Body and Blood

Lenten Vespers, Week Five

Reading: John 6:51-58

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Last week we spoke of Baptism, of the promises of God made thick, made tangible, in water and the Word. Tonight we conclude our Lenten reflections on the Small Catechism by speaking of perhaps the one thing humbler even than a bath: and that is a simple Meal of bread and wine.

This Meal goes by many names: Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, the Sacrament of the Altar. But it is best to speak of this Meal, I think, in terms of the Passover, for indeed that’s what the Eucharist is. It is the Christian Passover. The Eucharist is an ancient promise—the old, old story—fulfilled and made new in the Crucifixion and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Four thousand years ago, God made to our ancestor Abraham a promise. God promised that He would make of Abraham a great nation, and that through this nation He would then bless all the families of the earth. The Old Testament is the story of God fulfilling the first half of that promise; the New Testament is the story of how God fulfills the second half. In the Old Testament, God indeed makes of Abraham and Sarah a family, and of that family a people, and of that people a nation.

When that nation, Israel, falls into bondage, God sends Moses to lead His chosen people out from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land. The story of this liberation is the Exodus, the great leading-out. And the people of Israel to this day commemorate the Exodus in an annual meal called Passover. At Passover, meal and story merge, so that the food and drink shared bring to life God’s mighty acts of power and mercy and liberation.

Lamb is served, to recall that the Israelites painted the posts and lintels of their doorways with lamb’s blood to mark their inclusion into the people of God. Flatbread is broken, representing the speed of their liberation, so quick that bread had not time to rise. Four cups of wine are poured, a celebration of freedom’s joys. And this Passover meal has been shared, and this Passover story has been told, every single spring all over the world for nearly three-and-a-half thousand years.

But the Passover isn’t simply the story of something that God did for our great-great-great-great-grandparents thousands of years past. It’s not a reenactment of promises made long ago and far away to people who are all dead now. No. Rather, whenever the Passover meal is shared, the story told, the promises reaffirmed, all of those present are united in a mystical and religious manner to the original event—the original Passover meal during the Exodus. And so the promises made by God to our ancestors are made new, made real, in every generation. Everyone who shares the Passover is there with Moses, there at the Red Sea, there in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land. There are not many Passover meals but one Passover to which all return.

But that’s the Old Testament Passover. We’re here to talk about the New.

In the night in which He was betrayed, our Lord shared a Passover meal with His Apostles. And they broke the flatbread, and they poured the wine, and they told the old, old story as they had every single year since the time of Moses some 14 centuries before. But this time, Jesus did something new. This time, Jesus changed the script. He took the bread and said that from now on, this bread was His Body, and this wine His Blood. He Himself was to be our Paschal Lamb whose Blood marks us as God’s own. And the Passover, from this point forward, was to commemorate not one people’s Exodus from slavery to freedom, but Jesus’ liberation of all peoples from slavery to sin, death, and the devil.

This was the New Covenant prophesied of old. This was the fulfillment of the second half of God’s promise to Abraham. Through Jesus Christ, all the families of the earth are blessed; through Jesus Christ, all peoples are forgiven and redeemed; through Jesus Christ, the whole world is at last set right. And when we join in this holy Meal, this New Passover, we are united with all God’s people throughout every time and place; united to that Last Supper so long ago when Jesus poured out His Life for the salvation of the world. We are there with Jesus as He gives to us a New Commandment, and dies upon the Cross at our hands and for our sake.

But beyond even this, the Eucharist grants to us a foretaste of the feast to come: the eternal Wedding Feast of the Lamb at the end of the age, when Christ shall dry every tear and heal every wound and God at last will be all in all. When we take this small wafer and tiny sip of wine into our bodies, we are taking into us the very promise of God made real, made tangible. We consume nothing less than the Body and Blood of our Lord, as He promised when He proclaimed without equivocation, “This is My Body,” “This is My Blood,” “Do this for the remembrance of Me.”

And even as we consume Him, so are we consumed by Him. In Baptism we are given Jesus’ own Holy Spirit dwelling within us. In Communion we are given His own Body and Blood to bring us eternal life. And if we have the Spirit of Jesus, the Body of Jesus, the Blood of Jesus—who does that make us? It makes us Jesus! So that when God the Father looks at us, sinners though we are, He sees none other than His own beloved Son. We are Jesus’ Body still at work in this world, still healing through two billion pairs of hands, still forgiving through two billion confessing tongues.

What a wonder, what a promise, what a miracle is here revealed! Truly this is the central Sacrament, the great and holy Mystery of the Church! Forgiven, redeemed, resurrected, we are sent out from this Table to be Jesus for the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.