that in Jesus, God’s work of re-creation has begun.  Jesus has set it in motion.  And the task of his disciples is to take what Jesus has begun and apply it to the world around them—to start living and announcing the reality of the kingdom—to start expanding it and spreading it around.  This is the New Testament call to be fruitful and to multiply.

Jesus’ breathing on his disciples speaks of new creation in another way too.  Think back again to Genesis.  We’re told there that God would come to Adam and Eve, to fellowship with them in the time of the evening breeze.  After they sinned, we’re told that when God came looking for them he came not as a gentle breeze, but as a whirlwind.  But here, now on that first Easter, the gentle breath of Jesus flows over and around his disciples.  Jesus had undone Adam’s fall and God is with man once again.  As God had breathed life into Adam, the second Adam now breathes life into his friends.

Jesus had twice promised peace.  I expect he promised it many more times that than, but John specifically records two instances in chapters 14 and 16.  And now Jesus announces that peace to them again.  It really has finally come.  And he sends them out to proclaim it.  This is what those difficult words about forgiving sins and not forgiving sins are all about.  Jesus is sending them out to proclaim the good news.  Jesus who was crucified is risen.  He is Lord and he is making all things new, he’s restoring sinful human beings to their Creator.  The good news is a royal summons to forgiveness and to life for all who will believe and give their allegiance to Jesus.  But, Jesus says, they are also to retain sin—which is probably a better translation than to withhold forgiveness.  Jesus is commissioning them not only to announce forgiveness, but to warn the world that the wages of sin truly is death and separation from God.  Jesus highlights something we need badly to hear today: You can’t proclaim the good news without also announcing the bad news.  Sin has consequences.  Serious consequences.  We see it in the cemetery surrounding us and we see it in the world.  Open a newspaper or watch the evening news and we can see the serious consequences of sin everywhere.  But this is why the good news is such good news.  We are dead in our sins and the world has been corrupted and turned upside-down by our sins—that’s the bad news and the warning—but if we will repent and follow Jesus, the good news is that we have a share in the life of God and of the age to come.  Jesus has inaugurated God’s new creation and promises us a place in it.

I think Mary that first Easter morning gives us a very down-to-earth example of the kingdom and of new life and of the good news about Jesus.  Not only that, but we see how the good news meets us where we are and brings forgiveness, life, and hope.  Mary’s there in the eight verses between last Sunday’s Gospel and this Sunday’s.  She went to the tomb that morning in tears.  She was a wreck.  Her friend and master was dead.  And then she got there to find his body gone.  Now she’s devastated.  Think to one of those times when you were absolutely crushed by something and grieving your heart out.  You thought it couldn’t get any worse and then it got worse.  The angel asked her why she was crying and she sobbed out, “They’ve taken my lord away.”

Brothers and Sisters, as we proclaim the good news about Jesus we come face to face with the pain and the grief and the tears of real people.  Like Mary they are broken and devastated.  If we ask why they’re crying they may tell us, “They have taken away…my husband, my wife, my child.  They have taken away…my hope, my life, my dignity.  Mary embodies the grief and the pain of a world set wrong by sin.

And that’s when Mary turned around and someone was there.  Who was he?  Mary guessed that he was the gardener.  She was wasn’t really wrong.  There was Jesus, risen from the dead and the world’s true Lord.  You would think he had better things to do, but there he was gardening.  John doesn’t say specifically what he was doing, but whatever it was led Mary to think he was the gardener.  But it makes perfect sense.  Jesus knew what he was doing.  New Creation broke into the world that morning.  Pilate had declared, “Behold, the man!”  And here he is, the first man of the New Creation, the new Adam.  And here’s the new Adam, doing the task that Adam had rejected: taking care of the garden.  I like to think that when Mary saw him, Jesus was hard at work ripping a thorn bush or brambles from the ground to make way for a fruit tree or flowers.

But Mary didn’t recognize him.  The same was true for some of us the first time we saw Jesus and the same thing is true for so many of the people we will bring to him.  We can hear the back and forth between Jesus and Mary as she cried and poured out her heart to this man she thought was a stranger, bringing her problems to him.  And then he says her name.  She didn’t know him, but he knew her and that’s true of all of us.  It’s true of everyone.  And when he says our names he says so much.  He greets us.  He rebukes us for our unbelief. He consoles us in our pain and grief.  He invites us to himself.  And suddenly, like Mary, we know him.  He was different and the same all at once.  He’s alive with a new kind of life the likes of which we have never seen before.  I suspect the only people who would have recognized it were Adam and Eve, because they were the only ones who had ever known that life.  Everyone else since has lived apart from it, cast out of the garden.  But Jesus now offers it to us.  He makes us clean, he forgives our sins, and he wipes away the tears, not just of our own guilt, but all the pain caused by the sins of others.

Brothers and Sisters, Jesus welcomes us into his new creation, into the garden restored, into the temple.  It’s a building still under construction.  We may see ourselves as broken or worthless, but Jesus knows our pain.  He was the stone that the builders rejected.  But he has become the cornerstone of God’s new temple.  And he knows just the place for each of us.  He breathes God’s spirit into us, he wipes away our tears, he washes away our sins, he restores us to the life of God, he makes us whole and he makes us holy—and he gives us a holy task.  Because his temple will not be complete until each stone has been brought, until, as God planned for Eden in the beginning, the garden, the place of his presence has filled the earth.  As God spoke through the prophet Habakkuk, one day the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.  Friends, Jesus now sends us into the world to proclaim the good news—to announce that in him God’s King has come, that he will judge sin and set the world to rights, but that he also offers forgiveness and the life of his new world to all who will come to him as Lord and Saviour.

Let us pray: Lord Jesus, as you breathed your Spirit into your friends that first Easter Sunday you have fill us with your Spirit in our baptism.  You have made us whole and you have made us holy.  Now send us out into the world, equipped and empowered by your Spirit, that we might proclaim the good news to others, that they might be made whole and holy by your death for sins and your rising to give life.  Amen.

A New Day

St. John 20:1-18, Isaiah 25:1-9, Colossians 3:1-4

by William Klock

In our Easter Gospel this morning, St. John tells us that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb of Jesus, on the first day of the week, while it was still early and still dark.  We can imagine her mournfully making her way through the dark garden.  The morning dew forming on the grass and wetting her feet, while she wept tears that wet her cheeks.  Had she slept that night?  Probably not.  Not with the awful picture of the cross and Jesus nailed to it burned in her vision.  She was tired.  She was distraught.  And so she rose in the pre-dawn darkness to do the one thing that made sense, the one thing she knew she could still do: she went to anoint his body; she went to look after the dead.

Darkness on the first day of the week.  John echoes his own prologue—the Gospel we read at Christmas—those familiar words: “In the beginning…”  Those words echo Genesis.  “In the beginning the earth was formless and void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”  But the darkness wasn’t empty.  There was a wind blowing through the darkness.  God’s Spirit, hovering over the waters.  And God spoke, “Let there be light!”  And there was light.  God spoke and Creation began.  That was the first day.

And St. John recalled that first day as he put pen to paper and wrote his account of Jesus: “In the beginning…was the word.”  God’s word was the agent of creation.  And now John tells us that that very word has become flesh, that he dwelt amongst us, and that he—the agent of light and life in the beginning—has brought light and life into the darkness.  He brought new creation.  Wherever he went, the darkness was undone, light shone, sickness became health, what was sinful was forgiven and made holy, even death was turned into life.

And John echoes Genesis again in our Good Friday Gospel.  On the sixth day, God spoke.  He created life—this time creating man and woman.  The crown of his creation.  His priests, created to bear his image in his garden temple.  But they would be the very ones to rebel and return Creation to the darkness.  And on the sixth day of that first holy week so long ago, as it seemed the darkness had overcome the light once again, as Jesus stood bruised and bloody before Pilate, the Roman governor declared to the people, “Behold the man!”  New Creation was breaking in even as the darkness seemed to have won.  The Word Incarnate, the second Adam, despised, rejected, and crucified.

A spear in his side satisfied everyone that Jesus was dead.  The darkness closed in.  His friends wept.  They took him down from the cross, wrapped him in linen, and laid him in a tomb.  And again there’s a silent echo in John’s Gospel.  This is the sixth day.  Behold the man!  Somehow God is seeing this—seeing evil rise up to do its worst—and yet despite the horrible events of the day this Friday is somehow still “very good”.

The sixth day rolls into the seventh.  Jesus, the word of God, has done his work and lies in the tomb taking his sabbath rest in the midst of the darkness.  Somehow the sabbath, just as it always had, sends a message: God is in control.  Take your rest.  Don’t worry.  No matter how dark it may get, trust in the one who continues to sit on his throne.

And as the sabbath ends and the first day of a new week begins, as the dawn of the eighth day breaks, Mary comes to the tomb with a jar of spices and another of oil.  And she finds the great stone rolled away and the tomb empty.  Mary didn’t understand.  It was insult added to injury.  It was another twist of the knife in her heart.  And she ran as fast as she could to Peter’s hiding place.  John was there, too.  Out of breath and sobbing, she told them the news, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don’t know what they’ve done with him!”

Peter and John were in hiding, lest they suffer the same fate as Jesus.  But Mary’s news was enough to bring them out.  They ran to the garden and to the tomb.  There was so much running that first Easter morning.  John tells us that he got there first.  Sure enough, the stone was rolled away.  But he wasn’t sure what to make of it at first.  The door to the tomb was small and low.  You’d have to get down, probably on your hands and knees, to crawl through it.  He crouched down and looked into the semi-darkness and saw a curious thing.  The linens used to wrap Jesus were still there, lying on the stone shelf where they had laid him on Friday.  But the body was gone.  Someone must have stolen it, but why hadn’t they taken the linens?  And how did they get the body out of the linens without unwrapping them?  I don’t think John and the others could helped but think back to that day, not long before, when Lazarus had emerged from his tomb at Jesus’ calling.  Out stumbled Lazarus, barely able to shuffle, arms pinned to his sides by linen wrappings—just like a mummy—and mumbling through the cloth wrapped around his head.  They’d had to help unwrap the linens and what a tangled mess that had been.  But here are Jesus’ burial linens, seemingly untouched, but missing the body that had been wrapped in them—like a deflated mummy.

Then Peter caught up.  Big, impetuous, boisterous Peter.  He saw John stammering at the entrance of the tomb and pushed him out of the way.  He got down and squeezed his way through the little door and into the tomb.  Sure enough, there were the linens, empty but undisturbed.  And then he noticed another strange thing that John hadn’t.  The linen cloth that had covered Jesus face, neatly rolled up and set to the side.  None of it made sense.

John, at that moment, squeezed his way into the tomb to crouch beside Peter.  And as they crouched there looking at the empty linens, John says that belief dawned in them.  Jesus’ body hadn’t been stolen.  If that had happened, the robbers would have taken it away still wrapped in the linens.  No, this was the moment—just as day was dawning outside the tomb—this was the moment they began to understand that God’s power was at work in an act of new creation.  I doubt understanding came all at once, but it was at that moment that all those things Jesus had said over the past three years “clicked” and started to make sense.  It the moment when their despair faded and hope returned.  They had believed Jesus was the Messiah and that he’d come to bring a new world.  But Messiah’s—at least not the real Messiah—don’t die at the hands of Romans, nailed to a cross.  Hope had died for the disciples on Good Friday.  But now it returns with the realisation that Jesus had risen from death.  It was the only explanation that made sense.  And then the other things Jesus had said,  thing’s they’d never really understood, started to make sense.  They’d been assuming that Jesus was going to usher in God’s new world with a sword—like another Joshua or David or Judas Maccabeus.  They’d expected him to throw down the Romans and lead the Jews as they fought their way back to the top of the heap.  And now the realisation begins to dawn that all those hopes were part of the old world, part of the darkness, and that somehow, in dying, in allowing sin and death to do their worst, Jesus has inaugurated a new world, a new creation.  Because Jesus had died and was alive again.

The key was the missing body.  Resurrection had happened.

If I recall correctly, it was last Easter that the New York Times ran one of their usual Easter-time stories about Jesus.  In the story they explained that on Easter Jesus was raised the dead and went to heaven.  It was par for the course for the New York Times.  And yet even they occasionally have the clarity to realise just how much they don’t get Christianity.  Also last year, one of their editors wrote a piece in which he noted just what a mystery Christianity—and in particular, Evangelicalism—is to their writing and editorial staff.  He was trying to explain why they had repeatedly failed to grasp what was motivating Christians when it came to politics and culture.  But their misunderstanding of Easter is a common one.  The disciples were thrilled, people often think, because they realised that even though he’d died, Jesus went on to a happy existence in heaven with God.  But that’s not at all what restored hope to the disciples.  In fact, in verse 17, we see Jesus explaining to Mary that he has yet to ascend to his Father—he will, but not yet.  No, belief dawned in John—and presumably also in Peter—at this moment when they realised that Jesus’ body—his actual body, not just his spirit—had been raised from death.

And this, right here, is one of the single greatest pieces of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.  Because everyone in the ancient world knew it didn’t happen.  They were no less intelligent or observant than we are.  People don’t rise from the dead.  They don’t.  It doesn’t happen.  Greeks and Romans understood the concept, just like we do, but they knew that when you die, you die.  That that’s it.  In fact, the Greek philosophers taught that you wouldn’t want to be bodily raised from the dead anyway.  They developed a system of thought in which the spiritual was good and the material was bad.  The spirit was good.  The body was just dead weight.  The spirit realm was good.  The physical earth was nothing but pain and sorrow.  And so most people longed for death as a great release as they left behind the pain and sorrows of life and moved into a purely spiritual existence.  It’s not all that different from what many people believe today.  This form of Platonism even influenced the thinking of the Church in those early centuries and, still today, plenty of Christians hold to some form of this idea.  We’ve just borrowed language from the Bible to describe it.

But there was one small group of people who did believe in resurrection.  Those people were the Jews.  Not all of them.  The Sadducees were adamant that there was no such thing as resurrection.  They were firmly committed to the status quo and this idea of resurrection, if it was true, meant that someday the status quo would be overturned.  But many other Jews, most notably the Pharisees, had a belief—they hope in and longed for the day when the Lord’s Messiah would come to set the world to rights and on that day everyone—well, everyone meaning all the faithful Jews—would be resurrected to share in the Messiah’s new world.  They weren’t sure about the details.  Well, most of them were probably pretty sure, but they also disagreed with each other on the details, but one thing they all agreed on was that when resurrection happened, it was going to happen to all of God’s people at the same time.  It would be one glorious event that would happen at the end of history.  It would bring an end to the present age of darkness and usher in a new age and a new world with the Messiah and with Israel finally on top of things.

And this was why the disciples—not to mention everyone else—failed to understand so much of what Jesus had said and done.  This is why Jesus’ friend were suddenly hopeless when he was crucified.  This was why some of them—like Thomas—had so much trouble believing the reports that he had risen from death.  Because, first, everyone knew that dead people don’t rise from the grave.  And because even the people who did believe in resurrection had never thought of it as happening to just one person, let alone that it would happen to just one person while the world continued to trundle along, seemingly the way it always had.  Resurrection was supposed to come at the end of the age, at the end of history.  It would happen to all of God’s people at once.  And it would change the world.  No one would have made up this story of Jesus rising from death—at least not as we’re told it happened—because, before Jesus rose from death, absolutely no one in the world ever expected resurrection to happen this way.  As they recalled these events to their family and friends, they were fighting their way upstream and against the strong current of Jewish belief.

I think there’s a reason why John includes some echoes of the resurrection of Lazarus in his account of Jesus’ resurrection.  When Jesus raised Lazarus from death, he brought Lazarus back to the life he knew.  John, I think, wants us to know that what happened to Jesus was, in some ways, like what happened to Lazarus.  But, I think more important to John, are the contrasts that show that what happened to Jesus was very much unlike what happened to Lazarus.  Jesus raised Lazarus to the same life he’d always had.  That bad tooth?  Still there.  The painful bunion?  Still there too.  The leaky roof was still waiting to be fixed.  The jerk neighbour he never got along with was still next door being as annoying as ever.  When Lazarus came out of his tomb he was still wrapped in linen.  His friends had to extract him from the mess and they made a mess of the linens in the process.  In contrast, Jesus left his grave clothes neatly behind.  But, most important, death still mattered to Lazarus.  Lazarus would grow old or get sick and die again.  Nothing could stop that.  But, in contrast, Jesus had passed through death and conquered it in the process.  Jesus burst from the tomb, victorious over it.  Jesus came out of death a new creation.  There was certainly continuity with the old.  His old body had been transformed, not left behind or destroyed.  And in that, Jesus inaugurated new creation—one in which death is defeated and the life of God restored.  In Jesus’ resurrection, the words of our Old Testament lesson from Isaiah were fulfilled: “He will swallow up death forever.”

John and Peter—and Mary and the others—believed because they saw the empty grave clothes, because they saw that Jesus’ body was gone and that resurrection was the only answer.  I’m sure it took them much longer to work through the full ramification of this belief.  Again, no one had ever thought of resurrection in this way—it was supposed happen to everyone all at once at the end of the age, not to just one person in the middle of history.  But St. Paul works it out for us.  In our Epistle from Colossians he stresses that Jesus has led the way.  In our baptism, through faith, we have been united with Jesus.  Because we have been united with him, we have died with him.  Because we have died with him, we will rise with him.  And even as we wait, we have already been raised with him in that we already share in the life of God through his indwelling Spirit.  We’ve been plunged into the Spirit in our baptism and the life of the Spirit is the down-payment on the life of the age to come.  Paul writes, “When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”  When the time is right, when Jesus has finally put every enemy under his feet, all of God’s people will be resurrected—will be made new—just as Jesus was, and with us all of Creation.

You see, the problem with the way the Jews had been thinking about resurrection and the end of the age, was that it gave no room the redemption of humanity.  They were waiting for the Messiah to bring history to a close by raising them, the Jews, to the top of the heap while raining down fire and brimstone, death and destruction on the nations—on the rest of the human race and particularly in all those detestable Greeks and Romans.  Instead, Jesus stepped into the middle of history and died and rose again.  His work of new creation began with the creation of a new Israel—a new people of God—now filled with God’s own Spirit.  And that new Israel was created to herald the new age, to go out to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and eventually to the whole world—even to those awful Greeks and Romans—to announce the royal summons: the Jesus who died on the cross and rose from the grave is Creation’s true Lord.  He will finish what he has started.  He will set all things to rights.  He will wipe away every tear.  But to do that the people who insist on upsetting Creation, the people who cause the tears, will have to be dealt with.  To set things to rights, evil will, one day, have to be destroyed and wiped completely from Creation.  And so, in his graciousness, the King has come in the middle of history, so that his Good News might be proclaimed, and so that we rebels—we sinners and idolaters, we who have had a hand in the darkness and in causing the tears—can respond to the royal summons, kneel in faith before the risen Lord, be forgiven and made new ourselves, and have a share, not in the destruction of the old age, but have a place of glory in the new.

New creation was inaugurated that first Easter morning.  The resurrected Jesus was busy with his work when Mary found him and mistook him for the gardener.  John knew what he was doing when he included that little detail.  He knew it was the eighth day.  New creation had begun.  Eden was breaking in to a world filled with thorns and weeds.  And there was Jesus, the second Adam, tending the garden—pulling weeds or, maybe, pruning a fruit tree.  And in that image you and I, Brothers and Sisters, ought to find hope.  The Lord Jesus has inaugurated God’s new age.  We who are in him by faith have a share in it.  What has happened to him will, one day, happen to us and to the world.  As St. Paul writes, “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.”  Let us then set our minds on the things of his kingdom, on the things of the age to come.  Let us be like Jesus, tending the garden, not only preparing ourselves, but preparing the world.  We are the new Israel, we are the heralds of the kingdom.  Let us live as people with hope, let us be faithful in proclaiming the message: planting, cultivating, and tending the seeds of the Gospel and the fruit of the Spirit.

Let us pray: Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant us by your grace to set our minds on things above; that by your continual help our lives may be transformed; through the same, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

United with Christ

Romans 6:3-11

Maundy Thursday puts our attention on the Lord’s Supper as Jesus instituted it on that last night before his death.  In the Lord’s Supper we see Jesus as the Suffering Servant, as the Passover lamb, being led to the slaughter that the wages of sin and death might “pass-over” all those covered by his blood.  Maundy Thursday, the Christian “Passover”, the Lord’s Supper leads us to the cross.  On Good Friday we gather at the foot of the cross as the lamb is sacrificed for our sins with the promise that he will make all things new—that he will heal and restore a world and a people broken and in bondage to sin and death.  And now at Easter we see the lamb vindicated as he rises from death to life as the conqueror of sin and death and as he leads the way to resurrection.  As St. Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 15, we have a sure hope in Jesus; he is the firstfruits of the resurrection of the dead; and where he has gone he will one day lead us.

It’s very fitting then that our remembrance of our Lord’s passion begins by putting our attention on the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and now, on the other side of the cross, brings us to the sacrament of holy Baptism.  In our Epistle, taken from Romans 6, St. Paul writes:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6:3-4)

When Jesus rose from the grave he led the way into what Paul calls “newness of life”.  This was what he promised in the upper room, and now, this side of the cross, that newness of life is reality.  And even though we await the resurrection on that last great day of the age, even though we haven’t yet experienced fully what Jesus experienced that first Easter morning, we can still participate in his life while we wait in hopeful expectation.  If we are in Christ, life has been changed for us.  In our baptism we share with Jesus, in some mystical way, his death and his resurrection and his new life.

Now, there’s a reason that Paul tells us this.  Our Epistle begins at verse 3, but if we go back to verses 1 and 2 he asks a question.  Chapter 5 of Romans, the previous chapter, is where he tells us about grace.  Specifically it’s where he expresses the utterly amazing thing about grace: that where sin abounds, grace super-abounds—that God’s grace will cover every sin for those who are in Christ Jesus.  The danger there is that some people might misunderstand the reality of grace and end up taking advantage of grace, so Paul asks:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?

 

If grace is such a good thing, and since it abounds wherever sin is, should we not then abound in sin and receive an even greater measure of grace?  And Paul’s answer is:

By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

 

It doesn’t come through in most of our English translations, but what Paul is describing is a change of state: a transfer from one covenant to another.

Veronica and I were in Montréal not long after the last referendum in the 90s.  Tensions were still pretty high.  We were fine downtown, but one night we drove east to do some shopping and to eat dinner and we discovered that speaking English was unwise.  For a few minutes, while we were in a grocery store checkout, I was afraid the clerk and most of the other customers might lynch us.  Being in francophone country meant speaking French, unless you wanted trouble.  But imagine how silly it would have been, after we flew home to Vancouver, to go around still speaking French.  We’d experienced a change of state.  A plane picked us up in Montréal and transferred us to Vancouver.  There was no longer any reason to speak French.  That’s something of what Paul is getting at.  In this case, we were once living in a state of sin, but Jesus has transferred us to a state of grace.  In other places Paul talks about Adam and Jesus.  We were all born “in Adam”, Paul says.  We were all born into a state of sin and subject to death.  But by God’s grace, through our baptism, we have been transferred—we’ve been removed from Adam’s family and been made part of Jesus, who knows no sin.  As we sing in Isaac Newton’s hymn: “’tis grace hath brought me safe thus far”—grace transfers us from Adam’s family to Jesus’ family and grace keeps us in Jesus’ family despite our continued sins, but we’re already here.  We sinned because we were part of Adam’s family and that’s how Adam’s family behaves, but by grace we’ve been removed from that sinful family.  There’s no longer any reason to sin—in fact, to continue in sin, is in a very real way to express a desire to leave Jesus’ family and to return to Adam’s.  As Paul writes, “How can he who died to sin still live in it?”

The rest of our Epistle affirms this reality, this change of state, just in case we’re inclined to disbelieve that it’s happened.  Think back to Thursday.  I said that as the Passover was confirmation for Israel that they were people in covenant with God, so the Lord’s Supper is confirmation for us, the new Israel, that we are in covenant with God through Jesus.  Baptism is much the same.  It corresponds to circumcision in the Old Testament.  It was through circumcision that children were brought into covenant with God, and for Christians baptism does the same thing.  God offers his promise of redemption and of new life in these waters and we take hold of his promise in faith as we pass through these waters.

Paul says, more specifically, though that through these waters we not only receive God’s promise, we’re not only transferred into the new covenant, but we actually participate with Jesus in his death, burial, and resurrection.  Holy Week isn’t merely a commemoration of events through which Jesus walked two thousand years ago.  No.  Through our baptism we participate with Jesus in these events.  In baptism we take hold of Jesus by faith and that means that everything he has done is applied to us.

Paul goes on in verses 5-6:

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.  We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.

 

Again, we lose a bit of what Paul is saying when we translate him into English.  When he says we were buried with him, that we’ve been united with him in his death, that we will be resurrected like him, that we were crucified with him what Paul actually does is add a prefix that means “with” to the verbs in Greek.  Literally, we and Jesus have been “with-crucified”, we and Jesus have “with-died”, we and Jesus have been “with-buried”, we and Jesus will be “with-resurrected”—we with Jesus, all through our baptism.  Never let anyone tell you that baptism is just a symbol or that baptism is primarily something that you do to show your commitment to God.  In baptism God makes his promise and commitment to us and through it he unites us with Jesus—in death and in new life.

That means, brothers and sisters, that when Jesus broke from the tomb on Sunday morning having conquered sin and death, we who have been baptized were with him.  Think of the Israelites passing through the waters of the Red Sea to leave their slavery to Egypt behind, never to go back.  In the same way, Jesus leads us through the waters of baptism, leaving our slavery to sin and death behind.  And in that lies the answer to Paul’s question: Should we keep sinning?  No.  Imagine how silly it would have been for the Israelites to go back to being slaves in Egypt.  It would be just that silly for us to go back to being slaves to sin and death.  And so Paul goes on:

For one who has died has been set free from sin.  Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.  We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.  For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.  So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.  (Romans 6:7-11)

Death no longer has dominion over us.  Through our baptism we are in Christ Jesus who is alive.  Think again of Israel.  The Lord led them out of Egypt, drowning Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, he led Israel across the wilderness, and finally into the Promised Land.  Pharaoh no longer had dominion over them.  And brothers and sisters, sin and death no longer have dominion over us, so long as we are in Christ Jesus.  He has broken our family ties with the sinful first Adam, at the cross he broke the chains of sin and death by which we were bound, and through his resurrection he leads us into new life—a life committed to God, the life we were created to share as God’s servants and stewards and worshipers.

This is the new life.  This is what Easter is all about.  Friends, think of the empty tomb and be encouraged.  When the world, the flesh, and the devil tempt us to go back to our old life of sin, remember that at the cross Jesus broke the chains of sin.  We are no longer bound to that slavery.  In our baptism we are bound to God, through Jesus, by a covenant of love.  When sin temps you remember our Easter acclamation:

“Christ is risen!”

And so are we!

He Humbled Himself

Philippians 2:5-11

by William Klock

In our Epistle this morning, the familiar passage from Philippians 2, St. Paul writes about the Church and about unity.  Paul couldn’t be with the Christians in Philippi.  He was in prison.  But the next best thing to being there was to hear about their unity.  It would, he writes, make his joy complete.  Unity is one of those funny things.  With the exception of a few folks who seem to revel in fighting, we all know that unity is a good thing.  But that doesn’t mean that finding or understanding or, especially, living in unity is easy.  And this is why Paul doesn’t just tell them to united.  He points them to Jesus.  There’s a reason why the Church has coupled this Epistle with the day’s Gospel lessons about that first Palm Sunday, the King riding into Jerusalem, and about his crucifixion.  We can look for unity in all sorts of places.  We can try to make it.  We can even try to force it.  But if we want to have true unity, we need to look to Jesus.  That’s what Paul writes here.  Look at how he starts in verses 2-4:

…complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.  Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

“Be in full accord and of one mind.”  Don’t do anything with selfish motives.  Don’t look at for yourself.  But humbly look to the needs of others and consider them more important than yourself.  It looks good on paper.  It would look even better in real life.  But we struggle to put it into practise.  How many people have left a church because of broken unity?  How many churches have split because of broken unity?  How many people stay in the same church, but have little or nothing to do with a brother or sister because of broken unity?

We step on each other’s toes.  Sometimes it’s accidental.  Sometimes it’s deliberate.  We sometimes make uncharitable assumptions about others, we take offense, we storm off.  Despite our best intentions, most of us aren’t easy to live with one hundred per cent of the time.  It’s not always easy to always be servants to each other.  Sometimes we let our selfishness or pride get the better of us and humility and forgiveness fall by the wayside.  Sometimes we lose our focus and as a result we all end up travelling off-course or missing opportunities to fulfil the mission Jesus has given us.  But we should want, Paul says, to live in one accord in love.  But it’s not enough to want to.  The only way unity will really and truly happen—true unity that overcomes our sins and shortcoming and true unity that is more than loving people like ourselves—is for us to be rooted in Jesus.

In fact, if we are in Jesus, unity becomes part of our nature.  Living together in love and unity as the Church isn’t some optional extra or some ideal state that only the best Christians ever achieve.  This is basic.  This is simple.  This is the foundation on which the Church rests.  If we don’t get this right we won’t get anything else right—which may be why the Church is often in such a sorry state and so bad in fulfilling our mission of being light to the world.  No, this is basic.  In verse 1 Paul writes:

If there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy…

He’s saying: If Jesus the Messiah asks you or motivates you to do anything at all, if you’ve experienced the love of God in Jesus or the love of God in another Christian, if you have any sense at all that the Holy Spirit is at work in you, if you feel any affection or any sympathy for Jesus and for the Good News—if you feel any of this at all—then do this.  If you have any sense of being in Christ, having found your life in him, then live in love with your brothers and sisters and live the unity that Jesus gives you with them as his body.

And that’s it: Jesus.  He’s at the centre of this.  Unity comes as our minds come together, focusing on the same thing—in this case the same object, the same person.  Jesus.  We don’t find our unity in our backgrounds or our social standing or our culture or likes and dislikes or even in our mission.  We don’t even find our unity in pursuing unity.  Unity for the sake of unity may be one of our greatest failings today: Unity is what life in Jesus creates, but too often we turn that upside down and we make unity the object and sideline Jesus and that just leads to all sorts of wishy-washy-ness, because when you make unity itself the goal you always end up sacrificing truth.  If unity is found in Jesus, you can’t forge this kind of unity with people who don’t find their life in the Jesus of Holy Scripture.  We can certainly find points of commonality with people of other faiths, with secular people, even with cults and heretics and those can be points for engagement, for evangelism, even for working together to meet needs in our communities.  But real unity, the sort of unity that the Church embodies is only found in Jesus and cannot be forced or created with anyone who is not in him.  You and I don’t create Christian unity.  Jesus does.  This is why we need to put Jesus first.  If we put him first, the unity comes naturally.

Unity is the result of Jesus in our lives and of the love that wells up in us in response to his love.  We find unity as we get to know the story of God’s faithfulness laid out in the Scriptures.  We find unity as we see the story of God’s faithfulness come to fulfilment in Jesus, in his humility, in his death, in his resurrection, and in his ascension.  We find unity as Jesus now invites us to join in the story, not just in taking part in Israel’s story and experiencing God’s faithfulness to his promises, in forgiving our sins and filling us with his Spirit and making us his people, but we also find unity as Jesus incorporates us into his mission and makes us agents of the Good News and agents of his Kingdom.  Jesus is at the centre of it and if we stay focused on him unity, again, comes naturally.

Setting aside conceit and selfish ambition and instead being humble and serving each other isn’t an easy thing to do.  But this is precisely why we need Jesus at the centre of things.  Paul goes on in verses 5-11:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

“Have this mind among yourselves,” Paul says.  And then he describes the humility of Jesus.  What he describes here is the humility we see in the Gospel of the Liturgy of the Palms this morning—the story of Jesus arriving in Jerusalem as the King, but doing so in humility and riding on a donkey.  What Paul describes here is the humility we see in the day’s Gospel, the passion narrative.  We see Jesus mocked and beaten.  We see Jesus rejected by the people.  They so despise Jesus that they’d rather have Pilate release Barabbas, the violent revolutionary.  And finally, we see Jesus in humility, stumbling under the weight of his own cross and being led to be brutally crucified outside the city.  This is Israel’s King.  In his rejection and suffering and his death Jesus shows us what it looks like to be the world’s true Lord.

And in that we see just how different the values of God’s kingdom are from the values of the present age.  When Paul wrote that Jesus is Lord and when the first Christians proclaimed in faith that Jesus is Lord, they were making an incredibly subversive statement.  It was supposed to be “Caesar is Lord”.  It was the Emperor Augustus who had finally ended the long Roman civil war.  It was Augustus who had brought peace and stability to the empire.  It was Augustus who was declared to be son of the divine Julius Caesar whom people claimed they saw ascending into heaven in the comet that appeared shortly after his death.  It was August who had brought peace and unity to the empire with his mighty sword.  “Caesar is Lord” was the Roman pledge of allegiance.

But this had been and has always been the way of the world.  The kings of Babylon and of Egypt forged their empires by brute force and declared themselves to be gods.  When Europe became Christian emperors couldn’t declare themselves to be gods anymore, but that didn’t matter—they just claimed divine right.  It was the next best thing.  And things haven’t changed very much.  We still have presidents and prime ministers and kings and their supporters making claims of divine right—or at least divine providence.  People still look to their political leaders today much as the Romans looked to theirs.  We look to political saviours.  We praise strongmen who promise to make everything better, even if they have to do it through force.  “Caesar is Lord” has always been the gospel, the good news, of the world and of the present age.

And this is why what Paul tells us, this is why that proclamation by the first Christians that Jesus is Lord, is so subversive and so world-changing.  Jesus was vindicated in his resurrection.  When Jesus rose from the dead he did so as proof that he truly is Israel’s Messiah, that he truly is God’s King, that he truly is Creation’s Lord.  Caesar, Herod, Alexander, Cyrus—all those great emperors honoured by the world—are pretenders.  It’s been our problem from the beginning.  Adam wasn’t satisfied.  He had to be his own lord and so he swallowed the serpent’s lie and ate the fruit and ever since, humanity has been in this rebellious struggle to assert our sovereignty against the sovereignty of God.  We’ve struggled ever since to become our own lords.  But in Jesus, Creation’s true Lord came into the world and in Jesus we see what true lordship looks like.  Not like Caesar or Alexander—just the opposite.

In Mark 10 Jesus said to his disciples:

You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.  For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:42-45)

Jesus turns everything upside down.  And in the Epistle Paul expresses it in a song or a hymn.  In most of your Bibles you probably see verses 6-11 formatted as poetry.  The general consensus is that this was an early Christian hymn that Paul borrowed to make his point.  These words are a statement of the core of our faith as Christians.  They remind us that while we may have libraries full of theology books on all sorts of subjects, all of it comes back to Jesus at its centre and here Paul gives us the main, the key points of who Jesus is and what he’s about.

And the key point this hymn makes has to do with the nature of true divinity.  Jesus is God, for all eternity—infinitely into the past and infinitely into the future.  He stands on equal footing with God, with his Father.  He is the eternal Word.  He was the agent of creation itself.  In the beginning, God spoke and creation came into being.  However that works—and I don’t think that’s something we can even begin to fathom—the Divine Word was the agent.  And yet when his creation rebelled and when his creation condemned itself to death, God didn’t wipe it away and start over.  In his love for us he instead sought to redeem and to renew.  And so the Divine Word, the agent of creation, became incarnate.  The Divine Word took our flesh upon himself—he became one of us—the agent of creation become also the agent of re-creation.

The hymn says that the Word did not count his divinity something to be grasped at, but instead emptied himself.  Two things here.  First, the Greek word there we read as “grasped” has the sense of exploitation.  It wasn’t that the Word was grasping at something that didn’t really belong to him.  It’s that eternal glory and honour are his by his very nature as God.  In contrast think again of the kings and powerful men of the earth.  Some are born to it and other earn it and some take it by force, but one of the most common themes of history is men grasping and exploiting positions of glory and honour for their own benefit.  Jesus had this—and not just this, but something far greater—he had it by his very nature and he chose not to exploit it for his own benefit.  Instead—and this is the the second point—he emptied himself, as the hymn says.

This does not mean that in the Incarnation the Word ceased to be divine or stopped being God.  This is one of the oldest heresies we know.  It’s still around today.  No.  In the Incarnation the eternal and divine Word of God—the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and the agent of Creation—joined his divinity to our human flesh.  Jesus of Nazareth is both fully God and fully human.  The Incarnation wasn’t a temporary thing for Jesus.  The Incarnation, this choice by the Divine Word to take on human flesh, is permanent and for all eternity.  Because of the Incarnation, Jesus is forever one of us and one with us in our nature.  We enjoy stories of kings who disguise themselves to go out amongst their people, but that sort of thing is always temporary.  Jesus did it for all time.  And in that we see not a failure of divinity, but the very nature of true divinity.

In the Incarnation and in the cross, God shows us his commitment to us and his love for us.  In 2 Corinthians Paul says that in Jesus God was reconciling the world to himself.  So rather than exploit his divinity, rather than watch as we his creations consign ourselves to death, he became one of us in this amazing plan of re-creation and renewal.  He humbled himself, becoming one of us.  But there was more to it than simply joining our humanity to his divinity.  As if that weren’t humbling enough, he also humbled himself in his rejection by the people he already knew to be rebels.  He humbled himself as he was mocked, spit upon, beaten, and crucified.  Brothers and Sisters, if you want to understand the nature of God, look to the cross, look to Jesus and see in him God giving himself in sacrificial love for rebellious sinners, for his enemies, for you and for me.

Jesus was despised and rejected.  Even today he continues to be despised and rejected.  People don’t want that kind of God, whether it’s because they can’t wrap their heads around a God who would do such a thing or because they simply refuse to acknowledge that another has sovereignty over them.  But, the hymn says, because Jesus has humbled himself, because he has done these things, because he has reconciled creation to God, he is highly exalted.  In his resurrection and in his ascension he was vindicated before the eyes of the world.  And the hymn acknowledges that one day all of Creation will bow before him and acknowledge that Jesus truly is Lord and that in this the Father will be glorified.

That’s truly amazing when you think about it.  God doesn’t need to be glorified.  He has all glory and honour by right of his very nature.  And yet in humility—and not humility for the sake of humility, but in a humility expressed for the sake of the love of his creation and his people—God finds the greatest glory of all.  God is glorified through the cross, through the death of his Son, Jesus, because there at the cross we see his true nature—not an angry or sadistic God arbitrarily crushing his own Son, but in a God who loves us so much that he is willing to sacrifice his very self to restore his enemies to his fellowship and friendship—so that we rebellious sinners, dead in our trespasses can be restored to life in the presence of our Creator; so that through Jesus we can be restored to our place as God’s sons and daughters.

Brothers and Sisters, this is the mind we are to have amongst ourselves.  This is what brings unity as we live in humble love with each other and as we humbly serve the world around us.  Again, true unity doesn’t happen for the sake of unity alone.  True unity comes as we each live with Jesus as the centre of our life, as we set aside everything that is not Jesus and commit ourselves in trusting faith to follow the one who is honoured as Lord because of his humility, because of his sacrifice, because of his love for his enemies.  How do we live less for self and more for others?  How do we learn to be less prideful and more humble?  How do we cultivate a life of service when most of the time we want to be served?  How do we learn to forgive when we’d rather hold a grudge?  We do it as we exercise our faith in Jesus, setting aside everything else and finding our life and our security and our being in him and him alone.  We do it as we ponder and mediate on Jesus and on his life and ministry and especially on his sacrifice for us. This is the mind of Christ and it belongs to us, because we belong to him.

Let us pray: Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for mankind you sent your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility:  Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

Greater and More Perfect

Hebrews 9:11-15

by William Klock

This is my dad’s old lantern.  We used it on camping trips when I was growing up.  It was the start of my collection.  I always thought it was eye-blindingly bright.  As I got into collecting, people told me I needed to get my hands on some of the newer Canadian-made models.  They’re so much brighter, they said.  I had trouble believing that.  This thing is really bright, I thought.  Plus, it has two mantles and those Canadian models from the 70s and 80s only have one.  How could they possibly be brighter?  That, and when I started, I didn’t want to collect anything younger than I am, so that ruled out those newer models.

Well, fast-forward a few years and I’ve now got several of those newer models—like this one here.  I was sceptical that it could be that much brighter.  Take a look and you’ll see, it only has one mantle.  And so I was surprised.  That old lantern was blindly-bright, but this guy’s so bright it’ll scorch your retinas.  One guy I know took a dozen or more lanterns on a camping trip.  The first night he had ten lanterns burning and the ranger stopped by his site to say that people were complaining about all the light.  He needed limit it to two lanterns.  So my friend shut them all off and brought out two of these.  Half an hour later the ranger came back and said, “Okay…you can light two…but not two of those.  The technology changed.  The old one works on the same design that Coleman had been using since turn of the century.  The new one burns the same fuel, operates on the same principles, but it’s got a better fuel-delivery system and even though it only has one mantle instead of two, that mantle is bigger and that makes all the difference.  The candle-power rating on the newer model is almost twice that of the older one.  Now, I may still use the older one sometimes for nostalgic reasons—it’s what I grew up with—but if my goal is to light up a campsite in the dark, I’d be stupid not to use the newer one.

I say this by way of introduction to our Epistle from Hebrews this morning.  We don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews, but we do know that it was written to Hebrew (Jewish) Christians in part to explain to them and to assure them that the new covenant established by Jesus—while it has continuity with the old covenant—is nevertheless better.  I haven’t had a chance to listen to what Bp. Dorrington preached last week when I was away, but the Epistle was from Galatians and, if you remember, it highlighted just how tempting it was for Jewish Christians to fall back into the old way—the old covenant way—of doing things.  Some of this was that it was simply the life they knew.  When they became Christians they didn’t stop being Jewish.  But there were also Gentiles now coming into this movement of Jesus-followers.  The unbelieving Jews didn’t like that.  As far as they were concerned Gentiles were unclean.  And so these Jewish Christians were shunned by their friends and family and even kicked out of their synagogues for associating with Gentiles.  It got worse as the Jews began to actively persecute the Church.  Jesus had given these new Jewish believers so much more than they’d had in the old covenant, but it was easy to think only about living for the day.  For Jewish Christians it was tempting and it would have been easy to simply drift away from the Church and fall back into old covenant Judaism.  And so the writer of Hebrew urges them not to do that.  Despite the persecution, what they have now in Jesus is so much better than what they had before.  The old covenant gave a promise of a new world and a new life in the Messiah.  In Jesus, the Messiah has finally come and he’s fulfilled that old promise.  He’s inaugurated the new world and the new life.  In Jesus we take part in the fulfilment of God’s promises and that’s worth it, no matter the cost.

To make his point the writer of Hebrews takes his readers back to the tabernacle—that was the tent that the Israelites built in the wilderness, the precursor to the temple in Jerusalem.  Look at Hebrews 9:11-14.

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.  For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

The writer here talks about tents and holy places.  It might be a little foreign to us, but think back to the book of Exodus.  The Lord rescued his people from their bondage in Egypt and at Mt. Sinai, in the wilderness, he gave him the law, written on stone tablets.  At the same time he also gave Moses very detailed instructions for building the tabernacle—the tent complex where the people would worship the Lord and present their offerings and sacrifices.

That tent, the tabernacle, was built to mimic the garden and Eden as they’re presented in the first chapters of Genesis.  The imagery used to decorate the tabernacle was meant to invoke the idea of a garden.  At the core of the tabernacle, as you progressed from the camp of the Israelites into the outer court of the tabernacle and then into the centre of it was the holy place, where only the priests went, and then beyond that was the holy of holies or most holy place.  That was where the ark of the covenant was kept.  It was essentially God’s throne room.  That was where the cloud representing the glory of the Lord rested—God in the midst of his people.  But no one was permitted into the most holy place.  Sin and uncleanness cannot enter the presence of the Lord.  Only once a year did the high priest enter the Lord’s presence to offer expiation for the sins of the people.

No sinner may enter the presence of our holy God.  This is why Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden.  But there in the wilderness, as God’s plan of redemption began to move forward, he instructed his people to build this tabernacle so that they could once again know him, so that they could live with him in their midst.  It was a partial undoing of the consequences of sin.  Adam and Eve had once lived in the most holy place, in God’s presence.  That’s what Eden was about.  They were to live and to serve in God’s presence, cultivating his garden.  And as they were fruitful and multiplied, the garden, that holy place would grow—until it fill the whole earth.  Because of their rebellion, Adam and Eve were driven out from God’s presence.  But in the wilderness the Lord helped Israel to build a model of that most holy place, he took up his residence in it, and he gave the people a law by which they could live on the periphery of that manifestation of his glory.  No, they couldn’t enter directly into his presence, but whereas Adam and Eve were driven away, in the tabernacle, the Lord now drew his people near.  It was the beginning of something good.  The tabernacle, the law, the whole old covenant were good things.  They reminded God’s people of his promise to one day set all of creation to rights and to restore his people fully to his presence.

The problem for Israel was that in the day-in and day-out activity of living around the tabernacle, of living the law, and of routinely making sacrifices and offerings, it became very easy to forget that all of this pointed to a greater reality and a greater fulfilment.  These things were dim shadows of a much greater reality.  The tabernacle, the sacrifice, the law were never meant to be a permanent arrangement.  The point was never for God’s people merely to camp out around the place of his presence, merely to be able to get close to the Holy of Holies.  The point or the goal was to return to Eden itself, to return to a life in the presence of the Lord.  God and humanity brought back together; Heaven and earth rejoined.  As Christians we’re, too, often guilty of forgetting God’s end goal.  We come to the Lord’s Table on Sundays, we gather with our brothers and sisters for worship, and we make it very routine and hum-drum, forgetting that what we have here is a down-payment on the full inheritance that Jesus will be bringing with him when he returns—of resurrection and new life and of living fully in the presence of the Father.

This is what the writer of Hebrews is getting at when he talks about Jesus as our great high priest of the good things to come.  The tabernacle was a good thing, but it pointed to better things, just as the Lord’s Supper is a good thing, but points to something even better.  And Hebrews says, as our high priest, Jesus entered not in to the most holy place of the tabernacle.  No.  At the cross Jesus entered into the true, the real holy of holies—the one of which the holy of holies in the tabernacle was only a representation and only a shadow.  In his death, Jesus entered the real, the actual presence of his Father.  The good news is that because Jesus has entered the Father’s presence as our great high priest, since he has made purification for us, we’re now ourselves welcomed into the Father’s presence as well.

Again, in the face of hostility and persecution, many Jewish Christians were tempted to simply go back to the old way of doing things.  In their day the temple, the great building of stone on the mountain above Jerusalem, had replaced the tabernacle, but it was laid out on the same plan and served the same purpose.  The temple and the sacrifices were good things.  Why not just do things the old way?  The Lord had commanded them, after all.  Why risk persecution by joining with Gentiles to worship Jesus?  And so Hebrews reminds them: as good as the temple was, Jesus went to the real place the temple represents.  The temple was a model that pointed to the heavenly reality.  When Jesus takes us into the heavenly reality, how can we possibly justify going back to the model?

Jesus as our great high priest entering the most holy place naturally leads us to the second point Hebrews makes here about the new covenant and how it’s better than the old.  The priests of the old covenant entered the most holy place of the tabernacle once every year.  We’re told here that Jesus entered once and for all time.  The old sacrifices were good until the next time you sinned.  The sacrifice that Jesus made at the Cross is good for eternity.  Why?  Because when the old priests went into the holy of holies they took with them the blood of goats and calves.  Jesus entered the presence of the Father with his own blood.

This was hard for many Jews to understand.  The closest the Old Testament ever got to human sacrifice was in the story of Abraham following the Lord’s command to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on Mt. Moriah.  But, of course, the whole point of that story is that the Lord stopped Abraham from following through with the sacrifice and instead provided a ram as an alternative.  (Hebrews picks this up later, because it points to what Jesus has done for us.)  The prophet Isaiah wrote about the Suffering Servant sacrificing his life, but no one really ever understood it as pointing to the Messiah giving his life for the people.  Animals were for sacrifices, not people.  The other difficult thing was that no one ever imagined that the priest would himself become the sacrifice.  This is why the people had such a hard time accepting Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah.

But that doesn’t mean this wasn’t all there in the Old Testament.  The writer of Hebrews gets at three aspects of sacrifice in the Old Testament that actually do point to Jesus and what he did for us:

First, the whole point of the old covenant sacrifices was that the people gave up something valuable as a sign of their commitment to the Lord and their trust in him.  We see this throughout the law.  We see it in the Sabbath.  Other peoples worked seven days a week to survive, but the Lord promised to take care of his people and commanded that they take off one day a week.  Not only was it a day of needed rest for them, but it was a potentially costly act of faith in which they expressed their trust in the God who had promised to care for them.  In the wilderness they collected manna six days a week.  If they tried to keep it overnight it spoiled.  Except on the sixth day.  Each Friday they collected twice as much manna and somehow it remained unspoiled as food for the Sabbath.  Any other day of the week it didn’t work, but the Lord did something miraculous to teach the people a point: he would care for them and they needed to trust him.  Whenever someone feared he wouldn’t be able to make ends meet if he took that one day off each week, there was that reminder in Israel’s story.  If God provided the extra manna for the Sabbath, somehow he’ll do the same today if we will only honour and obey him.  The same went for the tithe.  Other people held on tightly to every penny they earned, some out of greed and some out of desperate necessity, but the Lord reminded his people that it all came from him originally and that as a sign of their trust in him they were to give ten per cent back.  Somehow he’d help them to live on the remaining ninety—even the poorest people.  And he took care of them.  They learned to trust in the Lord.  But the animals sacrificed for the people in the temple took things a step further.  They reminded the people of the cost of sin.  Because of their sin, Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden, cut off from the tree of life.  Brothers and Sisters, sin puts us outside the presence of our holy God. Sin separates us from the source of life.  Sinners die.  The only way back into the presence of our holy God is by the shedding of blood.  And that’s the second point made about sacrifice here.  Redemption from sin requires the death of another in our place.  The animals sacrificed in the temple were costly sacrifices, but they were also imperfect sacrifices.  They were dumb and unwilling.  They served only until the next sin was committed.  And they brought the people only into the tabernacle or the temple.  For the people to be truly cleansed from sin, for the people to enter into the Holy of Holies would require an even costlier sacrifice.

Even though many of the people failed to think beyond the surface meaning of these sacrifices—just as many of us fail to see past the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper to the things they represent—those sacrifices pointed to Jesus.  In Jesus, God himself took up our flesh—he became one of us, he identified himself with us and became our representative.  He became like a second Adam.  And so Jesus obediently and willingly gave his life for us.  He was the costly sacrifice—the spotless lamb, the best of the flock.  As our representative, he took on himself the death that we deserve.  This is why we can say, as we do in the Lord’s Supper, that by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world has been made.  This is why we can pray that by his flesh and by his blood our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood.  The blood of animal sacrifices gave a superficial cleanness to people who had been defiled by their sin, but Jesus’ blood doesn’t just make us superficially clean.  It purifies us from the inside out.  And so we can also pray that as his body and blood make us clean, we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.  By his blood we can finally enter the Holy of Holies, we can finally be restored to the presence of our holy Creator.

And that gets at the third point made here—the third way in which Jesus’ sacrifice is better than the old sacrifices and the new covenant is better than the old.  The sacrifices of the old covenant were shadows pointing to the real sacrifice.  The holy of holies in the temple was a shadow of the real holy of holies, not just the heavenly presence of the Father, but it looked forward to the day when Creation will finally be set to rights, when heaven and earth will finally be joined together and humanity can once again live in God’s presence, just as Adam and Eve did before they sinned.  The cleanness and atonement offered by those old sacrifices was a shadow of the atonement and the cleanness offered by Jesus.  Jesus didn’t just enter the central room of the temple in Jerusalem to offer the blood of an animal on our behalf.  Jesus, who is both God himself and our perfect human representative, entered into the actual presence of his Father with his own blood shed at the cross.  In doing that he offers a sacrifice that washes us clean from sin to the very core of our being.

Somehow the perfect sacrifice of Jesus, Hebrews says, purifies our conscience from dead works so that we can serve the living God.  Through Jesus we are transformed.  Chapter 6 introduced this language of “dead works”, but it refers to our repentance from our old pagan and sinful ways and also, for the Jewish Christians, from the obligations of the old covenant and its temple and sacrificial system.  As good as those things were, as God-given as they were, Jesus now offers something better.  Jesus’ sacrifice undoes our sin once and for all.  Through him we have access to the presence of God.  What we lost when Adam sinned we now have back—or at least we have the down payment of it and hope for its fullness in the future.  Jesus washes us clean with his blood and having purified us for the presence of God, he makes us his dwelling place, his tabernacle, as he fills us with the Holy Spirit.  And the Spirit then sanctifies our hearts and our minds, making them holy again so that we can serve the living God just as Adam did in the garden.  Jesus, by his sacrifice, not only leads us into the holy of holies to know God’s presence, but in giving us the Spirit he also makes us—you and me and, collectively his Church—the holy of holies: God’s presence in us.

Verse 15 stresses again that this is all and only through Jesus:

Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant.

Jesus is the mediator.  There’s no other way.  Even the old way—the way of the tabernacle and the sacrifices—that God once gave is now defunct.  It’s been fulfilled.  The thing to which it pointed, the thing for which it was preparing the people, the new thing has finally come in Jesus.

Imagine a frozen river.  The first time Veronica and I went to Montréal the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers were frozen.  We were driving across the bridge from the west end of the island where the two rivers meet and we saw a Jeep cruising over the ice back towards Montréal.  The ice was that thick.  You can do that in the middle of a cold Québec winter, but when Spring comes the bridge is the only way across.  Try driving your car on thin ice—or try driving on water—and you’ll die.

In Jesus, Spring has come to the world.  In Jesus a bridge has been provided across the water.  The law was perfectly good in its time, just as the ice was safe to drive on if you wanted to cross the river in January, but the time has passed for that.  If you want to cross the river now the bridge Jesus provides is the only way.  Hebrews was written to people who feared persecution for following Jesus.  They were accustomed to driving on the ice and despite the fact that it was now melting and thin, they were still tempted to keep driving on it.  Last week in our Epistle from Galatians we read about the Judaisers.  They were insisting that to follow Jesus the Gentiles had to be circumcised, follow the right dietary rules, and observe the Sabbath.  They still said they were following Jesus, but it doesn’t work that way.  That’s like telling everyone how perfectly good the bridge is while trying to drive your car across the thawing river.  The ice is melting.  The time for those old ways has passed.  Jesus offers something better and his way is now the only way.

Brothers and Sisters, do our lives demonstrate faith in Jesus as our sole mediator?  While you and I may not be tempted to go back to the law or the temple or the old covenant sacrifices, we have our own pasts to which we often hold more tightly than we may realise.  We profess faith in Jesus, but we still haven’t repented of all of our old loyalties, all of our old ways of doing things, all of our old sources of security.  We profess Jesus, but we still find satisfaction in sin and in self.  We say we trust Jesus, but we still look for security in work and in money.  We say we trust Jesus, but we often evaluate ourselves not based on what he has done for us, but on what we think we’ve done for him.  Friends, it’s like giving people directions to the bridge, while we ourselves are sitting in our cars with the engine running, nosing our wheels into the water and thinking we’ll somehow get across the river.  Lent is a time for us to look around, to take stock, and to evaluate our situation.  Easter is only two weeks away.  It’s a reminder that in Jesus Spring has arrived.  The river isn’t frozen anymore.  We need to let go of the old ways of life and follow Jesus across the bridge. Yes, to follow Jesus means challenge and sacrifice, but Jesus is better in every way.  He and he alone has redeemed up from death to serve the living God.

Let us pray: Gracious Father, we thank you this morning for the sacrifice you have made in the death of your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ.  In Jesus the price of our sin has been paid once and for all.  By his blood we are washed clean through and through.  Strengthen our faith, Father, that we might trust fully in Jesus as our only mediator.  Open our eyes to the areas of life in which we’ve failed to repent, and give us the faith to entrust those things to you.  We ask this through him, our Saviour and Lord.  Amen.