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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints, I was reflecting today on how this, today, is the 1989th anniversary of the institution of the Lord’s Supper, and I started to wonder, and I sort of got carried away wondering, when the Lord thought of it. When did Jesus decide that He would give His church in the New Testament His body to eat and His blood to drink for the forgiveness of sins? We know He thought of it at least earlier than when He gave it because He had the whole thing planned out.
We heard a little bit in the Gospel reading, Jesus says, go into Jerusalem and make ready the Passover. We’ll go and celebrate it, and the disciples say, well, how do you want to do it? Where do you want to do it? And Jesus says, you’ll go and you’ll find a man carrying a water jug and he’ll take you to an upper room and it’ll be all prepared. So Jesus thought about it before then, but even before that, you get hints that Jesus was thinking about this all through His ministry when He’s taking bread and breaking it and giving it to the disciples and saying, as He describes how He is the manna come down from heaven unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no part of me.
But even before that, we heard in the prophet Jeremiah, from the Old Testament lesson, that the Lord was already planning back then, in the year 585 B.C. or so, to institute a New Testament, not like the Old Testament that He made with them at Mount Sinai, but a New Testament. He says, I’ll write my law in your hearts, and I’ll forgive your sins, and I’ll remember your iniquities no more. So the Lord already, 600 years or so before He did it, was thinking of how He would set up this meal, this feast of His own body and blood.
But I think it goes even before that. Remember when the Lord was setting up the Old Testament, it was Moses and Joshua and Aaron, and they were eating a meal with the Lord on Mount Sinai when He called Moses up into the cloud, the pillar of cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night, and He set up the sacrifices of the Old Testament, the blood to be spilled on the altar and the animals to be killed and to be eaten. And already then it seems like in the Old Testament the Lord was thinking about the New Testament. But even before that, the night before the tenth plague, when the Lord was about to break the bonds of the people in Egypt and set them free and deliver them from the tyranny of the Pharaoh, He says, why don’t you take a lamb and kill it and take that blood and put it on the doorpost and roast the lamb and eat it and take the bread and the spices and eat it, and when the angel of death comes by, he will pass over you and you will be preserved.
In fact, the Lord when He gives the Passover meal, now this is a strange thing, I’m still trying to get my head around this. When the Lord gives the Passover meal, He says, I want you to do this in remembrance of the thing that He hadn’t done yet? How can you remember something that hasn’t been accomplished? How can you celebrate something that’s going to happen the next day? Well, Jesus does the same thing in the Lord’s Supper, do this in remembrance of Me, His broken body and shed blood, which would happen the very next day. So already in the Passover meal, 1,446 years before the Lord instituted the New Testament, it was already on the Lord’s mind.
But dear saints, I think it goes back even before then. Here’s my best guess. The book of Revelation calls Jesus the one who was crucified from before the foundation of the world. Now, can you imagine that? We know that Jesus was crucified in the year 33 AD. But when the Lord Jesus looks at the unfolding events that were going to happen in all of creation, He looks at Adam and Eve in the garden, and He sees their failure, and He sees their sin, and He sees the triumph of their own sinful flesh, and of the devil, and of the corruption of the world. The Lord Jesus looks at all of the things that are going to go wrong, and He Himself there determines, before the foundation of the world, that He would become a man. That He would take on our flesh and blood. That He would assume our mortality so that He could also bear our sins and carry our sorrows and be nailed to a cross to forgive us.
He is crucified from the foundation of the world because He’s already determined that He would do it. And I think at that same time, when the Lord Jesus determined that He would be born of the Virgin Mary, that He would suffer under Pontius Pilate, that He would be crucified, die and be buried in Jerusalem, at the same time He decided that on the night when He was betrayed, He would take bread, and He would give thanks, and He would give it to the disciples and to his church and say, take and eat. This is my body given for you. Take and drink. This is the cup of the New Testament in my blood poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins.
In other words, Jesus, your Jesus, is not simply pleased to die for you and to be raised for you, to ascend into heaven for you. He wants you to know that that is for you. He wants you to hear it, and He wants you to taste it. Jesus is not content for you simply to know of the event that happened on the hill outside Jerusalem so many hundreds of years ago. He is not content for that simply to be something that you think about, or wonder about, or even remember. He wants to take all that He’s done and deliver it to you, into your hand, into your mouth, into your ear, and into your heart, so that you have His body, and you have His blood, and you have His forgiveness.
What we do here at this table every Sunday is not something that we just thought up. It’s not something that Jesus just thought up. It’s something from the conversation of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from before the foundation of the world, and instituted for us by our Lord Jesus Christ on the night when He was betrayed.
So here’s what we have. We have a God who did not despise our weakness or our sin or our death but came down to be a partaker of the same, and we have a God who still does not despise our weakness or our sin or our distress but still comes down to be with us, to feed us with His mercy, to comfort us with His presence, and to keep us in His promises until we attain to everlasting life. So let us rejoice. Jesus so wants you to know that you belong to Him, that He, even tonight, will take His body and put it in that bread, and He’ll take His blood, and He’s gonna put it in that cup.
And He’s going to take that body and that blood, and He’s going to put it in your mouth. And He’s going to guarantee this promise that your sins, every single one of them, that your sins are forgiven. And when you forget tomorrow, He’s going to do it again on Saturday night. And then on Sunday morning. And then the next week, and the next week, and the next week, until He finally has you at a table of a glorious banquet in the resurrection. Because all of that suffering, all of the bleeding, and all of the dying, all of the being incarnate, all of it, it’s all for you.
God be praised, Amen.
When He took the cup, He said to them, “This cup that’s poured out for you is the New Testament in My blood, poured out for the forgiveness of your sins.” Amen.
The peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
