Brethren, I have received of the
Lord that which also I delivered unto you.
In the Name of...
Of all the great and wonderful things recorded in
the gospels, not all of them are recorded in all four gospels, as you may
well know. Lots of things appear in more than one, like the birth of
our Lord, which is recorded in Matthew and Luke, and the baptism of the
Lord, which is told by Matthew, Mark and Luke. And although it is
strongly hinted at by St John, it’s not actually recorded there. In
that gospel, John the Evangelist records the words of John the Baptist, who
said, “I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven, and it remained on
him” (1.32) which, we know from the other three gospels, happened at our
Lord’s baptism, though it’s not explicitly stated here. But out of all
the many events that we read about in the gospels, only two appear in all
four. They are our Lord’s feeding of the 5,000 and his Passion and
Resurrection. And these two are very intimately bound together.
If you’re into fancy terminology, this evening
begins the Paschal Triduum, the three days of the Christian Passover, which
ends on Sunday evening with the appearance of the risen Lord to his
Apostles. When we hear the word ‘Passover’ we immediately think of
Moses and the Israelites on their last night in Egypt. That is when,
in obedience to God’s command, the enslaved Israelites smeared their
doorposts with the blood of lambs and roasted those same lambs and ate them
while the Lord killed the firstborn of all the children and livestock of the
Egyptians, and of those Israelites who refused to bloody their doors and eat
the lamb. It’s called ‘Passover’ because on that night God passed over
those houses that were so marked, and in the coming days he delivered the
survivors and their families to freedom through the Red Sea and drowned the
Egyptians who were chasing after them in order to keep them in slavery.
This is the image that the Church has probably
most often used to describe what our Lord has accomplished for us in the
Paschal Triduum. One of the great Easter hymns, written by St John of
Damascus in the eighth century, which we will sing on Sunday begins this
way:
Come, ye faithful,
raise the strain
Of triumphant gladness;
God
hath brought his Israel
Into joy from sadness;
Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke
Jacob’s sons and daughters
Led
them with unmoistened foot
Through the Red Sea waters.
(Book of Common Praise, Canada 1938 #165)
Now you may be tempted to think that that’s a
neat image which the Church has borrowed because it happens to bear some
similarity to what Christ has done in Holy Week and Easter. You may
think that, but you’d be quite wrong.
Ever since that first sin of Adam and Eve, God
had been laying the groundwork for Easter. All the great acts he
performed not only delivered his people from their immediate predicament,
but also foreshadowed the events of Holy Week and Easter. They point
to Jesus and what he did, just as a shadow causes us to look up at the thing
that causes the shadow. It’s all preparatory. In all those Old Testament
events, God is saying to Israel, If you think this is something, just wait
until the big finale. And because of these things that you’ve
experienced, you’ll be able to recognize the really big thing I’m going to
do, not just for you, but for everybody. Fr Geoffrey Kirk says, “The
story is brought to its conclusion and we are set free from the images to
apprehend the reality, only when Jesus Christ clothes himself in all the
images of Jewish history and messianic prophecy and lives them out. He
crucifies the images, as he himself is crucified. The mystery is this:
that the crucified reality is better than the figures of prophecy”
(“The Irrelevance Argument,” New Directions, March
2008). “He crucifies the images...” He draws our
attention from the groundwork to the finished work.
On Monday and Tuesday of this week we read from
Isaiah who prophesied this finished work 700 years before it happened.
“I was not rebellious,” he writes, “neither turned away back. I gave my back
to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not
my face from shame and spitting” (50.5-6). Then last night we read
from the NT epistle to the Hebrews how all the law and the prophets point to
Jesus. And speaks of how just as the first covenant was sealed in
blood – the blood of the sacrifice is flung on the people as a symbolic
washing of their sins and some of the flesh is eaten while the rest is burnt
on the altar as an offering to God – so the new covenant is sealed with the
blood of Jesus, which the people drink, and his flesh which has been offered
on the altar of the cross is also given to us to eat. “The crucified
reality is better than the figures of prophecy.” The crucified reality
is the perfection, the completion of all that went before it. It is
the thing for which God has been preparing the world ever since the first
sin of his first creatures.
So what’s the Feeding of the 5,000 got to do with
all that? Well, the 5,000 are Jews who know their history. They
know the story of the Passover, of how their ancestors were spared the
destruction of the unbelievers by smearing their doorposts with blood and
eating the lamb whose blood was smeared. They would have understood
that it was precisely because their ancestors believed God and obeyed his
commands that they were delivered that night. And they knew the story
of how those same believing, obedient ancestors passed through the water to
freedom from slavery while their unbelieving pursuers died in that same
water. And they knew the story of how, by a miracle, God caused manna
and quail to fall from the sky to feed their ancestors in the desert after
they passed through the water. So when our Lord, after having fed
those 5,000 men with five loaves of bread and two fish, and connecting it
with the quail and manna, then says that he himself is the true bread that
came down from heaven, and that whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood
will have eternal life, he has put one more piece in the puzzle which, along
with all those events and images from the time of Adam and Eve right up
until that moment form a nearly-complete picture of his crucifixion.
Then on this night, Maundy Thursday, he blesses the bread and the cup and
says, “Eat this... this is my body... Drink this, all of you, for this is my
blood, shed for the forgiveness of sins.” Then the disciples remember,
“Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will
raise him up on the last day.” How could they not remember, having
been prompted by so bold a statement as “This is my body... this is my
blood”? It wouldn’t be for another fifty-three days, when the Holy
Spirit was to settle on them that they would be given a clear understanding
of all these things. Then they would be able to see that, of course!
everything from Genesis 3 to Maundy Thursday night is a lead-up to Good
Friday when the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world was
sacrificed on the cross. And now our eating his flesh and drinking his
blood is better than smearing the blood of an animal on our doorposts and
eating its flesh, because this is the perfect sacrifice, the one that is
sufficient for all sins for all time. Thursday night he showed us how
he intended to feed us from the sacrifice that he offered on Friday.
And he told us to do it in memory of Friday – even before Friday came; and
he told us that by doing it our sins would be forgiven and we would be
nourished for life in his everlasting kingdom. “This is the bread that
came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate [in the desert]
and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”
In the Name of...Amen.
a.m.d.g.
