Date : Second Lenten Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Text : The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ Drawn from the Four Gospels

Title : The Lord’s Supper

"Jesus answered [Peter], ‘Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but afterwards you will follow me.’"

These five Wednesdays, the sermon will seek to provide insights into the readings from the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Today, I begin at the end of the lesson, where the Lord tells His friends that they can no longer follow Him because of where He is going.

Peter, of course, doesn’t buy it, so he presses the Lord: "Where are you going?" Jesus reiterates that they cannot follow, but he adds that, later, the disciples will follow.

Of course, the disciples would become the apostles, and they would follow Jesus in proclaiming all things that He commanded, baptizing with the washing of rebirth and renewal in the Holy Spirit and distributing the resurrection meal of Christ’s living body and blood. And, all but John would follow Jesus in being put to death for their witness to the true God and the one true faith.

Is it hard for us to imagine how challenging to the disciples were the Lord’s words, that He was leaving them? Jesus was everything to these men. He recruited them. They left their jobs and families to follow Jesus. They witnessed things that hadn’t been seen since God worked the miracles with Moses. They heard preaching that could be found nowhere else.

It is fair to say that they were having an Adam and Eve experience: God walked with them, and talked with them, and ate with them, and lived all day, every day, with them. They might not have digested everything that Jesus was saying and doing—they wouldn’t, until Jesus sent the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost—but, the Lord had already provided them enough insight that they could testify that Jesus was, in fact, the Christ, and the Son of the living God.

They were having this Adam and Eve experience, and the Lord’s news, that He was leaving, surely was upsetting. Scary. Not what they were looking for Him to say.

And, in typical Peter fashion, a vital part of the Lord’s message was quickly forgotten, if he heard it, at all. It reminds us of when Jesus told the boys that He was going to be crucified and then be raised from the dead. As soon as Peter heard crucified, he stopped listening and missed the amazingly wonderful part about Jesus’ resurrection.

Same thing here. The Lord says that He’s leaving and the boys can’t come with, and Peter stops listening. But, let’s not. What Jesus says in the next sentence is what puts the Maundy in Maundy Thursday. Maundy means mandate—it’s an order, a command. Maundy Thursday is named for this direction from the Lord: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you. For this I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

How closely did the boys listen? Well, let’s see . . .

And, that was all within the first twelve hours after their Lord told them to love in the same manner that He loved them.

It makes a Christian wonder, doesn’t it? If the guys, with whom Jesus lived for three years, couldn’t obey His commandment to love, within minutes after Jesus gave the command, then do we even stand a chance to excel at loving one another in the shadow of our Savior?

Sometimes, we do. Most of the time, we don’t. All too often, we don’t even want to. So very frequently, we act like we’ve never even heard this command, or any of God’s Ten Commandments.

We completely forget how Jesus showed that He was God, walking among His people in the same manner that He did with Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, before they sinned. We forget what Jesus did, right before He said He was leaving and told us, His followers, to love—how He got down on His knees and washed the feet of His friends, and how He concluded the washing with another mandate: "If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet," to which we reply, "Unh, unh; not me. No, thanks," as if we are too good for such a gesture; as if we are better than Jesus, our Lord and Master.

One also wonders if we also completely forget that part of the one thing that we do remember, Sunday after Sunday, as we partake of the Last Supper of Jesus, which He made to be His Supper, the Holy Communion of His body and blood in the bread and wine which He directed us to take and eat and drink in remembrance of Him.

In remembrance of Him. In remembrance of what? Sure, in remembrance that He sacrificed His body and blood on the cross for the forgiveness of the sins of the world—for our sins—for your sins.

But, is that it? Is that all there is? Does our remembrance end with the Lord’s sacrifice?

Did Jesus only sacrifice Himself so that we could be forgiven—so that, possessing God’s forgiveness, we would not perish to hell but be given eternal life in Paradise? Is that the only reason Jesus sacrificed Himself; the only thing we are to remember?

Not hardly. In fact, forgiveness is only the foundation. There’s a whole house of God built upon the sacrifice of Christ. And, on one corner is the letter L, and on the next corner is the letter O, and on the next corner is the letter V, and on the last corner is the letter E.

Love is what moved the Son of God to become the Son of Man. Love is what moved Jesus to face the devil for forty days, without a single Soup Supper in his stomach. Love is what moved Jesus to wash His disciples’ feet. Love is what gave Jesus the ability to accept the lies of His trial, the stamina to take the scourging whips, the strength to carry the cross, and the courage to hang in shame and poverty, forsaken by man and God, alike.

The Lord was right. Where He went, His friends couldn’t go. You and I couldn’t go. Only He could go to the cross as the Lamb of God, to take away the sins of the world.

Now, you follow Him. You follow His Gospel of love and forgiveness, which led you to the font of His washing of rebirth and renewal, which continually leads you to His altar to feast on the resurrection meal of His living body and blood.

Now, you follow Him. His Holy Spirit lives and labors in you that, as children of the heavenly Father, you are moved to mind His mandate, "that you love one another as I have loved you. For this I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

Your love, dear Christians, is God’s love, who loved you first, and gave His Son as an atoning sacrifice for your sins, that you may, indeed, follow Jesus where He has gone—to heaven. To Paradise. To eternal life. Amen.