Maundy Thursday
Exodus 12:1-14
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
The lamb was selected on the 10th day of the month. The lamb was slaughtered at twilight several days later, on the 14th day of the month. The lamb’s blood was put on the doorpost and the lintel. The lamb was eaten. The people were saved by the blood of the lamb.
Note carefully here exactly what it is that the Israelites are being saved from. They are being saved from the Lord and His judgment of death. He is the one who is passing through the land to strike down all the firstborn. It is the Lord’s Passover! Don’t ever forget that the thing you most need to fear in this life isn’t the devil or the world; it is God whom you are to fear. The Lord in His judgment is the One from whom you need to be saved!
The Lord God isn’t a kindly old Grandpa God. He’s not the type of God who comes to be your fishing buddy or your life coach. The Lord God is the destroyer of sin and sinners. He’s the unstoppable force and the immovable object who is not just a little bit bothered by sin, He’s burning with hell-hot anger and hatred against it and against those who do it. He is a jealous God, visiting the sins on the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him.
Ponder that the next time you dismiss your sins as nothing, or willfully do something you shouldn’t because you think that God will just forgive you afterwards. The fires of hell say that the Lord God isn’t manipulated like that. The Lord God launches Himself on the night of the Passover to open a can of divine judgment on those who reject Him and His words. He brings death to every male firstborn as the price for whatever gets in the way of His being your God.
However, you won’t see that angry God in the Passover Lamb! Here you see God carrying out His vengeance in such a way that His people receive mercy. Take the Lamb, He says, a male without blemish. This isn’t the time just to get rid of the runt of the litter, to give a token offering. It must be a spotless lamb, something that is prized and precious, that requires sacrifice to give up. Kill the lamb at twilight. Take the lamb’s blood and paint it on the door post and lintel with a hyssop branch.
Then, eat the lamb. It must all be consumed, either with the mouth or with fire. Eat it with bitter herbs, remembering your suffering. There is to be no leaven, no yeast in the bread, which puffs up. Have shoes on your feet, clothes tucked in, staff in hand, ready to go on the journey the Lord has prepared for you. When the Lord arrives He’s going to deliver you. When the Lord God saw the lambs’ blood on the doorposts of the children of Israel’s houses, He passed over their homes. They were saved from His wrath, saved from Him. The Lamb took their place in judgment.
This is how the children of Israel celebrated the Lord’s Passover every year, until...Good Friday. For this is what the Passover was always pointing forward to–a fulfillment in Jesus, who saves you from the wrath you deserve eternally because of your addiction and slavery to sin. Jesus has come to set you from your spiritual taskmasters, and bring you into the Promised Land of the resurrection of the body.
God the Father Himself is the One who selects His own Passover Lamb during Holy Week. We saw this choosing of Jesus on Palm Sunday–which is the 10th day of the month!–when the Lamb of God was selected with shouts of “Hosanna!” As the Passover sacrifice could come from the sheep or from the goats, so this Lamb of God takes away the sins of the whole world, both the sheep who will believe in Him and be saved and the goats who will reject Him and be damned. This one Lamb is for everyone, for all time—a perfect Lamb, without sin or blemish or spot.
The Son of God Himself is the Paschal Lamb whose blood is shed. And please note how the blood of the Passover was to be applied: with the branch of a hyssop. Remember how it was a branch of hyssop that was used to raise a sponge full of sour wine to Jesus’ lips right before He died. And there’s also this: the Passover blood of old was painted on the doorposts with a vertical motion, then on the lintel over the door with a horizontal motion. Do you see? In doing this, the Israelites made the motions of the sign of the cross in blood. It all points us to Jesus.
And this is true also of the slaying of the firstborn. Here God only punishes one Firstborn, for you. All the anger and hatred that God has for every sin and against every sinner for all time fell upon His Firstborn and only-begotten Son on the cross. The God who punishes, whose anger consumes and burns hotter than the surface of the sun, passes over punishing you. Jesus dies. You live. You are saved and set free. We will sing of it on Easter.
Here our true Paschal Lamb we see, Whom God so freely gave us;
He died on the accursed tree—So strong His love—to save us.
See, His blood now marks our door;
Faith points to it; death passes o'er.
And Satan cannot harm us.
(LSB 458:5)
God’s people of old received the benefits of the sacrifice by trusting the Lord’s words and by eating the meal He instituted. So it is that on this night in which Jesus is betrayed to a hellish death, He takes the unleavened bread of the Passover and declares it to be His body; the cup of wine He declares to be His blood. Believing Jesus’ words, we eat of the Lamb of God and receive the benefits of His sacrifice, the forgiveness of sins. Death passes over us and does not touch us. For the blood of the Lamb is on the doorpost of the church and on our hearts by means of Christ’s preaching and Sacraments. Taking refuge in Him we are spared; we are safe.
Jesus is the Firstborn Son who has saved us from the plague of eternal death. And being baptized into Him who is the firstborn from the dead (Col 1:18), we are now treated with the exalted status of firstborn. Hebrews 12 says this, “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”
That blood of Christ was sprinkled on you in Baptism, doorpost and lintel, on your forehead and on your heart. And that blood is given into your mouths in the Lord’s Supper, that you may be filled with His life and cleansed by His presence. Feasting on the body and blood of the Lamb, death, hell, and Satan can no more harm you than they can harm Christ. They are stingless and toothless against Him. So, they are stingless and toothless against you.
And even more importantly, God won’t harm you either. Because of the Lamb who was slain and who has begun His reign, you are a beloved child of the heavenly Father. Taking refuge in Christ, there is no more wrath, no more judgment, no more hell; only forgiveness, eternal life, and loving one another as Christ has loved you.
The Passover month was the beginning of months for Israel. In the same way the sacrificial death of Jesus marks a new beginning for you. Let us then purge out the old leaven of sin which puffs us up in pride. And let us partake of this paschal feast in sincerity and truth. This is the Lord’s Passover: His Body broken for you and His Blood shed on the Cross for you. Receive it in faith. Eat Jesus’ sacrifice. Be forgiven. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.
✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠
(With thanks to George Borghardt)