Sermon: Wittenberg Academy - Nov 12, 2024

12 Nov 2024

Text: Matt 26:1-19

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

As we approach the end of Matthew’s account of the life of our Lord, we are rapidly moving to the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  Things are coming together quickly, and in two days time, the world will be changed forever.  At this point, the only one who knows this is our Lord: “After two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.”  And as our Lord is saying this, “the chief priests and the elders… plotted together” along with Caiaphas, the corrupt high priest, “in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill Him.”  But they had to be politically sensitive, for, as Jesus said, “The Passover is coming.”

Indeed, the Passover is coming: the one final Passover to end all Passovers.  This is the one actual Passover for which the fifteen hundred or so previous Passovers were nothing more than previews or rehearsals.  “The Passover is coming,” says Jesus.  The Passover is the cross, dear friends, when the body of the sacrificial Lamb will be slain, and the people will be delivered from death by means of the protective blood poured out by God’s grace and mercy.

Some Christians want to go back to the rehearsals by having so-called “seder meals.”  It is almost pretending that Jesus hasn’t yet come.  But Jesus changed everything – and for the better.  There is no going back.  Jesus said, “The Passover is coming.”  And the Passover is the Eucharist.  Jesus is the Lamb.  The blood on the doorway leading to heaven is the blood of Jesus being poured out on the beams of the altar and doorway of the cross.  And this holy, sacrificial blood is poured from the chalice into your very body as the “medicine of immortality” as it was described by St. Ignatius of Antioch, who was a disciple of the apostle John.

Two days before the Passover came, we see the alignment of the conspirators.  We see Jesus anointed at Bethany, and we see the treasurer (and thief) Judas complaining about the expense.  And it was at this moment that he “went to the chief priests and said, ‘What will you give me if I deliver Him over to you?’”  The price of the Lamb was thirty pieces of silver, paid by the priests of Satan to the traitor.  Never before or after has the monetary cost of a King’s ransom been the price of a slave.

Jesus makes arrangements to eat the final Passover meal with His disciples to prepare for this final Passover: the moment for which all of human history has led.  Jesus will forever change the meal from mere symbolic seder ceremony to the miracle of the Mass: His ongoing Real Presence with us in the Divine Service, the Sacrament of the Altar.  For His Word – the same Word that created the entire universe – the Word Made Flesh and Blood will forever fulfill the Passover by establishing the Lord’s Supper of His flesh and blood.  And the ransomed people of God will eat the flesh of the Lamb and drink His blood – and the Lamb’s blood will cry out to heaven for redemption.  God will use the wicked conspirators even as he used hard-hearted Pharaoh to lead His beloved people away from the bondage of sin, death, and the devil into the promised land of forgiveness, life, and salvation.  

Indeed, the Passover is coming.

Amen.

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