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.