“BLOODSTAINED”
Holy (Maundy) Thursday
March 24, 2016
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, “Behold the
blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance
with all these words.”
Exodus 24:8 (ESV)
One of the most common criticisms raised by modernists about the
Bible is that it is a book full of rituals and practices that involve
graphic violence. I suppose that the passage before us this evening
doesn’t help much in disputing those charges. What Moses is doing in
this passage goes beyond being unusual or strange; it strikes the
twentieth-first century sophisticated mind as being distasteful and
perhaps even disgusting. It’s bad enough that animals are killed in
this ritual, but to actually sprinkle the blood of the slain animals
on the people who had assembled is repulsive to most people, to say
nothing of being a health hazard. All of this is just too much for
the modern mind to handle. And not just the modern mind either. The
first-century critics of Christianity said the same thing about the
Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
Rather than trying to explain these things in such a way as to make
them more palatable to the sophisticated person of today, I would
submit that instead we need to freely acknowledge that the Bible is
indeed full of rituals and practices that involve graphic violence.
But what modern man doesn’t seem to understand is that it has to be
this way because God’s Word addresses sin--and sin certainly is
graphic and violent. It is not God or the people of God who have made
it this way; it is the sinners themselves. The graphic violence that
we see not only in the Bible but everywhere in life is the end result
of how we ourselves have chosen to live. People want the freedom to
do as they please but they don’t want to look at (or be confronted
with) the consequences of what their actions. That’s why the
so-called “pro-choice” people become so enraged whenever photographs
of aborted babies are displayed. The graphic ritual described in this
evening’s sermon text impresses upon us two facts about the covenant
that exists between God and His people: (1) The covenant involves
blood and (2) the covenant is established by God.
No matter how much we may want to sugarcoat it, sin is a very serious
and unpleasant reality. There’s getting around it. We can deny it
outright and blame religion for placing a needless burden of guilt on
the shoulders of mankind. We can call it by all kinds of fancy names
that make it seem to be more acceptable. We can analyze it in such a
way as to make it look like it’s not really all that bad. We can make
all kinds of jokes about it and make it appear to be harmless. But we
can’t get away from the fact that it is still a rejection of God and
His will in favor of our own wants and desires. Neither can we get
away from the fact that the decision to sin, in fact, is a decision to
live without God, and choosing to live without God necessarily means
choosing to live without the grace of God. Such a decision and action
has very serious consequences. God has made it abundantly clear to us
in His Word that sin can be paid for only by the shedding of innocent
blood. That’s what all of the animal sacrifices in the Old Testament
(including the one referred to in the text) were all about. They were
all intended to teach God’s people this great truth.
But all of that was only in preparation for the real Sacrifice--the
one that would take place once for all time to cover every sin ever
committed by every sinner in human history. “In the fullness of time”
(Galatians 4:4) Jesus Christ, “the Lamb of God,” came to take “away
the sin of the world” (John 1:29) by bearing it all in His own body on
the tree of the cross. That’s another Bible story that the
politically correct crowd in our day finds too unpleasant to stomach.
How could it not be unpleasant? But the purpose of this unpleasant
event is to atone for sin. And so the blood of the perfect “Lamb of
God” (John 1:29) has been sprinkled on us, too, in a sense. Through
faith we are covered with the blood of Christ before the judgment
throne of God, so that when He looks at our sin, He sees the blood of
Christ that was shed for us to make atonement for our sin. We are
marked with the blood of Jesus and are thereby spared from the
judgment of God, just as the ancient Israelites marked their homes at
the first Passover with the blood of the Passover lamb and were
thereby spared from the angel of death, as we heard in this evening’s
Old Testament Reading. In the cross of Christ our sin has been paid
for and we are no longer under judgment. What’s more, we have been
given the Sacrament of His body and blood as a way for us to receive
the benefits of that once-for-all Sacrifice and literally take it into
our lives and make it our own, just as God’s Old Testament people
consumed the Passover lamb that had been sacrificed for them.
Moses, in the text before us, describes the covenant between God and
His people as “the covenant that the Lord has made with you.” It’s
not the kind of covenant that we are used to. It’s not a covenant
that has been mutually agreed to by both parties involved. No, our
covenant with God is completely one-sided. It is a covenant based on
grace--specifically God’s grace in Jesus Christ. It is a covenant
that God has established with us unilaterally, as the apostle tells
the believers at Rome: “God shows His love for us in that while we
were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). While we can
nullify the covenant or reject it, we cannot establish it, change it,
or even accept it on our own. All that we can do is acknowledge it by
the power of the Holy Spirit and live in it by the grace of God, given
to us in Word and Sacrament.
It only makes sense that it has to be this way, since what this
covenant is all about is the removal of the guilt of our sin. And,
after all, since God is the One who is offended by our sin, He is the
only One who can put it to rest. In spite of what the humanists of
our day might say, we cannot in any way be the solution to the problem
because we are the problem. Forgiveness can be given only by the
offended party. You and I may be offended by the various sins that
are committed against us, and we can and should forgive those who have
wronged us. But all sin offends God. For this reason the forgiveness
of all sin is possible only through His grace as He has revealed it to
us in the cross of His Son. When we forgive one another we do so only
by the power of the Christ who has made full and complete atonement
for all sin.
It got a little messy for the ancient Israelites when they were
sprinkled with the blood of sacrificed animals. Nevertheless, they
felt privileged to be included in the covenant that their God had made
with them. It gets a little messy for us, too, when we have to come
face to face with our sin and its consequences. But the cross of
Jesus offers us more than guilt because there we find the perfect
peace that comes from sins forgiven. There we find the body that was
broken and that same blood that was shed for us to make atonement for
our sin. This peace is given to us in the body and blood of Christ,
broken and shed for us to eat and to drink for the forgiveness of our
sins. May we forever rejoice that we are a part of the people of God
in Jesus Christ--stained and redeemed and nourished with the broken
body and the shed blood of “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of
the world” (John 1:29).
Amen.
May the One who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood,
making us kings and priests before His God and Father, lead you to a
life of repentance and trust. May He also be glorified in the lives
of you, His people. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.
Amen.