Church Write-Up: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday 2020

Here is my Church Write-Up for this week. Last night, I watched the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services. Sunday afternoon, I watched the Easter Sunday one.

Here are some items. That’s what these are: items. They are things that stood out to me, sometimes detached from their larger context.

A. Maundy Thursday, of course, commemorates the Lord’s Supper: Jesus’s last meal with his disciples. The pastor, youth pastor, and worship leader were setting the table. For the bread, they placed huge garlic bread loaves. I was reminded of how my Dad and I used to make fun of Pat Robertson for using huge garlic bread loaves as props when explaining the Lord’s supper. The mistake was that Jesus would have used unleavened bread (crackers), not leavened bread, since it was a Passover meal. The pastor is aware that it was a Passover meal, for he described it as a seder, albeit a radical seder, unlike what the disciples were accustomed to celebrating. In a class that I took over a decade ago, the professor was arguing that the bread of the Lord’s Supper actually was leavened. The Gospel authors, he argued, connected a regular church ritual to the Passover, in a rather awkward manner; the ritual originally was independent from the Passover. One aspect of his argument was that the Greek word that the synoptic Gospels employ for the bread at the Last Supper, artos, usually refers to the usual leavened bread, whereas the Septuagint prefers another noun, azuma, for the unleavened bread of the Jewish festival. I did a search on artos, and it turns out that artos can be used for unleavened bread (Leviticus 2:4l 8:26; etc.), but, in such cases, it is usually modified by azumos to convey that the bread is unleavened.

B. Jesus says at the Last Supper, “This is my blood, shed for you” as part of the new covenant. The pastor connected this with Exodus 24:8, in which Moses sprinkles blood on the Israelites and affirms: “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with you concerning all these words” (KJV). The pastor said that the blood here sealed God’s covenant with Israel. His comment made me wonder about the significance of that blood. Were not the Israelites God’s people before Moses sprinkled the blood on them? Did the blood effect something that did not exist before, or did it make something official, or more official? The context is the Sinaitic covenant. The Israelites hear God’s law and promise to do all that the LORD tells them, then Moses sprinkles the blood on them. Something new is being effected here: the Sinaitic covenant, in which Israel is obligated to do the law. Israel was already God’s people, but now it is taking the first steps to becoming God’s nation, governed by a legal constitution. Perhaps the significance of the blood, assuming it has here an atoning function (i.e., Leviticus 17:11), is to highlight that the Israelites will fail to observe God’s law and thus need atonement; or it could be to reaffirm that, for God to make a covenant of any sort with the Israelites, the Israelites, as sinful and limited human beings, need atoning blood to stand before God. One can raise the point that blood, in Exodus 24 and at the Lord’s Supper, marks two different kinds of covenants. The first is by law, and the second is by grace. The first still has some grace, for the Israelites need grace because they will fail to obey the law. The second has law, for God continues to have moral standards for God’s people. What, then, is the difference between the two covenants, since both have law and grace? The second perhaps stresses grace more than the first one did, plus the second promises the transformation of the sinful flesh through the power of the Holy Spirit, whereas the Old Covenant largely sought to tame the flesh and to point, in a shadowy fashion, to what Christ would do later.

C. The pastor talked about how Jesus was eating a meal with his disciples on the night of his arrest. Something that Lutherans like to emphasize regarding communion is that Jesus Christ is actually and physically present with his people when they partake of it. It is not merely a memorial, but Jesus is right there. In some sense, in their conception, the bread and the wine contain and communicate a spiritual power to those who partake. This is important for Lutherans. The LCMS church that I attend, like many LCMS churches, requires people to believe that Christ is really present in the bread and the wine to even partake of communion. Last week, I mentioned a radical Lutheran group that is online. Whenever people complain that they cannot find a church void of legalistic preaching, someone advises them at least to find one that has the sacraments. You can tolerate legalistic preaching: maybe even bring an earpiece to listen to a grace podcast while the pastor is preaching! But make sure you do not go without communion, for that is a means of grace! I was thinking this week about whether I believe that. My conclusion was that communion is a symbol of the Gospel but is not the Gospel itself: what is important is faith in what Jesus did, and communion reminds us of what Jesus did. My own church background (Armstrongism) had communion only once a year (the night before Passover), so that shows how much it regarded communion as a necessary means of grace, to be eaten frequently. My position runs into challenges, particularly that the Christian church, from early times, seemed to believe in the real presence. And, from an emotional standpoint, there is something comforting about Jesus being physically present with people at communion: of actually eating with them. But should belief in that be a prerequisite for people even to partake of it? On first sight, it looks like it should merely be a bonus: you eat communion, and Christ is there while you do it, whether you believe that or not! So partake! Making it a prerequisite to partake, however, may be based on two assumptions. First, Paul in I Corinthians 11 said that those who partake of communion should discern the Lord’s body. The LCMS may take that literally. Second, there may be an Old Testament sort of mindset behind closed communion: if the holy God is actually present in communion, then you want to partake of communion knowing the implications and in a state of faith and relative holiness. In the Old Testament, people who mishandled God’s presence got killed by God. That may not happen immediately in New Testament times, but Paul in I Corinthians 11 refers to Christians who became sick and even died because they ate the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy fashion.

D. The Good Friday service this year, which was online, was actually better than the in-person ones of previous years. Previous services mainly had Scriptures and songs. This year, however, the pastor offered a brief commentary on each Scripture. Here, I want to focus on Judas. Judas was willing to betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. The pastor talked about materialism, how Jesus is worth more than money, and how all of us betray Jesus by giving in to the flesh. Initially, I wondered how accurate that was: thirty pieces of silver was not a lot in those days! Some seek a higher motivation for Judas’s betrayal of Jesus: that he wanted Jesus to get cornered so that Jesus would display his power and do what Messiahs are supposed to do, conquer Israel’s oppressors! But the Gospel of John highlights that Judas was a thief (John 12:6), so greed was a problem for Judas. And Judas did buy himself a field, according to Acts 1, so he was trying to benefit himself personally as a result of the betrayal. Speaking of Judas, I would like to share this quote from the radical Lutheran site. “Yet, the horror of the thing is that Judas reveals exactly what the desire of every sinner is when it comes to Christ, God in flesh. There is no other choice or desire Judas has than to kill Christ – and there isn’t for any of us either. The horror of Judas is not that we must learn to do better than him when our turn comes but that he is us.” – Luther’s Outlaw God by Dr. Steven Paulson, p. 135.

E. On Easter, the youth pastor observed that Jesus rose early in the morning. According to the youth pastor, Jesus was eager to get out of the tomb and be with his people.

F. The pastor talked about how we may find ourselves arriving at a point where we cannot go on, when we give up on what we are doing, for we lack the inner resources to continue. He referred to an NCIS episode that advised such a person to push through. I thought about my dissertation. I gave up. I could have pushed through, but I think that I would have pushed through to nowhere. If I had continued, I can see myself doing this for another ten years of my life, and even then not finishing! It was going nowhere. Now, I have a job and am earning money, and I am unburdened by that dissertation. I am happy.