Eucharistic Meditation, January 23

1 Corinthians 5:7: Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.

Jeroboam�s dynasty, and the entire northern kingdom with it, was condemned from the beginning. No sooner had he led Israel out of the �Egypt�Eof the house of David than he led them into an wilderness of idolatry. As we saw in the sermon this morning, Ahijah�s prophecy tells Jeroboam that his exodus is going to unravel: There will be no Passover for his son, and eventually Israel will be removed from the land in an anti-exodus. All this right occurs from the beginning; the beginning of Jeroboam�s kingdom was the beginning of the end.

That is the way life often seems to go. You do poorly in grade school, and you are condemned to a lifetime of remedial education. The marital problems from the first year of marriage are never dealt with, and you spend the rest of your life grimly reaping the harvest. Your kids are out of control before they are six, and you never can recover them. Your career begins with a dead-end job, and you never are quite able to make ends meet. On the other hand, a good beginnings often seem to be a prelude to a future of uninterrupted success. Some lives seem charmed from the beginning.

But that is not how life goes. We are not condemned by our beginnings to certain endings. And our hope that the past does not determine the future is the gospel of God in Jesus Christ. Jesus�Edeath, like the death of Abijah, is an inverted Passover, for the Israelite dies rather than the Egyptian. Unlike the death of Jeroboam�s good son, Jesus�Edoes not spell the end of things, but the beginning of things; for in Jesus�Edeath, the Israelite not only dies rather than the Egyptian, but the Israelite dies for the Egyptian. And it spells the beginning of things because Jesus�Edeath is followed by His resurrection.

Through Jesus, the guilt that plagues us from the past is forgiven, and by forgiveness, we are opened to a future for which we do not dare to hope. Through Jesus, the dead are raised, and all things are made new. The gospel means precisely that the end is not a mere extrapolation from the beginning; on the contrary, the end reverses the beginning, as tears are washed away, as sorrow and sighing flee, as the curse us removed, as the dead raised.

That is the gospel we celebrate here at this table. This is the blood of the new covenant, Jesus says, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins. Here at this table, we are renewed in covenant, freshly forgiven, so that we can put the past, so our past sins do not imprison us.

This is the table of a new covenant, of new beginnings, of forgiveness and resurrection. For Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. And Christ is risen. He is risen indeed.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, January 23, 2005 at 08:00 AM

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