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Christ our passover8th Sunday after Pentecost, Geneva, August 7 2011

Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast1 Cor 5.7

Rev. Praic Ramonn

Why is this day different from all other days? And how many of us, I wonder,when we come to communion think about the Israelites in Egypt making brickswithout straw?

Not many, I suspect. Yet perhaps we should.

Last Sunday, I preached on Romans 9 and spoke in an inclusive fashion about

the church as Gods chosen people. Next Sunday, I shall preach on Romans 11and about the dreadful things that happen when Christians or Jews understandthemselves in exclusive ways. But this Sunday I want to do something different,something we dont do often enough: I want to preach about the sacrament.

Once a year, Jews all over the world or at least, religiously minded Jews think about the Israelites in Egypt. They gather in their homes and celebratepassover. The youngest child in the home asks Why is this night different fromall other nights?, and the story is told once more of how the Israelites wereslaves in Egypt but God led them out into freedom.

The passover meal is full of symbolism. Bitter herbs, to symbolize the bitternessof slavery. Haroset, a mixture of chopped nuts, apples and wine, to symbolizethe mortar with which the Israelites built monuments for Pharaoh. Unleavenedbread, because they left in such haste they had no time to make bread withyeast.

At the centre of the meal, there is the passover lamb roast lamb that remindsthose present of the night when God visited the last of the ten plagues on thehouse of Egypt but passed over the houses of the Israelites because they weremarked with the blood of the lamb.

And four cups of wine, one for each of the four words the Hebrew scriptures usefor redemption:

I am the LORD, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliveryou from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and withmighty acts of judgement. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God.(Ex 6.6-7)

Touchingly, as each of the ten plagues is named, a little wine is spilt from thecups. It is forbidden to drink the full cup of joy, because the Egyptians who diedin the course of the exodus are also Gods children.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because this is the night onwhich observant Jews celebrate the liberation of Gods people, not just to

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remember something that happened in the past but to become part of thisliberation in the present: to be Gods people, here and now.

Michael Lotker puts it like this: We are instructed to imagine and feel as thougheach of us were slaves in Egypt and we ourselves were freed. The exodus is

the central event in our salvation history and a key metaphor for deliverancefrom all that enslaves us.

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Christ is ourpassover lamb.

In contemporary religious discussion, supersessionism the idea that the churchsupersedes Israel - is a boo word. In its alter ego, replacement theology theidea that the church replaces Israel it is, as I suggested last Sunday and shallsuggest again next week just plain wrong. The church does not replace Israel:

it is Israel, renewed and transformed.

But we deceive ourselves if we do not notice that there is a supersessionistthrust at the heart of the faith of Israel itself, a thrust that comes above all fromthe experience of exile.

When we think about the Bible, if we do, we think above all, I suspect, about theexodus and about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Theseare the foundation miracles (RH Fuller) of the people of God, of the oldcovenant and the new.

But it is the experience of exile that leads the Hebrew scriptures to foregroundthe story of the exodus, and it is the experience of exile that leads Jesus ofNazareth to understand his life and work in the ways he does.

So what is this exile? Almost six hundred years before the birth of Jesus, theBabylonian empire the worlds only superpower of that day descended on thepeople of Judah and carried their leaders and great men into captivity inBabylon. Eventually, Babylon fell to another power the power of Persia, ormodern-day Iran and Cyrus the Persian allowed captive Israel to return home.But in Jesus day, many pious Jews felt the exile hadnt really ended, and heagreed with them.

The prophets of Israel and Judah saw exile as Gods punishment for sin, Godsjudgement on his people because of their failure to keep the covenant God hadmade with them.

They made their point in many and various ways.

Gods law, given on Mount Sinai, was good; but the people, and especially theirrulers, werent keeping it. The books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel looked forward to atime when God would go one better: instead of just telling the people what thelaw was, God would write it on their hearts. God would take away their hearts ofstone and give them hearts of flesh.

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The kings of Israel and Judah were at best ambiguous and at worst a bad lot.When the people of Israel first asked for a king, so they could be like all thesurrounding nations, Samuel told them the king would oppress and exploit them,

just like all the surrounding kings. Jeremiah was not so categorical: he held thatthe task of the king, the kings job description, was to do what is just and right,

and he contrasted bad king Jehoiakim with his father Josiah for buildingexpensive palaces instead an early but not untypical example of theconspicuous consumption of the rich.

Many prophets looked forward to the coming of a righteous king, a king whouncharacteristically would do what God required. And the way you became aking was to be anointed with oil, as Samuel anointed Saul and afterwards David.The king was Gods anointed servant, Gods messiah.

You can see where Im going with this.

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As John puts it in the hymn of praise with which he opens his gospel, the lawwas given through Moses (and the law was good); but grace and truth camethrough Jesus the Messiah (John 1.17).

Jesus is the Messiah not because he overcomes the superpower of his own dayand throws the Romans out of Palestine, as many of his contemporariesexpected. For Jesus, the Roman empire is just the most conspicuous symptom ofa world given over to malice and wickedness; and the way to overcome thisworld, paradoxically, is not the way of power but the way of weakness. Christ

overcomes the world, not by using the weapons of power, but by using the oneweapon that can overcome the powers, the weapon of vulnerable love.

And that is what we remember and celebrate and become part of in thissacrament, not as something that happened once and now happens no more,but as something that continues to happen as the risen Christ journeys with usthrough our history and calls us to share in that vulnerable love: to be Godspeople, here and now.

Paul in Romans, especially in the section just before passage we read thismorning, does what the whole New Testament does, and what we in turn mustdo. He retells the story of Israel, from Abraham to the Messiah, to show that

Gods purpose in having a chosen people... was that they should be the placeand the means whereby all the sin and sorrow of the world is brought to a head,so that the world may be saved. And this is the role and destiny of the Messiah.(NT Wright)

Christ, crucified and risen, is the end of the law, the goal of the law, so thatcovenant membership may be extended to all who believe (Rom 10.4).

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Why is this day different from all other days? Because this is the Lords day, onwhich we celebrate his supper.

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The Lords supper is mysterious, because it draws us deeper into the mystery wecall God; but it is not magic. There is nothing magical about the bread we eatand the wine we drink, any more than there is about the water we pour inbaptism. Thats not how sacraments work.

If I may put it crudely and telegrammatically, this is how this sacrament works:

We call it the Lords supper because it is, precisely, his. I may stand up here inmy fancy robes and you may sit down there; I may say most of the prayer ofthanksgiving over the bread and wine, with you joining in just for a little bit; butit is the risen Christ who presides at this feast.

George Wallace Briggs says this right in a communion hymn in CH3, curiouslyomitted from CH4. Its a hymn based on the story of the two disciples probablyman and wife on their way to Emmaus on the evening of the first Easter,although written with a hindsight the two disciples on the way do not yet

possess:

Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest;Nay, let us be thy guests; the feast is thine...

This is my body: so thou givest yet;Faith still receives the cup as from thy hand...

Then open thou our eyes, that we may see;Be known to us in breaking of the bread.

What were the compilers of CH4 thinking when they left this out? Its an obviouschoice for communion, especially in those years when we read through Luke.

But if it is Christ who breaks bread with us and offers us the cup, it is the Spiritof Christ, the Spirit of God, that makes these gifts effective.

For our whole lives as Christians, from beginning to end, are suspended on thegrace of God dependent, from beginning to end, on the love of God pouredinto our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Rom 5.5).

And it is the Spirit that takes these elements of bread and wine, offered to us bythe risen Christ, and makes them food for our Christian journey, a journey thatbegins with the exile of sin and death and ends with the kingdom of God akingdom that comes, once for all, when Gods will is done on an earth renewedand transformed as it is, from all eternity, in heaven.

Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not withold leaven, the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened breadof sincerity and truth. (1 Cor 5.7-8)

Sources

Michael Lotker,A Christians Guide to Judaism (New York: Paulist Press, 2004)NT Wright, Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A(London: SPCK, 2001), p.94.