You Are Jesus Now

Lenten Vespers, Week Five

A Reading from the Small Catechism of the Rev Dr Martin Luther:

What is the Sacrament of the Altar? It is the true Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ Himself for us Christians to eat and to drink …

A person who has faith in these words, “given for you” and “shed for you for the forgiveness of sin,” is really worthy and well prepared. However, a person who does not believe these words or doubts them is unworthy and unprepared, because the words “for you” require truly believing hearts.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

For this fifth and final week of Lent, we end our catechetical instruction with the very heart of Christian faith and life, the central Mystery of the Church: the Holy Eucharist. Also known as Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or the Sacrament of the Altar, the Eucharist encapsulates and exalts the whole of Christianity in a simple sip of wine and meager morsel of bread.

Now there are many approaches one could take toward instruction in Holy Communion. Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we actually had two classes learning about the Eucharist: our First Communion class, aimed at fifth and sixth graders, and our Confirmation class, which had only the Eucharist left to cover before finishing out our curriculum for the year.

In First Communion, students gather over the course of four weeks to hear four different stories: that of the Exodus, the Passover, the Last Supper, and the Eucharist. And we try to make clear how all of these stories, spanning thousands of years, are really one and the same—that they are our story, the story of God choosing and freeing and forgiving and resurrecting each and every one of us.

In Confirmation we speak of Sacraments, the Mysteries of the Church, which are none other than the promises of God made solid, made tangible, that we might see and taste and touch and smell and hear the Word of God above us, around us, within us. Jesus Christ is God made flesh, God made visible for all the world to see. And the Holy Sacraments are the extension of that Incarnation, in and with and for us.

Last week we spoke of Baptism, and how the promise of God in Word and in water binds us to Christ’s own Crucifixion, already died for us, and to Christ’s own eternal life, already begun. Thus the Old Adam, the Old Creature, is drowned in the waters of that font—and we arise reborn with the Holy Spirit of God, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, alive and burning within us. This is our entrance into the Church, the Body of Christ.

The Holy Eucharist is also the promise of God, not here in water but in bread and in wine, in the simple things of sustenance and joy; our Daily Bread. When Jesus gathered for His Last Supper—the final Passover celebration of His mortal life—His Apostles expected, quite naturally, that they would hear the old, old story of the Exodus, of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, of their forebears’ liberation under Moses, of the Red Sea and Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments.

For indeed, they knew that Passover is a remembrance, but not in the way that we today often think of remembering. Passover isn’t simply some commemoration of something that happened in the Long Ago and Far Away. No, Passover is an anamnesis, which means that when we remember a holy event in a ritual and spiritual way, we do not simply recall or reënact that event, but actually join in the original—so that Jews who keep the Passover are there at the Exodus, there with their ancestors, there with all of God’s faithful children of every time and every place. Thus the story truly belongs not to the past alone but to each and every generation.

Yet at His Last Supper, Jesus flips the script. He changes the old, old story. He holds up the flatbread, unleavened so as to remind the people of the celerity of their liberation, and He says that from now on, this bread is His Body. And this cup of joy is His Blood. And this Meal is no longer a reaffirmation of the Old Covenant but the inauguration of the New; so that this Passover now embodies not one people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt but all peoples’ liberation from slavery to sin.

And He Himself, Jesus, shall be the Passover Lamb of God, sacrificed at our hands and for our sake, that He might trample down death by death, and deliver all of humanity, all of Creation, from bondage to the devil, the world, and the flesh.

So sacred, so holy, was the Mystery of faith, that for centuries Christians would ask the unbaptized to leave halfway through the Divine Liturgy, after the passing of the peace—so convinced were they that the magnitude of grace here imparted, God again descending to the earth, could only be understood in the experience of it. No one would dare to believe such an impossible promise of infinite mercy, save in the reception of it for ourselves. For indeed, Luther was right: that it is easier to believe to God would make bread and wine into His own true Body and Blood than it is for us to believe that God would do all of this “for you.”

In Baptism, we are given the Spirit of Christ. In the Holy Eucharist, we are given the true Body and Blood of Christ. And if we have the Spirit of Jesus, the Body of Jesus, the Blood of Jesus—what then does that make us? It makes us Jesus, with all the wonder and terror which that entails! For indeed, when God looks at us, He sees His only Son; which is to say, God’s own heart and face and Being. What God the Father is in His eternity, Jesus is in space and time. Thus we are now the Sons of God, the Daughters of God, the heirs of all God’s promises, the workers of God’s own will.

And God’s will is none other than that we go out there and be Jesus for a world still very much in need of Him: that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, teach the ignorant, rebuke the wicked, forgive the sinner, speak truth to power, and lay down our lives for the people and the world that God so achingly loves. God entrusts us with infinity, that we might infinitely give. Be Jesus for the world, my brothers and sisters, and you can never die. Be Jesus for the world, and you will raise the dead.

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