The Lamb who Comes

Preached at Croydon Minster on Maundy Thursday: Exodus 12.1-4, 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11.23-26; John 13.1-17,31b-35

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (John 13.1)

 

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The Christian Gospel is a proclamation, that is to be lived out day by day, of liberation from all that enslaves, obscures our vision and restricts our lives.

 

The purpose of this Gospel is that we are free to gain clarity of sight and to be alive to the ways and purposes of God so that, in Christ, we are delivered into the very heart of God.

 

That is the golden thread that runs through, and holds together, tonight, Good Friday and Easter.

 

This is the Passover of the Lord; the Paschal Mystery.

 

To this day – in fact this week - God’s first-chosen people the Jews, annually celebrate Pesach - the Passover. They celebrate Israel’s long, hard liberation from Egypt, with its false starts and trials, its bitter herbs and laments, as a pattern of all liberation and God’s enduring relationship with them through the observance of Torah.

 

For Christians we find that the symbols and promise of the Passover is fulfilled and made known in Christ, who now opens to all nations what Israel has already tasted and anticipates.

 

This we taste and see as we celebrate the Eucharist. This was handed on to St Paul and it is handed on in turn to us.

 

The Eucharist has echoes of Passover: unleavened bread; wine; remembrance; blood; accounts of God’s liberating love in the scriptures.

 

The one thing apparently missing is a Passover lamb. In Genesis Isaac asks Abraham, ‘where is the lamb for the sacrifice?’ To which Abraham replies, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the sacrifice, my son’ (Genesis 22.7,8).

 

God has provided. As John the Baptist declares on seeing Jesus: ‘Behold, look, see: the Lamb of God’ (John 1.29).

 

In the scriptures the Lamb is the sacrificial offering which makes right Israel’s relationship with God. In the Eucharist, given to us by Christ at the Last Supper – on the night that he was betrayed – he takes the place of the Lamb: he is the victim and he is the priest who makes the offering.

 

The whole cosmos, the created order, our lives: all is God’s gift, God’s offering. In Christ, God is the offerer and the offering.

 

This cosmic reality has a divine and human face. It is the face of the kneeling Jesus who looks up from the feet of his disciples into their eyes and says, you can have no part in me, no part in my mission and life, if you do not let me serve you.

 

What an extraordinary thing! Christ asks no more of the disciples than that they should allow him to serve them, so that they in turn might serve him in one another, and love as he loves us: the New Commandment.

 

As our gospel reading began:

 

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (John 13.1)

 

‘Love to the end’ is what the liberating Gospel is. Hence the traditional Maundy Thursday anthem at the washing of feet: Ubi caritas et amor Deus ibi est ‘Where charity and love is found, there is God’.

 

Christ, in the form of God and form of man, takes the form of a slave, humbles himself and is obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2.6,7,8).

 

Isaac had taken wood for the sacrifice of a Lamb; the wood of the cross is the place of sacrifice of the Lamb of God. And that sacrifice is presented to us afresh in the immediacy of broken bread and poured out wine: ‘far as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Corinthians 11.26).

 

This is the foretaste and reality of the banquet of the Lamb, around whose throne all nations gather and to whom salvation belongs. Of this Lamb we read:

 

the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd,

   and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’ (Revelation 7.17)

 

Tonight from the eyes of Peter and Judas tears of denial and betrayal will flow; tomorrow the tears of Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, will flow; on Easter morning the tears of Mary Magdalene will obscure her sight of Christ.

 

Tears are real. Just as Christ washes and wipes feet, our tears too will be wiped away, our sins will be wiped away.

 

O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world: have mercy upon us.

 

The Passover was near

First preached as a sermon at Choral Evensong for Passion Sunday (Fifth Sunday of Lent) at Croydon Minster. Luke 22.1-13.

‘Now the festival of Unleavened bread, which is called the Passover, was near.’

(Luke 22.1)

With that phrase there is a change of gear in the narrative of St Luke’s gospel, which mirrors the stage of this season of Lent that we have now reached.

We have now entered Passiontide, which moves us, as it were, from the focus of self-denial and the facing down of temptation, which is seen through the lens of Jesus’ forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, and, through the change of gear, into the impending betrayal, passion and death of Jesus Christ.

In the Slavic language there is a phrase, ‘the devil helps’. Well, the devil helps this change of gear. The adversary – Satan literally means ‘adversary’ - the Enemy of our Human Nature, as St Ignatius of Loyola calls the devil, came to Jesus in the wilderness (4.1-13), and now - for only the second time in Luke’s gospel he is named – this time as entering into Judas, surnamed Iscariot, who he reminds us, ‘was numbered among the Twelve’.

The previous change of gear happened at Caesarea Philippi when Jesus directly spoke of what awaited him as he came to Jerusalem, ‘The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised up’ (Luke 9.22).

What unfolds as the Passover draws near is precisely what Jesus anticipated and declared at Caesarea Philippi, and to which, in both St Mark’s and St Matthew’s accounts, Peter took such great exception such that he is told, ‘get thee behind me Satan’, you adversary (Mark 8.33; Matthew 16.23). When you refuse the way of the cross you are an adversary, acting contrary to the ways in which the Son of Man must reveal God’s glory.

The journey from Caesarea Philippi was a journey to Jerusalem, and along the way Jesus healed, taught and prayed and spoke repeatedly of what was to come in the Holy City, the city that kills the prophets and over which he would weep.

Now, in Jerusalem, Christ’s disciples are to be drawn more into his inner life through their participation in the Passover of Christ’s body and blood.

Yet one of them could not bear to participate in the Divine Life. Judas.

There has been a certain attempt at the rehabilitation of Judas in recent years. It is of course the case that without his betrayal the route to the saving death of Jesus would not have opened up in the way it did; in that sense Judas’ betrayal of Jesus is indispensable to our salvation.

There has been considerable analysis given to Judas’ psychological condition, and a portrayal of Judas a victim not perpetrator. It’s an old question, really. In the fifth century St Cyril of Alexandria identified two motives for Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. The first of these is ‘envy…which always leads to the guilt of murder (Homily 140), the second, which is much less weighty, is greed suggested because Judas is the keeper of the common purse and is suggested to have siphoned off the funds of the band of disciples.

In the spirit of the French-American theologian and anthropologist, René Girard, we might reflect that Judas’s motivation is around adulation and disappointment. Judas was deeply attracted to something in Jesus which he did not himself possess, and rather than wait to receive Jesus’ life in the Passover meal he sought to take away Jesus’ life through betrayal.

Christ drew others into his life; Judas drew others into his plans for death.

Even in the face of betrayal Christ resolutely faces the cross, and knows that for the meaning of the cross to be sustained throughout the ages the Eucharist, the Christian Passover, will be the vehicle for bearing and bringing the reality of Christ’s saving death to his people by drawing us into his life.

The Passover meal that Christ celebrated with his disciples is the very meal that Paul describes having handed on to him, and what is handed on in turn to us:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (1 Corinthians 11.23-26)

So the day of Passover drew near, and as we read, the day came, ‘the day of unleavened bread, on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. John the Baptist declared Jesus to be the ‘Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world’. Everything is converging such that St Paul can say: ‘Christ our Passover, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed for us: so let us celebrate the feast’ (1 Corinthians 5.7b).

But first we are drawn to the passion, the suffering that precedes resurrection: ‘So Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, “Go and prepare the Passover meal for us that we may eat it”’ (Luke 22.8). That is the commission to the Church this Easter and what begins to unfold, most intensively, next week: Holy Week.

May we now prepare for this Passiontide, for our Passover, and draw afresh from the life of Jesus Christ.